Editing Wikipedia, Discovering Inquiry

Abstract

The authors discuss a scaffolded, semester-long Wikipedia-editing project developed by a librarian and art history professor for a modern and contemporary African art history seminar. Their goals for the project were to introduce critical information literacy concepts into discussions about art information on the Wikipedia platform with their students, as well as to encourage them to see themselves as information creators. While course participants were tasked with adding research-based content that complied with Wikipedia’s point of view, they also generated many ideas for scholarly inquiry into their chosen artist’s life and work—a process with which undergraduate students, as emerging art historians, often struggle when they are assigned a traditional paper.