Wikipedia Resources

palmer mississippi

Frances Flora Bond Palmer, The Champions of the Mississippi – “A Race for the Buckhorns”, hand-colored lithograph, published by Currier and Ives, 1866 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

NOTE: For a more extensive article on my Wikipedia project, see “Activism in the Classroom: Wikipedia and American Art,” an article that I wrote for the Fall 2016 issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

In fall 2015, I designed a Wikipedia-based assignment for the students in my “Women in American Art” class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students in the class formed groups and researched the lives and careers of American women artists and then used their research to draft or improve articles on the online encyclopedia. Through the project, students made a real-world impact in improving the coverage of underrepresented artists on Wikipedia. Working with Wikipedia is an effective way to increase the stakes of classroom assignments and to make a difference to an international community of learners.

The purpose of this page is to provide sample assignments for educators interested in developing a Wikipedia-based assignment. For more information about the specific articles edited by PAFA students on Wikipedia, see my Wikipedia user page and this blog post. For more information about Wikipedia’s outreach to educators, go to the site for the Wikipedia Education Program.

Below are the assignments that I handed out during the course of the semester to guide students through their Wikipedia assignment. Feel free to adapt these documents to your student needs – and let me know the result at sbeetham@udel.edu!