“But my other professors told me not to use Wikipedia!” my class chorused, upon hearing that we were going to be writing Wikipedia entries. In an unscientific straw poll conducted through a show of hands, they all admitted to using the online encyclopedia despite their professors’ warnings.[1] This article explores the benefits of and rationale for having students in a literature class write Wikipedia articles[2]: in this case, students in a third-year Renaissance Drama class analyzed existing Wikipedia articles about early modern plays, devised the rubric for how their articles would be evaluated, adopted and researched a play, presented their work to the class, and had the option of publishing their writing on Wikipedia. Ultimately, being part of the assignment design process and writing for a public audience led students to undertake primary research, to question received ideas of literary canon, and to take ownership of their writing. This research-based writing project relies on the digital humanities principle of having student-scholars leverage digital publication in order to participate in social knowledge creation that benefits both the students and the larger (often academic) community.

This is not the first article about using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. For years, advocates have touted Wikipedia’s usefulness in composition classrooms [Haley-Brown 2012] [Vetter 2014]. The “Wikipedia Education Program” that encourages “educators and students around the world to contribute to Wikipedia… in an academic setting”  [Wikipedia Education Program 2016].[3] The Wikipedia Education Program offers instructors guidelines on “How to Use Wikipedia as a teaching tool,” with sample assignments and case studies by professors who have successfully had students write, edit, expand, or translate Wikipedia articles. Professors who ask students to write for Wikipedia agree that having an actual public audience for their writing galvanizes students to research more thoroughly and to write better [Kill 2012]. Recent academic interventions have focused on the need for clearly theorized and inclusive (of race, gender, sexuality, language, and more) approaches to this digital platform [Edwards 2015] [Gruwell 2015] [Koh and Risam 2013]. Indeed, as Amanda I. Seligman argues, writing for encyclopedias is a scholarly and valuable pursuit [Seligman 2013]. Erin Glass points out that “the benefits of integrating NPS [Networked Participatory Scholarship] in higher and graduate education are clear”; yet too few undergraduate literature classes take this approach [Glass 2015]. This case study serves as an example and template of how writing for Wikipedia can be productively incorporated into an undergraduate literature course.

With over three hundred classes that have used the Wikipedia Education program, and many others classes that were not officially affiliated with the program that also wrote articles, why do we need an article about Wikipedia in the university literature classroom? Because discipline-based Wikipedia editing initiatives have been very successful pedagogically. The American Sociological Association has had more than 3,300 students write and edit Wikipedia articles, with three goals: “(a) to develop communication skills for general audiences; (b) to discover the importance of logic, strength of argument, flow and clarity of writing, and the need to cite the appropriate literature; and (c) to experience the significance of accuracy in scientific writing”  [Vandendorpe 2015]. As outlined below, by writing for Wikipedia, literature students can gain general and transferable research and communication skills, while also considering the nature of digital texts (particularly hypertext and ontologies) and literary texts (with a focus on canon and textual studies). Furthermore, the assignment outlined here takes the collaborative nature of Wikipedia’s platform one step further: students collaboratively created their own learning goals by choosing the rubric on which their Wikipedia articles would be graded.

Writing for Wikipedia in a literature classroom engages students to question the literary canon, to consider the role of editors and editions, and to undertake research using primary and secondary sources. As is often the case with writing Wikipedia articles, this research and writing helped students develop a sense of mastery of the material and provided exigence for real-world writing. The stakes of defining a literary canon and understanding editorial interventions are always high, but especially so when confronting Renaissance Drama, that literary period and genre dominated by Shakespeare.

Almost ten years ago, Michael Best surveyed information about Shakespeare studies on Wikipedia, and found that, predictably, Wikipedia “does a good job of dealing with the facts about [Shakespeare’s] life and works, and provides some good starting places for further studies in the main articles,” yet, “as links take the intrepid explorer into the byways of Early Modern minor writers the quality becomes more uneven”  [Best 2006, 109, 114]. Best concludes by exhorting Shakespeare Newsletter readers to “take the plunge and wade into Wikipedia waters to update, improve, and extend the information Wikipedia is making available to our students, and to the world”  [Best 2006, 114]. A decade later, Best’s call to action still holds true: “minor writers” and anonymous works are often entirely overlooked. As Matthew Steggle notes, “Wikipedia’s coverage of the Renaissance varies considerably from article to article and even within articles”  [Steggle 2010]. In writing Wikipedia articles about these lesser-known plays, my students responded to a genuine need — they were not writing the traditional paper for an audience of one, the professor. The professor-as-audience is, furthermore, someone who presumably already knows the material, whereas those reading a Wikipedia article are actively seeking new knowledge. Writing for Wikipedia means students have to consider what readers might know before coming to that particular article; they learn to consider audience and rhetorical situation in concrete ways that improves their writing.

Before the digital age, scholars attempted to make early modern plays accessible by editing and publishing editions that would not, like the original playbooks, be safeguarded in rare book rooms. Digital projects followed this model, making works findable and searchable in even more ways. Early digital projects began with canonical texts: for instance, Best founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) in 1996, to meet the demand for scholarly, edited, online versions of Shakespeare’s plays [Best 2012]. In 2015, Brett D. Hirsch launched Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE), a “kindred project” that moves beyond Shakespeare’s plays to publish works by lesser-known or anonymous authors, including John Redford, Walter Mountfort, and Richard Edwards [Hirsch 2015] [Hirsch 2011].[4] Wikipedia has traced a similar trajectory: the earliest and most detailed entries deal with canonical authors and plays. I contend that Wikipedia entries not only reflect the current literary canon but also help to shape it. As a first stop for undergraduates, graduate students, and even at times professors [Knight and Pryke 2012], Wikipedia offers at-a-glance information that can be used as a starting point: and without even a “stub” (a short placeholder article that needs to be expanded), overlooked works are absent from the literary landscape and commonly- and communally-held cultural narrative Wikipedia presents.[5] Without conscious interventions such as this that seek to expand the canon, Wikipedia and other digital projects will only reinscribe our existing canon [Earhart 2012].[6]

Many undergraduate literature students have never heard the term “canon.” They have not questioned why there are entire courses listed in the university catalogue about Shakespeare, yet none on Ben Jonson or Mary Sidney. Students instinctively want to begin any written assignment with “William Shakespeare is the greatest writer of English literature” (or words to that effect), while instructors help students see the historical reasons the Bard has been positioned over other writers. Finding and researching understudied plays for Wikipedia helped students start to question the shape of the English literary canon and consider how anthologies and university course catalogues reify canon.[7]

In the spirit of Wikipedia, students collaboratively created the rubric on which their assignment would be graded. I determined that a portion of their grade would be established by their presentations and their pre-research. The bulk of the pre-research was a short “Wikipedia Analysis,” where they analyzed existing articles about Renaissance plays and evaluated what made the articles most useful (see “Process Elements” in the rubric in Appendix A). I encouraged students to read the Wikipedia pages about the plays we were reading that semester. Some of the questions they considered were: “What should every Wikipedia page about a Renaissance play have? What headings? What information?” and “What kind of notes are most useful? What sources are cited?” When prompted to suggest which articles would make good or bad templates, the response was almost unanimous: lots of plays we read that semester had strong Wikipedia pages (such as The Spanish Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside), but The Tragedy of Mariam, the only play we read by a female author, had an inadequate page. This led students to discuss the treatment of women writers both historically and today.[8] Reading the well-written write-ups, furthermore, gave students valuable background information that allowed them to engage with the canonical texts we studied in deeper ways. Much of the information on a Wikipedia page about a Renaissance play will appear in a modern introduction to that play; reading either an introduction or a Wikipedia page can be a passive experience. Analyzing Wikipedia pages, however, encouraged students to think about the value and reasoning behind the information presented. Furthermore, as we discussed together in class, with its hyperlinking, Wikipedia can facilitate deeper research than a print introduction: students can be easily drawn into related fields of inquiry as they click through to new pages on (literally and figuratively) linked topics.

After handing in their 300-500 word Wikipedia Analysis, students brainstormed in class what makes an effective Wikipedia page on a Renaissance play and what headings and content need to appear in the page. We grouped their suggestions into categories and finalized their rubric for the written component (see Appendix A). This assignment gave students ownership over their material in two ways: one, they were responsible for a play that nobody else would read; and two, they decided the desired outcomes for this assignment by collaboratively creating the rubric.[9] Students determined that introductions to each play needed to contain some basic, key information (when available): the play’s title and alternative titles, genre, playwright(s), setting, initial performance information (date, company, theatre, patron, occasion), and initial publication information (date, publisher, location). This is the kind of information that students take for granted: they skim over it when reading a play’s introduction; they glance at it on Wikipedia. Finding this information when it is not made readily available, however, gave students the opportunity to undertake true scholarly research. Students also start to see the holes or slippages in the narratives we have of Renaissance theatre history: often, scholars cannot agree on where or when a play was first performed, let alone who wrote it.

Before they could undertake their research, however, students had to adopt a play. I gave students a list of eighty-nine plays that had no Wikipedia pages (or, in some cases, stubs).[10] As their guidelines read, “There’s no Wikipedia page, and you can’t read all of these... so what should you do?” (see Appendix B). I suggested they pick two or three plays based on their title and do a little research on the play. I also advised choosing a play they could access in a way they would feel comfortable. In order to adopt a play, each had to locate an edition: some chose plays that can only be found on Early English Books Online (EEBO), Literature Online (LiOn), or in facsimile reprints of the first editions, whereas others opted to read plays that were recently recuperated by online publication (some edited, some not) in Early Modern Literary Studies or Risa Stephanie Bear’s Renascence Editions.[11] EEBO and LiOn are both subscription resources that we were fortunate to have access to at my institution, but they are not required for completing this assignment: HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Internet Archive are online repositories that have open-access editions of early modern plays: sometimes, even, facsimiles of the original publication.[12]

As the plays my students adopted were generally under-studied, my students had to learn both new ways of reading and new research methods. For many, this was the first time facing an unedited early modern text: for students used to anthologies of Shakespeare, even the non-standard orthography could come as a surprise. Some students learned that act and scene breaks could be editorial. By comparing how plays have been historically treated (or ignored), my class began asking questions about scholarly editing, that is, about how the texts we read are mediated in ways we often take for granted.

Beyond reading the play itself in order to write a summary, students had to undertake primary research to write the introductory paragraph about their play. As we had established, a good Wikipedia entry always gave a play’s initial publication, and, when known, details about the first performance, such as the company, theatre, and date. I devoted an entire 50-minute class and to how to research their plays. Although my students undertook research using primary and secondary materials, this assignment did not violate Wikipedia’s “no original research” policy, which “all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source”: it did, however, challenge the standard research undergraduates are asked to undertake.[13] I encouraged students to use both print tools such as the Annals of English Drama [Harbage et al. 1989] and the Records of Early English Drama[14] and online resources like the Database of Early English Playbooks and the English Short Title Catalogue. In their assignments, students favored digital resources over print: none, for instance, cited The London Stage (a suggested resource about performance history).[15] All, however, learned to navigate The Database of Early English Playbooks, and many turned to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography.

As a class, we looked at EEBO to find what the physical play-texts looked like. Upon finding that we had access to three digital facsimiles of Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra in quarto, my student who adopted this play exclaimed, “I’m going to compare all three!” The last portion of the research methods class was devoted to finding secondary sources, an important skill that would also serve them in good stead for their other university classes. Although scholars talk about digital natives,[16] in this class period I was reminded that students do not actually have an innate understanding of how to search for things effectively. Searching, however, is not endemic to online sources, and students similarly needed guidance with how to search using print sources. Showing students how to find the information they seek and discern its value (rather than telling them the answers) empowers them to come up with even more exciting research questions. Furthermore, these research skills are foundational to writing a Wikipedia article.

Equipped with the ability to use new research tools, students had two main parts of the assignment to complete: write the Wikipedia page, and present about their play in class. We all know the old adage that you learn something best by teaching. In this context, student presenters benefited from having an in-person audience to speak to as well as their online audience. As audience members, students learned about a variety of plays and genres that we would not have had time to all read together, including domestic tragedy, farce, roman history, and pastoral. Taken together, these presentations offered an overview of English Renaissance drama that no single anthology could provide. Indeed, students in this class gained a more realistic view of what was actually available to audiences in Shakespeare’s day, as well as the key genres that preceded and followed.

For their presentations, I encouraged students not to give a plot synopsis. Some, however, could not resist the temptation, as they had put in quite an effort to learn all of the details of, in some cases, very intricate plots. Others, however, managed to keep to the main points we wanted to hear: the themes in the play, why this play is interesting (or not), and why this play has been neglected so far.[17] For instance, one student who discussed Ben Jonson’s The Irish Masque at Court, taught the class about masques, those performances designed especially for the King or Queen; she also explained Ireland’s political turmoil in the early modern period, and, most importantly for this text, examined the English audience’s attitudes towards the Irish and the anticipated reactions to Jonson’s harsh portrayal of uneducated, ill-mannered, and ridiculous-accented Irish. Exploring non-canonical plays led to student-driven discussions that reflected on an array of primary sources and that truly supported classroom dialogue and critical thinking.

During these presentations, I discovered that my students had taken the “adopt” a play metaphor seriously. Some students felt protective of their plays and wanted to justify their play as worth studying. One student wrote about Cupid’s Whirligig, a city comedy by Edward Sharpham that nobody reads.[18] She expressed her shock that Cupid’s Whirligig was not regularly taught or anthologized. This possessiveness, born of truly caring about the texts they read, was a recurring theme in the presentations. Upper-level English majors were, some for the first time, grappling with ideas of canonicity because they had identified gaps in both in the curriculum and what seems like Wikipedia’s universal content.

Reading non-canonical works, presenting “their” adopted play to the class, and writing for Wikipedia gave students an incentive to excel: specifically, writing for Wikipedia increased the exigency of their work, as they were addressing an actual lacuna. As Wikipedia advertises, writing in the classroom can be “the end of throwaway assignments and the beginning of real-world impact for student editors” (emphasis in the original). These students created Wikipedia articles that, in some cases, actually contributed to a broader knowledge community.

I qualified my previous assertion about student contributions because I did not require that students publish their writing on Wikipedia. Asking students to share their work, even pseudonymously, is an ethical quandary. Posting on Wikipedia is different from, for instance, our course website: on a course website, I can protect all of the material by requiring a password and, even if the site were open-access, it would not get much traffic. As Wikipedia acknowledges, it is one of the most popular sites on the internet. Ultimately, I required students to write a Wikipedia-style article, but I did not require them to post it to the online encyclopedia for credit.[19] Some students creatively formatted their word document submissions, such as this entry on The Costlie Whore — a title I would not suggest Googling, as there is still no Wikipedia article on this anonymous play from 1632 (see Figure 1). Even though posting to Wikipedia was optional, about a third of my students gave it a try. Those students, on their own, created a Wikipedia username and learned enough about the wiki markup to upload their articles.[20] See Figure 2 and Figure 3 for images of the opening of Wikipedia articles my students wrote about Johan Johan the Husband and The Dumb Knight.

Initially, some of the write-ups my students created and uploaded to Wikipedia were marked as “orphans,” that is to say, no other pages linked to them. Even though students were not required to upload their work to Wikipedia, we talked about how they should categorize their plays and where their articles should both link to and be linked from. They had to indicate what links they would include even if they handed in their paper in a word document. While most students were able to include appropriate links, many did not understand the “categories” of articles on Wikipedia, nor what the benefit of linking to your page versus from the page might be. Uploading new pages to Wikipedia (and writing as if your work were to be uploaded) leads students to consider how to classify information. Exploring ontologies and taxonomies — those categories that we apply (“1631 plays”) or sometimes choose not to apply (“plays published in quarto”) when creating a Wikipedia page — helps students approach disciplinary knowledge systems. Wikipedia’s categories makes assumptions about how users will navigate the pages and what might interest them; Wikipedia’s explicit organization can prompt students to interrogate implicit ontologies in literary studies.

Adding new Wikipedia pages about early modern plays includes other people beyond the classroom in the learning experience and can lead students to continue to learn beyond the short time they are in class. As the revision history of a page created by a student on Thomas Heywood’s The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange demonstrates, a dozen Wikipedians read and edited the page (see Figure 5): most of the post-assignment edits involved normalizing the spelling to American, and, yes, sometimes adding or changing the categories. Beyond those Wikipedians who actively edited the text, there are the users who simply read this page and made no changes, which we cannot track. Perhaps most impressively, the most recent update to the page (15 November 2014, Renaissancefan) is from the same person who created it in 2012: no longer a student, this person is still engaging with the texts and ideas from their class. Although it might seem counterintuitive, writing for Wikipedia — that is, putting your work on the internet for all to use and change — can allow students to feel intellectual ownership. Renaissancefan is not just a consumer of knowledge shared by a professor, but an expert contributing to broader discussions.

With her Wikipedia page on The Fayre Maid of the Exchange, Renaissancefan is participating in collaborative authorship. Steggle suggests that we can perhaps better understand models of early modern writing by engaging with Wikipedia:

It is one thing to know that, in principle, Renaissance drama is at home with co-authored, repatched plays; with plays that plagiarize pieces of earlier plays; and with plays that change radically from version to version. But to realize that we happily use Wikipedia articles whose status is comparable helps us to see how well that might work in practice.  [Steggle 2010]

We might tell students about the highly collaborative practice of writing early plays for a public audience; this assignment helps students engage with the largest collaborative writing project ever undertaken. Of course, all collaborative modes of writing are not the same: an early modern playwright revising an older work is not the same as a student contributing to Wikipedia. That said, writing for Wikipedia can help students think of authorship models beyond the often fallacious idea of the single-author-genius.

Admittedly, writing about Renaissance plays on Wikipedia is a finite project. At some point in the future, all the plays listed in the Database of Early English Playbooks could have complete entries. If and when that halcyon day comes, class projects in this field can move to new related topics that are not yet covered adequately, such as royal progresses and processions, acting companies and actors, and even manuscript sources for early modern drama. The future of digital pedagogy projects that promote editing Wikipedia is, at its heart, one that both defines and reflects future avenues for scholarship.

This article has demonstrated the concrete benefits of having students write pages for Wikipedia, including self-motivated learning, improved communication skills, writing for a real-life audience, and undertaking scholarly research. Some of the benefits to writing articles discussed here are field specific, such as reading unedited plays, considering notions of literary canon, and exploring how and what we study as literary scholars. Beyond the values that Wikipedia itself touts and those discipline-specific skills that students gained, this assignment fosters critical thinking about Wikipedia itself: what’s in, what’s out, and what these bounds suggest about our cultural values. Learning about Wikipedia prompts students to question how other, sometimes seemingly monolithic, sites are conceptualized and created, as manifested in our class discussions. Analyzing Wikipedia also promotes what might be called digital civic engagement: this kind of action can help make digital spaces more inclusive and representative, although this is currently an uphill battle.

Even after writing their own Wikipedia pages, my class agreed that for final papers, Wikipedia was best used in the pre-research phase, and not cited in the bibliography. As I overheard one of my students comment to a classmate on the way out of class, “this is more work than a research paper.” Yes, doing scholarly research, reading unmediated texts, and writing for a real-life audience is work: it is the work we undertake as literary scholars. As the students in my Renaissance Drama proved, students are eager to learn to undertake real literary scholarship when we offer them the chance to gain and share their expertise by writing for Wikipedia.