Wikipedia in Teaching: Improving Authonomy in Research, Critical Sense, and Collaborative Abilities in Students, Making Them Contribute to the Free Encyclopedia

Wikipedia works and we do not understand how it is possible. If it does, it is thanks to the ants' nest-like "functional anarchy" of the users who daily correct, contribute, and check its articles. This work focuses on the possible interactions of the triangle students–teacher–Wikipedia, considering that until now the academic world has had mixed feelings towards Wikipedia.From a theoretical point of view, a list of possible means of contribution to Wikipedia by university-level students with real-life examples is given. These include -and are not limited to- writing new articles, proof-reading existing ones, translating from one language version to another, creating audio-visual content, and drawing info-graphics.For a more empirical approach, a project was carried out at Ca' Foscari University (Venice, Italy), with two cohorts of students who were given the possibility of choosing to contribute to Wikipedia as part of one of their exams.To offer a complete overview, this work deals both with the problems encountered during the preparation and the execution of the activity, as well as the general results.M.A. Thesi