Whittierpedia

In Spring 2017, DigLibArts is announcing it’s latest project, Whittierpedia, with the goal that this wiki will serve multiple purposes on campus:

• As a site for institutional memory
• A pedagogical tool
• A collaborative narrative and archive of Whittier College

Whittierpedia was designed as a tool for teaching students research and composition skills, and digital literacies. In particular, Whittierpedia is ideally suited to ask students to compose new wiki pages or improve existing ones in wiki markup or wikicode and create new, publicly accessible knowledge and digital content using resources available to them as Whittier College students. This type of activity can help students to:

• more critically evaluate sources like Wikipedia
• develop strong citation skills
• avoid plagiarism
• understand their potential roles as contributors to such online crowdsourcing projects.

Whittierpedia can be a perfect compliment to courses where students may be learning new vocabulary, or be introduced to major thinkers and theorists, for writing intensive courses, and local history courses. It is a great introduction to markup languages and can be a gateway to fostering interests in computer science and coding.

Anyone can join and edit Whittierpedia, and no special permissions are needed. It is completely open and free to use, with the most open Creative Commons license applied to all work published in the wiki.

We have general resources for editing and teaching with the wiki available on the site:

Guides

Previous Examples:

In Fall 2016, Paul Kjellberg created a wiki for his Chinese Philosophy class, which served as a model that informed the current Whittierpedia project.