Academic Summary

Hello, everyone! The following entry is an academic summary based on an article which explains how to develop a project for publishing in Wikipedia.

ACADEMIC SUMMARY                                                                                           1

Literacy Skills Development through Wikipedia Writing Project

            In her article “Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing” Christine Tardy (2010) presents the steps for writing an article for the Wikipedia website to develop academic literacy skills. Not only does she describe those steps, but she also asserts academic writing is usually a challenging issue for second language (L2) students because they are not often used to it. Writing academically means taking the position of expert in a certain subject matter as well as applying literacy skills such as conducting research, following genre conventions, citing sources, paraphrasing and summarizing in order to avoid plagiarism (Tardy, 2010).

            According to the author, Wikipedia is a worldwide famous multi-language encyclopedia which can be edited by any person throughout the world so long as they respect its writing genre. A series of eight manageable steps are described so as to produce a Wikipedia article. They include exhaustive examination of the website, topic selection and research, article outline and first writing draft. Once the draft is ready, the article must be revised by a peer who provides feedback so as the necessary changes can be implemented. The final step is publishing the article on the website but not before having been revised by Wikipedia editors.

            Paraphrases and summaries play important roles and must be appropriately documented in academic writing. Documentation in Wikipedia is firstly realized in what the author calls a “fact sheet” (Tardy, 2010, p. 15) which is finally turned into footnotes or general references. In addition, wikilinks should be included in a Wikipedia article. A wikilink, explains Tardy (2010), is a word or phrase in the article that appears in a different color -blue in Wikipedia- where the reader can click on it and they are redirected to a new article regarding the clicked word.

            In conclusion, academic writing is usually not an easy task to be carried out by students of a second or foreign language. Nevertheless, practice instances can contribute positively in acquiring writing skills. The Wikipedia-writing project “introduces students to many skills of academic writing in a manageable and interesting way”, affirms Tardy (2010, p. 18) at the end of her article.

References

- Tardy (2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27.