SPEA seminar expands students writing exposure worldwide

Students enrolled in School of Public and Environmental Affairs professor Barry Rubin’s seminar this fall are expanding their classroom writing horizons to 300 million people around the world.

Rubin’s graduate seminar, titled “Urban Economic Development,” is gaining this exposure as part of the Public Policy Initiative,  a program through the website Wikipedia.

Students contribute to and create articles on the online encyclopedia to help improve the quality of content and take a different approach to normal classroom writing.

“Students are going to be exposing their ideas and making their ideas available to the
entire world as opposed to just me,” Rubin said. “They are going to be providing information from outside of the confines of the University.”

Rubin said the 44 students in his seminar will be doing case studies on economic development projects, such as work force development in urban areas or how to turn existing infrastructures into an economic environment and developing Wikipedia contributions based off of the topic their group chooses to investigate.

“They’re going to be writing two different versions of their case study,” Rubin said. “One is for Wikipedia, where they contribute to the articles that are relevant, and the second part of the cases study report is for me and our class that includes primary opinions and sources.”

Rubin also said these will be different styles of writing because Wikipedia requires a mutual point of view, no opinion pieces and citations for all secondary sources.

IU is one of eight schools participating in Wikipedia’s Public Policy Initiative. Georgetown University, George Washington University and Harvard University are schools with public policy programs also aiding in the initiative.

To help guide students on the type of writing needed and acceptable for Wikipedia, Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors who have gone through training are available at these schools with knowledge of the proper style and editing.

Campus Ambassador Adrianne Wadewitz, a teaching fellow in IU’s English department, compared learning Wikipedia writing to moving to a new town.

“We explain to students how to interact with other Wikipedia users and what the community standards are, as well as the technical programming language,” she said.

Rubin said the seminar and initiative opportunity is beneficial to students because it changes the perspective of writing when they are writing for an audience of millions of people.

“One of the things about SPEA students is that they tend to be motivated by wanting to make a difference in the world and to contribute in a positive way,”
Rubin said.

— Lindsey Mohlman