Open educational practices with Wikipedia: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: Over the last two decades, there has been a growing recognition of Wikipedia's role in education, transitioning from a debated information source to an accepted educational tool. The current study systematically examines the existing body of research on Wikipedia's role as an Open Educational Resource (OER) and an open educational practice (OEP) in higher education. Method: A scoping review methodology was adopted. A comprehensive search was conducted across English and French language databases, covering literature from 2006 to 2023. The review followed the PCC (Participants, Concept, Context) criteria and involved a two-stage iterative process of data extraction and analysis. A total of 322 publications were selected for detailed analysis. Results: More than three quarters (77.3%) of the corpus present empirical research, while 22.5% consist of theoretical or conceptual studies on the role of Wikipedia in higher education. Literature reviews account for only 2.2% of the total corpus. The main empirical approaches used are narrative research (23.7%) and surveys (23.3%). Other approaches include evaluation research (10.8%), development research (10%), case studies (9.2%) and qualitative description (9.2%).The analysis of the empirical papers revealed that research on Wikipedia's use as OEP has increased significantly since 2015, surpassing studies focused on its use as OER. Undergraduate students are the most frequent participants, with 55% of OEP-related research targeting this group. The study identified trends across academic disciplines, with Humanities and Social Sciences most frequently engaging with Wikipedia as OEP, while STEM fields showed lower engagement. Conclusion: This scoping review is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of peer-reviewed publications on the utilisation of Wikipedia as an (OER) and as (OEP) in higher education. It can serve as a foundation for more in-depth and specialised investigations into both aspects of Wikipedia as a tool for open pedagogy in higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.083 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.038 | 0.033 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".