Wikipedia helps in improving cognitive skills
A research study was conducted to find the effectiveness of Wikipedia as a platform of learning. It was a program with graduate degree students. Students learnt to edit, write articles, features like templates in Wikipedia and a bit of Wikidata and using queries. Tests were conducted in the beginning and at the end of the program to assess the cognitive skills of the students.
The main purpose of education is to create a thinking human being rather than walking encyclopaedias. Over the years the education domain has systematically transformed itself from creating thinking pupils to producing a bunch of people with a lot of information but poor in the thought processes. Cognitive ability among the students' needs to be kindled and nurtured. Use of Wikipedia as a platform for learning has potential to improve this process, leading to impactful learning. In higher education, there is growing interest in using Wikipedia as a learning resource. Wikipedia can be used as an instructional resource as well. Most students use Wikipedia as a source of information to aid their study. But by writing articles on Wikipedia, they become creators of knowledge rather than consumers of knowledge. To write articles on Wikipedia, a student has to engage in research on the topic, collecting information from authentic and verifiable resources, applying thought on the validity of facts before organising the collected information into an article of global standard. This process improves the thought process of the student thereby improving the cognitive skills.
24 girl students of Dr. G Shankar Govt Women's College at Udupi, Karnataka, India, participated in this project. As a bonus to the participating students, it was designed as a one year certificate course titles Wiki ELearning Course. Students not only edited Wikipedia, added articles, translated articles, they also edited Wikidata, Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikiquote. All these done in Kannada language. All participating students were from rural and economically less privileged background. None of them had computer and laptop with them They came to the only computer lab in their college on weekends for one year and did editing. Cognitive skill tests were conducted at the beginning and at the end of the course. It is found that that the cognitive skill among participating students increased by participating in the course which is nothing but editing Wikipedia. This is for the first time such a study has been conducted in India, especially in an Indian language.