Authentic learning in cultural anthropology: Editing Wikipedia for real-world impact

Jennifer L. Sullivan (academic librarian) and Jessica Lott (anthropology professor) are invested in pedagogical approaches that help learners apply course content to their everyday lives. With this goal in mind, we created a flexible Wikipedia-based assignment for an upper-level anthropology course, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality: A Global Perspective, as a way to teach information literacy skills in a real-world setting while also enriching course content. As the course’s culminating assignment, learners researched an information gap on Wikipedia addressing gender. Learners were also asked to use their experience on Wikipedia to reflect on the significance of the documented gender bias in Wikipedia. This chapter discusses the advantages of Wikipedia as a platform for cultivating authentic information literacy practices. In particular, we address ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, information literacy as a social justice imperative, and disciplinary information literacy. We taught this assignment four times over the period summer 2017–summer 2020 and draw from our experiences collaborating on this assignment. We hope that learning from our successes and failures will inspire those who wish to adapt it for their instruction.