This summer, we are working to revise Literacy so that the article represents key knowledge about writing, power, and technology. Please join us in setting goals and coordinating collaborations to organize, expand, and improve the article.
Take action by...
1. Reviewing our core goals: Head to our core goals section to get a sense of our main priorities for article revision.
2. Signing up with a goal: Edit our setting goals section with your suggested plan for the summer. See our writing recommendations section for suggested tasks based on weekly time segments.
New to Wikipedia? Check out our resources page for a step-by-step guide on how to get started.
Target high-impact topics: Understanding literacy/illiteracy, childhood literacy, and adult literacy with attention to the different resources, skills, and factors that contribute to these topics are common questions that bring people to the literacy article. Since these topics will be heavily trafficked, it is critical to revise, expand, or create these sections.
Combat knowledge inequities: The current iteration of the literacy article contains several sections that reflect outdated, misleading, and inequitable understandings of literacy. We will provide a more equitable understanding of literacy by addressing key ideological frameworks like technology, power structures, and writing systems.
Address tensions: Embedded in literacy are concepts, ideologies, applications, and biases that need be addressed. We need to incorporate global perspectives of literacy while moving away from deficit-driven narratives, anti-ableist understandings of literacy while moving away from ableist understandings, and literacy as alphabetic or spoken verses multimodal and embodied.
Implement a new article structure: To implement these goals in practice, WikiProject Writing participants have outlined a list of new headings to be added to the article:
Draft and post a talk page message describing our plan for revising the article. Cite manual of style to gain concensus/support from other editors on restructuring headings
Swap sections 4 (history) and 5 (modern literacy)
Add writing to writing systems - history of scripts
Reframe “By continent” - Global story is not a deficit story about low reading levels
Give defined spaces to areas where lots of energies for controversies can be carried out
In national sections talk about different approaches to teaching reading and writing and not just deficit oriented rates
Teaching literacy section needs to be revised with an understanding of reading and writing as connected in all languages
Create a template for a series (of Wikipedia articles) on Writing (e.g. Reading series template)
Literacy as a topic needs to refer to how the concept of “literacy” developed and how “illiteracy,” as a term, came into being – autonomous model vs. ideological model of literacy
The concept of multiliteracies needs to be expanded to include foreign lnaguage teaching curriculum as well.
The part on literacy in China needs to be expanded. According to the national census in May 2021, the illiteracy rate is 2.67%. The number of Chinese characters recognized has been a main measurement of being literate.
Check out our collaborative google doc on different bodies of scholarship/scholars to gain perspective for the article. Help us by continuing to add and modify the document.
Currently, there are over 325 language Wikipedias that exist and develop separate from one another. Each language Wikipedia contains different articles, and therefore different articles on Literacy. Here we have listed a few resources that aid in finding and translating different language Wikipedias' articles on literacy into the English version of literacy (our focus for this edit-a-thon).
Here is a list of all 104 articles on literacy that exist on Wikipedia. Search for a language in the leftmost column to find it's unique article on literacy. If you do not find the language you're looking for, this means the article has not yet been created on that language Wikipedia.
WikiProject Writing has developed a translation task force with guidance on how to find articles on different language Wikipedias, integrate articles from one language Wikipedia to another, and other helpful best practices.
WikiProject Writing is working to compile a list of articles foundational to writing. We are following the example set by the reading series. Contribute key categories and articles to our shared google doc below:
This summer, the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is hosting three workshops dedicated to introducing the spotlight, setting goals, and coordinating collaborations. Additionally, we will be hosting three coffeehouses focused on contributing to the literacy article. If you need some help getting started, have specific questions, or would like to find space to work on your article alongside your collaborators, these are great spaces to do so:
This workshop will introduce scholars to the Literacy Summer-Long Edit-a-Thon event page and address core goals for revision, key collaboration tools and practices, and goal setting.
Curious about how different people navigate editing Wikipedia? Drop-in whenever you'd like from 1:00pm-2:00pm ET on Twitch where CCCC scholars and/or the CCCC Wikipedian-in-residence will live edit Wikipedia on a different topic focus. This summer, we will be focusing on contributing to WikiProject Writing’s Literacy Summer-Long Edit-a-Thon.
This workshop will review how to engage with the edit-a-thon meetup page and adjust our goals and collaborative plan for the second half of the summer.
This workshop will review the edit-a-thon meetup page, focusing on clean-up tasks and good article nomination. Join us in our final push to revise the article on literacy!
If you would like to discuss something Wikipedia-related one-on-one or get help with a Wikipedia article you’re working on, please feel free to sign up for my office hours or email me to suggest another time (savannahcragin@berkeley.edu).
