Physics students create popular revision ‘wiki’

Physics students Deep Shah, Kin-Hing Lo, and Victor See have developed the ‘Imperial Physics Wiki’, a website which allows students to share lecture notes and past-paper solutions. The collaborative website is built upon the same technology behind Wikipedia. It’s fully integrated into the Imperial system, such as logins and email alerts, and by using open-source software, the whole thing hasn’t cost the department a penny.

Since its launch in November, the site has amassed hundreds of pages of crowd-sourced lecture notes and past exam paper solutions. As well as allowing students to easily download material, they are able to make their own changes and improvements too. An online forum has been used by students to share helpful hints and to help co-ordinate the bidding for MSci projects.

Students seemed to agree that the wiki was transformative to the way they studied. This has been most evident in the third-year ‘comprehensive’ exams. Third year physics student John Selby said, “The third year comprehensive exams are a nightmare, I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have the wiki”. The comprehensive exams page on the wiki has received over 14,000 views and features annotations of past paper questions as well as summary notes that have been produced by students in the department.

Deep believes that the wiki will grow as a resource and become an invaluable resource for physics students in the coming years. “Every year students spend loads of time making notes, collating information, doing past papers, and trolling the web for information. Yet as soon as the year is over all this information just disappears into the ether. I always wondered why we didn’t have a central place where we could collect everything so every student would not have to repeat the work each year.”

Deep is excited about how quickly the wiki has taken off and has pushed for a similar solution to be rolled out across College. “The vast majority of students in the department regularly use the wiki and a growing number of students are beginning to contribute their own content. Over 700 students have registered to use the wiki and the site was receiving in excess of 1,500 page views a day during the exam period. I hope the website will continue to grow as a resource. We’re currently working with Alex Dahinten to give the wiki some additional backing and to roll it out a similar solution to the rest of college.”

Deputy President of Education Alex Dahinten had nothing short of praise for the wiki. “The Physics Wiki has been one of the really outstanding initiatives thought of by reps this year. A great thing about the Physics Wiki is how it is student run. Although staff members can access it and contribute, the day-to-day running is done by selfless students who wish to get others to interact online about their learning.”

Kin-Hing added, “In the future, we envision that the department could move to a wiki system for lecture notes and lab scripts. This would allow students to add their own improvements such as links to useful resources or alternative ways of deriving a solution to a problem. Lecturers would play an important role in producing the basic content and moderating the page but I feel this could make undergraduate teaching a more interactive experience for both parties.”

Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Angus McKinnon said that the Physics department is supportive of the initiative but is “slightly nervous about unforeseen circumstances” which could arise – in particular the challenge of ensuring coursework problems are not too similar to those which have been set in the past and for which solutions may be available on the wiki. “In a subject like Physics, where coursework tends to involve solving mathematical problems, the effect is very different from another subject in which coursework consists mainly of essay writing. You can feed an essay through ‘turnitin’ (a programme to detect plagiarism) but not a solution to a physics problem.”