“People often acknowledge scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, but other scientists who worked on the project are hardly ever acknowledged,” Connor says. “This is especially true for minority scientists, as people often underestimate them as a result of prejudice. I chose to write on Ralph Gardner-Chavis in order to ensure that his story is heard.”

A chemist, Gardner-Chavis was one of several African Americans whose research advanced the Manhattan Project’s goals. Gardner-Chavis was a chemist whose research on plutonium was critical to the development of the atomic bomb. But after his work on the Manhattan Project, Gardner-Chavis couldn’t find work as a chemist because of racism and ended up waiting tables.

“I detest the fact that many peoples’ contributions were (and still are) undermined because of aspects like race and gender,” Connor says. “Discrimination can cause important research to remain unnoticed, which is detestable. Regardless of who someone is, their works should be made known, and they should be acknowledged. I hope that my article will help Ralph Gardner-Chavis and his works become more prominent.”

Connor’s course at Lone Star was on environmental science, and his instructor, Dr. Brian Shmaefsky, was excited to offer the opportunity for his students to create biographies of diverse scientists like Gardner-Chavis through an initiative Wiki Education is running sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation.

“I was excited to use Wikipedia as a means of providing students with accessible real-world writing experiences,” Dr. Shmaefsky says. “The students were much more engaged in writing the Wikipedia entries than they were with other assignments. I fully believe that STEM fields advance more equitability with diverse representation. Writing biographies of individuals from diverse backgrounds better reflects the true diversity of the scientific community.”

Connor says the hardest part for him was finding sources that met Wikipedia’s Reliable sources policy. In his research, he tried to locate coverage in academic journals, but found that challenging due to the same historical marginalization of the work of scientists of color that led to Gardner-Chavis not being well known. Wikipedia, however, offered an opportunity to shed light on his work — once Connor dug up a few sources.

“My students gained insights into the varied challenges, contributions, and experiences of scientists who are underrepresented in textbooks, general reading books, and online resources,” Dr. Shmaefsky says. “Students began discussing how the unique cultural perspectives of underrepresented scientists influence the breadth, direction, and emphasis of research investigations.”

In the class, students discussed how having biographies of relevant scientists can influence students into pursuing a career in science, when they can have a role model to look up to from a similar background. That’s exactly why the Broadcom Foundation is funding this initiative, which encourages creation of new biographies of diverse people in STEM.

Professors, though, don’t just participate for this reason; they also want to make sure students are gaining core skills, and this project does that, according to Dr. Shmaefsky.

“Based on what I assessed from my students, the Wikipedia assignment encouraged students to learn effective research skills that included the ability to gather and evaluate accurate information from various sources,” he says “It also provided students with an understanding of the guidelines and ethical norms of online digital communication. The Wikipedia assignment was more effective than traditional teaching at instilling these skills.”

Connor found the whole experience rewarding, and he hopes to continue editing Wikipedia in the future. He’s grateful for the support of his partner, Christopher Voss, as well as for Dr. Shmaefsky for giving him the assignment in the first place.

“I definitely prefer writing for Wikipedia as opposed to a traditional assignment or term paper. This is because a Wikipedia article will continue to be edited and viewed. This is very different from academic papers, as those usually get filed away after you turn them in,” he says.

“Women of color are underrepresented throughout Wikipedia,” Dr. Clark explains. “I designed the course with a goal of our students helping to improve the representations of Black women on Wikipedia.”

Mission accomplished, according to Zainab Ahmed, one of the students in the course.

“Writing a biography of a Black woman in STEM was very meaningful to me because it was allowing Black women in a field that is mainly dominated by White men to be acknowledged,” she says. “It also provides more access to Black girls who are interested in STEM to be able to research other people like in that field. It also stops downplaying the role Black women have played in the STEM field.”

Zainab and her classmates worked on biographies as part of an initiative to increase the diversity of Wikipedia’s STEM biographies, funded by the Broadcom Foundation. Wiki Education’s staff provided support for students as they researched and wrote the biographies. Zainab says as she researched the contributions of the woman she chose, she was inspired and excited to learn more about her contributions.

And, of course, she learned about editing Wikipedia. While she’d made a few edits before, she hadn’t dived into writing a full article before. She enjoyed the formatting tasks, deciding what information went into subheadings like “Early life” or “Career”.

“In comparison to a traditional term paper I prefer this because it is more research yet less restrictive. I did not have a word limit to meet, I just had to make sure if it was objective and factual,” Zainab says. “I felt like a true editor and writer.”

These learnings are exactly what Dr. Clark wanted her students to get out of the class.

“They definitely learned about the individuals they wrote about. They also learned how underrepresented women of color are on Wikipedia and the implications of that underrepresentation. They saw their work as part of an effort to help improve that representation,” she says. “It allows students to understand how their work contributes to a database that is relied on to provide information to users around the world. It also holds them accountable for their work. It’s not just what your professor thinks, but if your work a valuable contribution to public knowledge.”

Zainab says she felt that accountability. While she was initially “intimidated,” she says, now that she’s learned more about Wikipedia, she wants to keep editing.

“I will definitely continue soon now that I have a more informed understanding of how to do a proper Wikipedia article,” she says.

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn how to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into your own course.

Header image of students in the class courtesy Msia Clark, all rights reserved.

A collaborative, team-learning spirit (everyone’s a learner)

As a first time editor, editing Wikipedia can feel like a very solitary activity, especially when the onus falls on the editor to seek out the Wikipedia community either through the Teahouse or a Wikiproject that catches their attention. The students that participate in the Student Program are in a unique position, since they are learning the ropes alongside their peers and instructors. One instructor shared, “The Wikipedia assignment helped to create a collaborative, team-learning spirit: I hope that students emerge more aware of how we are all learners, professors included!” Another instructor commented, “Often we were teaching each other, sharing tips, and edits–it really enlivens the classroom because everyone is so invested in the outcome.” Invested not only in the outcome of their individual assignments, but in the success of all their fellow peers collaborating to contribute quality information to the largest knowledge repository in the world.

The kind of collaboration fostered among students and instructors through this project is a refreshing change to the typical, top to bottom structure of most college courses. The majority of our instructors have very little to no experience as Wikipedia editors. Our most successful instructors take a vulnerable step forward alongside students to learn the processes, and inevitably to make mistakes as a new editor does. As one instructor put it, “This helped me challenge the traditional classroom hierarchy of the instructor and student, as I was viewed as a fellow Wikipedia editor!” Fostering that sense of collaboration across traditional power dynamics helps establish a trust and curiosity among instructors and students that encourages an excitement to learn and complete the project.

Establishing instructor & student relationships

Another facet of the Wikipedia assignment that results from its collaborative nature, is the opportunity for instructors and students to get to know each other as people. They’re able to share their interests within the course or outside of it, connect over the difficulties of learning new material and reach an understanding that comes from being able to frequently engage in 1-on-1 discussions. An instructor shared how they had the opportunity to have more individualized time with their students and describes the “great impact” it had on their instruction, “on a weekly basis I get to work closely with them, answer questions about how to research, which sources are reliable, how to cite something, what information is notable, and more. It’s a 1-on-1 situation I’ve never had before and I really value that time.” Even if it is hybrid or in person, the novelty of the Wikipedia assignment encourages students to engage in more inquisitive discussions with their instructors and can result in connections over unexpected challenges, such as in the case of this instructor who said the assignment, “really helped us to bond over finding reliable sources – students really got it.”

What really stood out to me were the personal connections made between the students and instructors. It was a surprise at how the Wikipedia assignment served to cut through the mundanity of the usual filing in and out of classes (in person or virtually). The assignment “provided an opportunity to get to know student interests and tailor other work in line with those interests. That is, allowed more opportunity to get to know them as people.” Especially as we reel back from the remote learning years of the COVID pandemic, it’s wonderful to see in person connections taking place as a result of this project. Other instructors shared similar experiences, “The Wikipedia assignment helped me to get to know my students better! Since I let them choose their articles to edit, I learned more about their interests and career plans.”

Each term, we hear from instructors and students alike about the great sense of accomplishment they feel about the global impact and reach of this project. Now we might sound like a broken record player at this point, but it really highlights how empowering it is for our students to be able to add their little grain of knowledge to Wikipedia. To relay an instructor’s insight, “I think it got students excited to have ownership over a project. They seemed to appreciate that it was an assignment that had a bigger impact beyond just me and them.” To become an active participant in the Wikipedia project as an editor, and to then intentionally reflect and zoom out of the immediate communities and relationships that we hold in our daily lives, and be able to attempt to grasp the idea of our participation in the knowledge building process on the global scale that Wikipedia functions at, is not an easy ask of anyone, or our students. Yet that very thinking becomes a motivating factor in producing quality work, “The fact that the work they were contributing was going to be seen on a global level made the quality of the work improve significantly over previous assignments.”

Contributing information for a larger, global audience also helps students think critically about the accessibility of their information. Students that participate in the Wikipedia project are from all over the US and Canada, and bring their unique, diverse lens to the knowledge creation process. One instructor shared a powerful reflection about their students, “One thing that I realized working with a class full of first generation students was that writing for Wikipedia allowed them to share their work with their families, many of whom had limited English skills. In someways writing for Wikipedia, writing for more general, less educated, global audiences, meant writing in ways that were more accessible for their own families. Many students in my class translated their work into Spanish, making it even more accessible, they were so excited to write for the world, especially when that included people close to them.”

Before I let you go, a quick recap of those fantastic numbers:

• Number of students: 5,980

• Number of courses: 351

• Words added: 5.08 million

• Refs added: 51,100

• Article edited: 7,430

• New articles created: 466

Thanks to all of the new and returning instructors and students that took that leap of faith to give the Wikipedia assignment a chance! We are grateful for your participation and contributions to Wikipedia. Cheers to future collaborations!

Dayanna Perez is a senior at California State University Dominguez Hills, who’d never heard of a Latina working for NASA until she wrote the biography of Christina Hernández.

“I chose Christina Hernández because she is the very first representation that I have seen in all my 22 years of Latinas in the aerospace field,” Dayanna says.

Inspiring students to understand there is a diversity of role models in the STEM field is a key element of the project. And what better place to do that than Wikipedia, the first place people turn to when wanting to know more about someone? But Wikipedia’s representation gaps lead many people to not find biographies of people of color or women; instead, figures in STEM with biographies on Wikipedia are often white men.

“Learning about Wikipedia’s lack of biographies of people of color and women in STEM fields opened my eyes to the privilege and power that news and social media platforms possess. Our nation has a history of presenting information that portrays African Americans and people of color in a negative light. The absence of positive contributions from groups that have been historically marginalized can be equally oppressive. Because of these inequities that exist, I made a conscious decision to choose an African American male as a subject,” says Kimberly Ivy, a student in Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles’s class who created the biography of Eugene M. DeLoatch. “After learning about DeLoatch’s development of Morgan State University’s engineering program, and that he is responsible for training more African American engineers than anyone else in the world, writing his Wikipedia bio became more than a graded assignment. DeLoatch deserves the type of public recognition that possessing a Wikipedia biography article grants.”

All told, students this spring added 18 new biographies of STEM professionals of color. The biographies have already received thousands of page views, bringing more attention to the contributions of people like:

• Rodney Adkins, the first African American senior vice president at IBM
• Abdul–Aziz Yakubu, a scholar and mathematical biologist who chaired Howard University’s mathematics department
• Marcus McCraven, a nuclear scientist who served as the only African American engineer on the team who built the hydrogen bomb at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Asmau Ahmed, an advocate for women in technology and founder of Plum Perfect, a beauty technology company
• Camille Hearst, a technical entrepreneur who leads Spotify for Artists
• Juan C. Meza, an influential mathematician and computer scientist

In crafting these biographies for Wikipedia, the students also learn key research, writing, media literacy, and collaboration skills. As students graduate and pursue careers, these skills become even more valuable.

“Wikipedia has helped students to understand more about why they should grow, learn, and earn a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They were able to be proud of people who look like them. Wikipedia has helped students to continue to see others who are working in many of the areas where many minorities are underrepresented,” said Corry Stevenson, a professor at Denmark Technical College, a Historically Black College and University, whose students created the biography of Marc Hannah. “Students gained a better understanding for procedures and requirements for why reading and writing skills are needed in today’s careers, and many of the students have modified their views. This initiative helped change their mind about pursuing a career in STEM.”

If you’re a college or university instructor at a diverse institution in the United States who’s interested in adding more biographies of historically marginalized people in STEM, teach with Wikipedia! If you want to learn more, register for one of our upcoming webinars.

Where do people get their history? The American Historical Association conducted a study in recent years on that very question and the results, reported in a table, show that most people get their history from social media, films, and television, and that a very small percentage learns about history in a formal course. My students weren’t exactly shocked to learn that, but it did give them pause. Although I don’t believe history education has to be entertaining, it should be engaging, and it obviously is not since the university is quite literally the last place the public will go for historical information. As I always tell the students, I can reach more people through Wikipedia than I will with my scholarship. So, the project matters to me, and I hope the students might adopt the same attitude. Possibly the fact that they took the content gap problem seriously (e.g., many students wrote about women) this past spring is evidence that they did.

My course focuses on the medieval Mediterranean from roughly AD 200 to 1100. The themes and goals include to describe change over time (Periodization/Global Middle Ages); to understand processes of intercultural contact and exchange (Christianization and Islamicization); to explain the shift in global influence from East to West; and to demonstrate the diversity of the medieval world. But the structure resembles less a narrative and more a thematic series of discussions, but these are built around a single specific object, person, text, or site – just like a Wikipedia entry. I devote one class day a week to working on skills; basically, on Monday I present a sample Wikipedia entry, and on Wednesday we discuss research strategies and methods to formulate an argument. Every day starts with two threads, one related to a particular aspect of writing a Wikipedia entry and the other about a potential Wikipedia topic. I gradually tie the two together by contextualizing the topic and situating its study in medieval historiography.

In practice last semester I delivered content on Monday, and we worked on method every Wednesday. Monday’s class started with an artifact followed by its context, which I unpacked gradually. For example, I showed the students a strange multi-purpose tool dating to the late Roman period. It has been called the Roman “Swiss Army Knife” in popular articles. It looks like a pocketknife with several retractable tools including a fork. Although two reputable museums with similar (allegedly) Roman multitools, one in Italy and one in England, claim the items are authentic, there is no way that could be true, because of the presence of a fork. We have only recovered one fork from the confines of the Roman Empire, and it dates to the sixth century, centuries before the multitool was made. The dates ascribed to the objects in both museums have to be at least a few centuries too early. My point here was twofold. First, you can’t simply trust everything you read; and second, the knife didn’t exist in a vacuum (i.e., if you were writing the Wikipedia article for the multitool, what would you need to know?). I emphasized that even trustworthy sources should not be read uncritically; perhaps a source lacks corroborating evidence or requires additional sources, or different sources, to be convincing. I also wanted them to appreciate that we could only know the museums were mistaken if we were aware of the wider context.

Rather than incorporating method and approach into lectures, every week I devoted Wednesday’s class entirely to building skills, from how to find sources to checking personal bias, and every few weeks I deliberately scheduled an in-class workday. Putting aside time for developing their research and writing skills was a game-changing decision. The students who regularly attended class understood concepts that the students in upper-division courses struggled to grasp. Indeed, several students told me that the course gave them skills valuable in our more advanced courses.

I’d like to share an anecdote about a particularly wonderful student project. One student, who took my suggestion to select a topic that addressed a “content gap,” chose to revise the article on the sixth-century Empress Theodora. It was a bold decision, to say the least. I warned this student that the historiography on her reign is vast and that the primary sources are dense. She was not deterred. It speaks to how much work this student had put into the project that her entry raised so many fascinating questions. I mentioned to her that the Roman historian Tacitus described the third wife of Claudius, Messalina, in a specifically sexualized way as a proxy for the Empire itself, which might also be the case with Theodora. I gave her quite a few articles to read, none of which was required, of course, but she read them anyway. She took my idea and ran with it. Her entry highlighted that the sixth-century author Procopius deliberately styles Theodora as feminine because she’s been elevated to a traditionally masculine position and operated in a masculine world. However, the palace was a unique space, at once the state and a private household, and Roman women ran the Roman household, so the empress occupied a unique position. The substance of her article was fabulous, but in my critique, I wrote that it could be improved with some discussion of how historians have understood Theodora. I could tell she took that lesson to heart. In her reflective essay, she wrote, “It is impossible to determine how we should analyze a figure or event in the modern day if we do not initially consider how it has been previously understood historically speaking.” How many students over the years internalized that message in my courses? Very few. I was so appreciative of her entry because Theodora is one of the most maligned figures in history, and her good work corrects that perspective.

The Wikipedia assignment has proved an effective means to weave together important conversations in the field with the practice of actual historical research. I am proud of what my students have contributed to the discussion and look forward to continuing this work in the future.

That day’s adventure began with a visit to a local paleteria shop, where Alma and I spoke about the motivations behind the Queer Arts Wikipedia Research Project and the challenges students shared throughout the process. Queer artists face many of the same barriers to recognition off of Wikipedia as they do on it. Alma presents the Queer Arts Wikipedia Research Project as a way students can actively change the public record. She sees it as a form of information activism.

Creating the biographies of historically marginalized groups of people such as queer identifying folks and Chicana/os is no easy task, as the students in the Queer Arts course shared later in the day. The biggest challenge? Finding reliable, secondary sources to satisfy the notability requirements of the topic.

Once in the classroom, we engaged in an interesting conversation around the Wikipedia policies of notability and reliable sources. For a topic to be included in Wikipedia, it must be “notable” and have significant coverage in independent, secondary reliable sources to support the topic’s notability. The idea is if it’s important enough to the community to cover said topic, then it’s probably important enough to be on Wikipedia. Although that policy is in place to ‘avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics,”(1) it also unintentionally excludes topics that haven’t been covered by mainstream media like the focus in this class, queer artists.

The challenge is then to find enough sources out there that are independent and reliable. My conversation with the students turned to the question of “then what is a reliable source?” For that, we explored the reference section of a draft contribution and took a crash course on information literacy and investigating sources. I clicked through references asking out loud, “what kind of podcast is this – does it have an editorial team or is it one person? Is this magazine well known for fact checking? Is it an opinion piece or is it a neutrally written editorial contribution? How easy can I find the ‘About me’ page to know more about this source? At the end of that exercise, Alma pointed out annotated bibliographies are projects usually done in graduate studies. With that, we all agreed this is not easy work, especially when it comes to finding sources about queer artists.

As part of the project, though, students also created a presentation to give in front of their peers, where they could show images and other medium that could not be included in their Wikipedia article. Any images used in articles or housed in Wikipedia’s sister site, Wikimedia Commons require a free license to be used in Wikipedia, something that cannot be easily obtained. There are many ways to weave a Wikipedia assignment into existing curriculum, even with these kinds of constraints.

As the class wound down, we talked about the unique position they are in as students in higher education. For them a walk to the campus library opens a multitude of doors to peer-reviewed, academic research and knowledge that sits behind subscription based databases or newspapers. Equipped with these tools, they stand a better chance at gathering information that might otherwise not be available to the average reader or Wikipedia editor. In this position, who better to shine the spotlight and tell the narratives of queer artists that, as mentioned by Alma, “despite their decades of experience such as Joey Terrill and Gary Floyd as well as art activists such as Homo Riot” were not yet included in Wikipedia.

Thanks to Alma and the students of the Queer Arts course for the welcoming experience and interesting conversations!

To read more about the class, visit Alma’s website.

Each term, I’m charged with reviewing and assessing the Wikipedia Student Program. It’s a time intensive process which is why these posts often appear several months after the completion of a term. It would be easy for us at Wiki Education to simply say that one term is like another. Thousands of students from hundreds of post-secondary institutions contribute millions of words to Wikipedia, and the world lives on happily ever after with countless topics improved for the public at large. True as that may be, each term brings its own experiences and learning opportunities for us at Wiki Education and a chance for us to highlight the amazing work of our students and faculty.

The numbers

The quantitative achievements of our students are nothing short of impressive! While numbers only tell a small part of the story, they demonstrate the sheer scale of the impact students can have on Wikipedia in a given term. In Fall 2022, we supported 363 courses and 6,460 students.

Those students:

• added 4.8 million words
• added 50,100 references
• worked on 6,300 articles
• created 497 new entries

And as always, their work was viewed hundreds of millions of times in the fall alone. Our students make up a small fraction of all students in higher education, and yet their contributions to Wikipedia and public knowledge are immense. As one of our instructors wrote, “One of the most profound experiences my graduate students have when doing this assignment is the realization of their own expertise in an area. I talk about how only 6% of Americans have a masters degree, and therefore it is their responsibility as experts in their field to ensure the content on Wikipedia is held to the highest standard, and that the way to keep it the resource that it is is for citizens like themselves to take pride and ownership in its development. I also emphasize how it is a privilege to be in Higher Education, and that they need to share this with the world, not keep it to themselves. It is their duty to share their knowledge. They take so much pride in this assignment/opportunity.” Ultimately, these numbers represent the opening up of knowledge to millions of people who otherwise might struggle to find reliable information.

Building community on and off line

When students engage in the Wikipedia assignment, they necessarily join the vibrant community of Wikipedia editors. Contributing to Wikipedia is inherently a communal act, and students learn how to construct knowledge in a collaborative setting. As one instructor wrote, “A few of my students actually started chatting with other wiki editors as they added content to their articles. It was a great experience feeling they were part of a community that was building knowledge.”

What’s less obvious are the types of offline communal engagements that the Wikipedia assignment can foster. Students often report that contributing to Wikipedia helps them to develop an authoritative voice and enables them to feel like members of an expert community. In the words of one student, “I can see how far I have come with reading and analyzing difficult research journals. I can share my findings with the public and make a difference in the science community.” Another student remarked on how the Wikipedia project opened their eyes to the inequities in mental health treatment globally and how this will inform how they interact with future patients. “When I thought about mental health inequalities, I often thought about different disparities between gender, age, race, sexual orientation, and education levels. It didn’t come to mind that not every country’s mental health system is as advanced as ours. Through doing this project, my eyes were opened to many injustices on a global scale. I think this information will be useful when working with clients with different backgrounds than my own and will help advance my clinical work.”

The Wikipedia assignment is also a way for many students to connect with their local communities or places of origin. One instructor remarked, “My favorite outcome was seeing a student from Uruguay add content to a stub article on a television network in Uruguay. That opportunity to add information about his home country was exciting to me, and he did an amazing job.” Another instructor described how one of their students wrote about a museum and visited the museum to let them know they were contributing to their Wikipedia entry. “That student reported feeling very empowered and connected to her community as a result.” Despite its online format, it’s clear that the Wikipedia assignment can help students forge community both on and offline.

A pedagogical tool

Of course, the most obvious community to which students belong is their institution and their individual classes. The Wikipedia assignment can also play a critical role in shaping a class and forging a more dynamic community of faculty and students. Students and faculty often express that they are less than enthused at the prospect of writing and grading traditional term papers. The Wikipedia assignment offers both instructors and students a chance to engage in authentic work that has the potential to resonate far beyond the class. As one instructor noted,

“It is much more fulfilling for students to see their research efforts out in the world, for everyone’s benefit, rather than writing a paper which sits on my desk.”

Another instructor remarked, “I feel more accomplished by helping them contribute to real world information, but also, their Wikipedia reflective essays are one of the most rewarding assignments to grade.”

Apart from engaging in work with real world applications, the Wikipedia assignment often results in an atmosphere of collaboration.

“I always enjoy the dynamic created by the Wikipedia assignments,” wrote one instructor. “I become a coach as students navigate an authentic audience for the work they are doing.”

The overwhelming majority of instructors in our program have no prior experience contributing to Wikipedia. They are in many cases learning alongside their students which just reinforces the democratic spirit of Wikipedia. As another instructor explained, “The collaborative research was fun. I think it helped students to work with each other but also for me to work with them, too: we struggled together, and they thereby gained windows into the world of real scholarship! (Professors struggle to learn, to write, to revise, too!)”

The Wikipedia assignment also has the potential to build a real foundation of trust between instructors and students. In the words of one instructor, “The students really seemed to appreciate that I trusted them to make real edits to a Wikipedia article, and that I gave them a meaningful, challenging assignment.” The public-facing nature of the Wikipedia assignment can be daunting. Instructors who run Wikipedia assignments are often challenging their students to reach beyond their comfort zones, but they are also imparting a confidence in their abilities that is hard to replicate. This trust reinforces the collegial spirit of the Wikipedia project and allows students to feel like experts with something to contribute. “It forces them to ‘grow up’ and be confident in themselves an in their knowledge and understanding of this field,” wrote one instructor.

A novel way to build critical skills

The Wikipedia assignment resonates both within and beyond the classroom, but it also has the potential to impact students on an individual level. The Wikipedia assignment excels not just in helping students to develop critical academic and professional skills, but it brings these skills together in a cohesive and complementary way.

It’s almost cliche at this point to say that digital literacy skills are critical for today’s students, but it’s also no exaggeration to note that the Wikipedia assignment tackles digital literacy in a way that is difficult to replicate in other projects. 99% of instructors agree that the Wikipedia assignment helps their students to develop and hone digital literacy skills, and 95% believe that the project improves their students’ research abilities. Sourcing lies at the heart of the Wikipedia assignment, and students must learn to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information. As one instructor noted,

“The Wikipedia assignment made students more aware of the importance of revising one’s writing, remaining attentive to copyright issues, and scrupulously citing sources.”

Another asserted that “the students learned to give and receive constructive feedback through the peer review process.” Yet another instructor reported that the assignment is “the very best tool for the teaching of academic writing!” The combination of skills students obtain from learning to contribute to Wikipedia positions them to take on the complex information landscape of today.

Wikipedia’s strict policy against close paraphrasing also means that students have to truly understand the sources they’re consulting. They have to be able to comprehend the material such that they can put it into their own words and translate often highly specialized and technical information into accessible language. One student last term reflected, “Contributing to Wikipedia has been a great assignment and is nothing like I have done in college so far. It has taught me how to effectively summarize long research journals/experiments, explain scientific evidence and refrain from using scientific jargon. Thoroughly reading through two scientific journals helped me become a stronger student by challenging me to understand concepts on my own.”

Making their work available for the public at large not only enables students to strengthen important skills, but it ultimately heightens their sense of digital citizenship. In moving from knowledge consumer to knowledge producer, students begin to understand the depth of responsibility that goes into making knowledge reliable and accessible to the general population. They understand that as college students, they are in a position of knowledge privilege and they can do good in the world by sharing that knowledge. As one student wrote, “I gained the understanding that, as an individual nearly-competent in my field of study and reasonably technologically-literate, that I can properly navigate primary sources and convert generally inaccessible primary source research into content digestible for the general public, which is simultaneously one of the grandest and smallest contributions to the world that I could possibly make.”

Thank you to all of our faculty and students from Fall 2022! We’re immensely grateful to your ongoing devotion to this endeavor. We take great satisfaction from the knowledge that Wiki Education’s support, “small” though it might be, played some role in your “grand” achievements.

Learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course of any discipline at teach.wikiedu.org.

“As a scholar of Ethnic Studies, I am always eager to learn more about people who engage in different and creative forms of activism or organizing,” Dr. Barnd says. “I only write in Wikipedia in order to create new content that focuses on communities of color, Indigenous peoples, and topics related to social justice.”

After learning Wikipedia basics in our course, Dr. Barnd created a biography for María Urquides, who is often referred to as the “Mother of Bilingual Education” in the United States. Dr. Barnd hopes that readers of the biography reflect on how long communities and schools have been fighting to implement bilingual education, as well as to notice how much resistance persists.

“María Urquides got involved in bilingual education at a rather late age, after a long career in education. So, she provides an amazing role model for community engagement and grassroots efforts toward inclusion education,” Dr. Barnd shares. “Since my children are currently in a dual immersion program, I would also hope readers consider, or reconsider, the various and wonderful models for learning and student growth.”

María was featured in the “Did You Know?” section on Wikipedia’s mainpage on November 24th, so her story has already reached thousands of readers. When biographies of notable women exist, readers can look to them for inspiration and to learn about their important contributions to history. But if no one takes the time to write these articles, they won’t exist.

“The people working with and within Wikipedia have enormous potential to make interventions against systemic bias. The first step, of course is becoming aware of this reality of bias within Wikipedia and within our larger societies. The next step is to understand it better, and to take action.”

Since taking this Wikipedia training course with us, Dr. Barnd has implemented a Wikipedia writing assignment into his course at Oregon State University. He is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies there. Students in the course wrote new Wikipedia articles and edited existing ones related to Native American activists. More than 20,000 Wikipedia readers have already been reading about the Liliʻuokalani Trust in a brand new article, Patricia Whitefoot‘s dramatically expanded biography, and new biographies about Mary Cornelius Winder, and Ramona Lubo, and more.

It’s not typical that instructors learn how to edit Wikipedia themselves before conducting a Wikipedia assignment. Wiki Education’s assignment templates and trainings offer them everything they need to cultivate a successful experience both on Wikipedia and in the classroom. And many of the instructors we support tell us they were delighted to learn about the platform alongside their students. But Dr. Barnd went a little more in depth with our Women in Red Wiki Scholars course. And he had a positive experience learning the in’s and out’s of Wikipedia alongside peers.

“As a professor, I am particularly involved with using the platform to help students become more media literate, as well as to help them understand how platforms like Wikipedia can be a force for good, or a tool for inequity. I want them to choose, and to do something about it. If we choose to do nothing, our inaction will not free of us responsibility. It simply sweeps us along the with the current.”

Learn more about incorporating an assignment like this into your course at teach.wikiedu.org. OR, if you’re curious about learning some Wikipedia editing skills yourself, check out our open courses at learn.wikiedu.org.

Dr. Ingallinella outlines the benefits of utilizing the Wikipedia assignment in her undergraduate class, which is dedicated to reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in English. Her insights can be applied across disciplines, beyond Dante Studies. In the article, Dr. Ingallinella covers the educational outcomes of the assignment and other applications of this work for educators interested in digital public scholarship and knowledge equity. And she lays out a set of best practices for utilizing Wiki Education’s free resources. Reading this, you’ll find a blueprint for how one instructor incorporates our trainings and Dashboard into an actual classroom environment. She answers questions like:

• What does the assignment look like day by day?
• How does the task of writing Wikipedia articles fit into larger discussions of knowledge equity in your field?
• How do you set expectations with students who haven’t edited Wikipedia before, and have actually been told never to use it?

Dr. Ingallinella also provides insights into Academia’s acceptance (and nonacceptance) of Wikipedia, how representation of scholarly journal articles on Wikipedia benefits both public audiences and the academic field, and how a Wikipedia assignment provides students with a good entry point into the reference works important to your field.

Thank you Dr. Ingallinella for sharing your insights with us and our instructor community. We’re proud to support your work and that of many others each term. Every instructor who utilizes our resources (there are hundreds of you!) is part of a community doing this work across the US and Canada through our program. Reach out to us and each other, attend our office hours, present at conferences together, and let us know when you publish work like this. We love to share it. Read the article here!

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out more about how you can incorporate a Wikipedia project into your syllabus.