As an undergraduate student, João Alexandre Peschanski had read several scholarly works by Dr. Erik Olin Wright, but he’d never met him. That changed in 2008, when João, who is from Brazil, was contemplating which Ph.D. program in sociology he wanted to attend in the United States. Erik called João, and the two immediately hit it off. João decided to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Sociology to study under Erik’s tutelage. Little did he know Erik would not only expand his sociological horizons, but introduce him to the world of Wikipedia.

At the time, Erik was president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and in 2011, he made a call to duty to improve Wikipedia, joining with what was then a fledgling program that today is Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. Erik didn’t just encourage other sociologists to teach with Wikipedia, he also embraced it in his own course. João was a student in that course ten years ago.

“Erik was fascinated by Wikipedia. Really! He talked about it all the time,” João says. “I was not so impressed at the beginning, which is funny now as I have become a strongly committed Wikimedian. It sounded like a nice experiment, sure, but I wondered: why would I want to write on topics I knew a lot with people I did not know and who knew much less if anything about these topics? It did not sound right.”

A Wikipedia volunteer, User:Daniel Simanek, came to speak to João and other students in the class, teaching them the basics of editing. João — as User:Joalpe — used this knowledge to make his first edits to Wikipedia, on the article about the 2011 protests in Wisconsin’s capitol, collaborating with fellow graduate student Michael Billeaux. (João also wrote a paper about the protests with Erik.) For his class assignment, he also added a couple of paragraphs about electoral dilemmas to leftist parties based on the theory of Adam Przeworski.

“I wish I could say editing Wikipedia led to an immediate change in my life — yet this would not be true,” João reflects today. “After this experience in 2011, I basically forgot about it. I thought it was funny, and I was a bit scared about how easy it was. I was scared people would end up changing what I had written. It is quite impressive to see my first edits on English Wikipedia are still there, ten years later.”

In 2014, João, now a professor himself in Brazil, decided he would teach with Wikipedia, asking his students to improve content on the Brazilian dictatorship and create content on the killed and disappeared in the authoritarian regime. (João also co-authored an article on this experience with undergraduates who had been involved in the project, including Marília Carrera, who is now projects manager of the Brazilian Wikimedia affiliate Wiki Movimento Brasil.) Since then, he’s become way more involved, editing tens of thousands of articles across the Portuguese, French, and English Wikipedias as well as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. He’s also integrated Wikipedia assignments into dozens of courses, introducing more than 4,000 students to editing Wikipedia, and has leadership roles in two Wikimedia affiliates: Wiki Movimento Brasil and the Wikipedia & Education User Group.

“I have edited a lot, but what I like the most is to support people doing their first edits,” he says. “It feels like I am sharing power.”

That sharing power element directly ties back to Erik’s vision. Erik passed away in 2019, but João sees his work as continuing Erik’s legacy.

“Everything I do in academia and in community organizing is a tribute to Erik. And I miss him a lot,” João says. In the last decade of his career, Erik had started investigating what he called “real utopias” — socialist experiments within a dominant capitalist society, such as participatory budgeting, universal basic income, and, of course, Wikipedia. João assigns every one of his students to both edit Wikipedia and read one of Erik’s pieces, usually about Wikipedia. More recently, he’s assigned Erik’s final book, How to be an Anti-capitalist for the 21st Century, which includes a section on Wikipedia.

Erik’s call to duty on behalf of ASA led directly to Wiki Education’s partnership with the academic association, which is still thriving ten years later, with nearly 200 courses in the U.S. and Canada having taught with Wikipedia thanks to his vision. João also took inspiration from Erik’s call and convinced his colleagues at a prestigious research lab in São Paulo, called NeuroMat, to launch a Wikipedia Initiative. The launching document was, in homage to Erik’s ASA piece, “A call to duty: NeuroMat and the Wikipedia Initiative“. The growth of the Wikipedia Education Program from its humble beginnings when Erik helped launch it into national and international prominence has been incredible.

“It is truly amazing how Erik saw this coming,” João reflects. “I am really honored to have carried on his vision as I got more and more involved with the Wikimedia movement throughout the years.”

As João’s advisor, Erik played a large role in shaping his academic trajectory, but João also credits other Madison professors, including Gay Seidman, Mara Loveman, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ivan Ermakoff, and Myra Marx Ferree, and fellow graduate students Tatiana Alfonso, Rodolfo Elbert, David Calnistky, Matías Cociña, Alex Hanna and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, among others, for helping him engage in Erik’s sociological vision. He’s also been inspired by the global community of Wikipedia and Education leaders, whose work is highlighted in the This Month in Education newsletter. He’s thankful for the resources that have been developed to support faculty who teach with Wikipedia around the world; the wikitext course page Erik used for João’s class has now been replaced by the Dashboard. And João is intrigued by Wikimedia projects beyond Wikipedia; he’s currently working on projects with Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata.

“I talked to Erik a couple of days before he passed away, and in this final moment I explained to him what Wikidata was,” João says. “He was thrilled, and we had plans to write a paper on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Digital Utopias. I might do it someday!”

Image credits: Hero image courtesy João Alexandre Peschanski, All Rights Reserved; Tinaral, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been amazing to watch this program evolve and see higher education embrace Wikipedia as the powerful teaching tool we always knew it was. Here’s what our program looks like in numbers, through the spring 2020 term:

• We’ve supported 4,088 courses…
• … with 83,996 students completing Wikipedia assignments!
• We’ve worked with 1,852 instructors…
• …at 754 universities in the U.S. and Canada!
• Students in our program have created 9,958 new articles…
• …and have edited 95,749 articles total!
• 71.5 million words citing academic scholarship are on Wikipedia thanks to our program, hard-working students, and innovative instructors. If we printed that out, it’s nearly 500 reams of paper!

But it’s more than just numbers. It’s changes to the information available on Wikipedia, on the internet, and at billions of people’s fingertips, making it more accurate, representative, and complete. It’s changes to the lives of thousands of students, who have gained key skills and become more media literate. In the blog post series, our staff has reflected on these changes:

• Executive Director Frank Schulenburg took a look back at the program, where it’s come from and where it is now.
• Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis discussed impacts to Wikipedia’s new active editor numbers from the program.
• Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn reflected on changes we’ve made to Wikipedia’s content.
• Senior Program Manager, Wikipedia Student Program Helaine Blumenthal reviewed student learning outcomes.
• Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson examined our impact to Wikipedia’s gender gap.
• Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent showcased our expert engagement learnings.
• Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross narrated our program’s history with technology.
• Helaine also reflected on how we’ve tackled equity.

We didn’t just want to reflect on our perspectives of the last 10 years, however. We also wanted to showcase those who helped make it happen:

• Max Klein and PJ Tabit joined Wikipedia to support student editors; both are still active today.
• Jonathan Obar started teaching with Wikipedia in the pilot program; he’s still teaching in our program today!
• Amanda Levndowski was a student in the pilot program; now, she’s proud Wikipedian and a law professor who assigns her own students to edit Wikipedia.
• Tighe Flanagan took three classes in the pilot program, and then worked for the Wikimedia Foundation helping to expand the program globally.
• Kasey Baker learned to edit as a student in the pilot program, and has gone on to bring hundreds of others to Wikipedia.

As we mark this milestone, we reflect on this experience for everyone involved in making our program a success for a decade. We owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who’s participated in our programs, worked for our organization, or supported our students on Wikipedia. And we owe a special debt of gratitude to our funders who have enabled this program’s success along the way, including the Stanton Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, Mary Graham, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Simons Foundation, Google, Pineapple Fund, and more.

To support our work for the next 10 years, visit wikiedu.org/donate.

Ten years ago, Kasey Baker was pursuing his master’s degree in public administration at Western Carolina University, when he took a policy analysis course that changed his life: It introduced him to Wikipedia editing.

The course was one participating in the pilot of what is now known as the Wikipedia Student Program, where professors assign students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. Kasey tackled the article on the nuclear energy policy of the United States. Then the Fukushima meltdown happened.

“More than 65,000 characters, hundreds of hours of writing, hundreds of hours debating with fellow Wikipedians later, I was off to the races,” Kasey reflects now. “Wikipedia was a jumping off point for my academic career, if it was not for that assignment and those in the community and Wikimedia who helped me blunder though such a massive undertaking, I honestly might have gone a different direction in my career. Looking back, the process of writing an article up to the standards of Wikipedia was just as difficult, rigorous, and rewarding as publishing independent research.”

After that first assignment, Kasey was hooked. He volunteered in future terms as a Campus Ambassador, helping the next generation of student editors. Now, as a political science professor, he’s taught Wikipedia assignments in many classes. And, with fellow Wikipedians in his region, he founded the North Carolina Wikimedians user group. He’s run many edit-a-thons, and supported countless new editors.

He loves sharing Wikipedia with people throughout academia, encouraging those initially opposed to shift their perceptions of Wikipedia. Kasey even admits one of his hobbies is breaking down teachers’ barriers by explaining the positive impacts of teaching students to critically use and improve Wikipedia. In the last decade, he’s shifted from writing articles himself to training others how to write articles; in the time it would take him to research and write one, he points out, he helps 30 students write their own articles.

“Over the 10 years teaching and sharing Wikipedia, I’ve never once met a student who thought this was a throw-away assignment. It actually has one of the highest engagements of anything I teach, because who doesn’t like telling their friends and family ‘Look what I wrote on Wikipedia,’ and seeing thousands of impressions each month on the page?” Kasey says. “Unlike most college assignments, even with harsh criticism from Wikipedians, students get immediate validation that ‘This work matters, I’m proud of what I’ve done.’ That fills a very important void for high school, undergraduates, and even master’s/PhD students.”

Kasey has a lot to be proud of in his decade of work on Wikipedia, but he points to his work preserving the written and oral history of Holocaust survivors on Wikipedia as the most fulfilling work he’s done. Through a series of edit-a-thons, students, faculty, and staff have expanded or created 200 articles, adding more than 600,000 characters to Wikipedia.

“I have even had a Holocaust Survivor speak to me about an article on him that some of my students adopted/expanded, and let me tell you, it is a humbling experience to be told we all are combatting Fascism/Nazism,” Kasey says.

Kasey has noticed a change in academia’s perception of Wikipedia since he was a student ten years ago. He attributes this in part to the community’s rigorous standards, and in part because of what Wikipedia is.

“A lot of it has to do with these pages being a battleground for the history of humanity,” he says. “It’s never a dull day editing articles here, and that’s a good thing in my opinion.”

Image: Derrick Coetzee from Berkeley, CA, USA, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tighe Flanagan was just starting his master’s degree in Arab Studies at Georgetown University when he took a class in fall 2010 that gave him an assignment to research and improve a Wikipedia article.

“This was my first Wikipedia assignment, and I remember being a little terrified,” Tighe reflects now. He was one of the very first students to participate in the pilot of what’s now known as the Wikipedia Student Program, but he’s one of the only ones that participated three times: He also took two more classes with Wikipedia assignments in spring 2011. Tighe had a mix of expanding articles and adding more incremental changes to a series of articles across his three courses that participated in the program.

With a number of edits to his name and a deep knowledge of the Arab world, Tighe was a natural choice to join the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013 to support the growth of a similar program in the Arab World. Over the next five years, Tighe worked directly with student leaders and professors, with the aim of growing the Arabic Wikipedia through student contributions. He worked to support classes in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Palestine, and Israel.

“Wikipedia and academia are a natural fit,” Tighe says. “The skills you need to be a successful student are the same skills you need to contribute to an open-source encyclopedia: writing skills, research skills, as well as sourcing/citation. When conducting research you have to think critically, whether it’s for a term paper or for a Wikipedia article.”

Tighe notes many of the courses he worked with were foreign language faculties, and these assignments are a great way for students to practice translation skills in an almost endless variety of topics. For Tighe, it also gave him the opportunity to grow as a storyteller, sharing insights both qualitatively and quantitatively. Tools like the Programs & Events Dashboard, he says, open up a world of data that you can draw insights, and coupling those with student and faculty experiences, tell a compelling story about Wikipedia and academia.

“Programs like this also change the dynamic around gatekeeping and knowledge production. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And yet, most people don’t,” he says. “Bringing in new editors, even if just for a semester, changes the demographics of the editing community. When you include students of all genders, of diverse backgrounds and lived experiences, and you arm them with access to books, journal articles, and subject matter experts, they can definitely leave a positive mark on free public knowledge.”

Tighe spent five years at the Wikimedia Foundation, and he points to the people he worked with as the most inspiring part of his role. Between the program leaders he supported (the hero image of this blog post shows Tighe, second from left, with Egyptian leaders Reem Al-Kashif, Walaa Abdel Manaem, May Hachem, and Ahmed Hamdi) both in the Arab World and around the globe with a group that became the Wikipedia & Education User Group and the students, Tighe was daily inspired by his collaborators.

“I was blown away by the contributions many of our students made as part of the course. There was a friendly, competitive, atmosphere, with students not just satisfying the assignment criteria, but wanting to contribute the most content,” he says. “Some of those same students are core members of the Arabic Wikipedia community and top contributors to this day.”

A few years ago, Tighe shifted careers to pursue his passion for quilt and garment making. His Instagram (@tigheflanagan) shows off his incredible creations, and he acknowledges his prior work with Wikipedia has influenced his sewing.

“In my patchwork and quilting, I like exploring traditional Islamic geometry and translating those complex grids and shapes into fabric,” he says. “Before I start sewing I learn everything I can about each design, from the geometric construction to where you can find examples in situ. I take a deep dive into a variety of sources so I have all of my citations in order.”

Although he laughingly acknowledges “citation needed”, he attributes the Wikimedian mindset he acquired from his work with the program, his academic training, and his detail-oriented personality as being helpful when he sews.

“In garment sewing, there are often many adjustments or ‘edits’ you may do to a base pattern to get the right fit or have the right style. I document all of the changes I make, so I can revert back where necessary or see what common modifications I might need to make in the future. In my mind, this kind of functions like the edit history on Wikipedia, with my alteration notes as the edit summary. I can always see what happened, when, and why,” he says.

Hero image: لا روسا, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Amanda Levendowski was a college senior 10 years ago when her professor assigned her to edit a Wikipedia article as a class assignment, part of the pilot program of what is now known as the Wikipedia Student Program. She tackled the article on the FAIR USE Act, a piece of failed copyright reform legislation introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren. And she was hooked.

“It felt so impactful to be able to contribute to this repository of knowledge that everyone I knew was using and leave behind something valuable,” Amanda says.

When her class ended, she wasn’t done with Wikipedia. She developed an independent study in law school to create the article about revenge porn because she was writing a scholarly piece about it and noticed that there wasn’t a Wikipedia article about the problem.

“That article has been viewed more than 1 million times — it’s probably gonna have more views than any piece of scholarship I write for the rest of my life,” she says.

She continued editing herself, even appearing in a 2015 “60 Minutes” piece about editing Wikipedia. (“There was a lot of footage that was understandably left on the cutting-room floor, but I’ll always remember wryly responding to Morley Safer when he suggested that copyright law was a little outdated and maybe a little boring — I think I said something like, ‘I’m sure many of your producers who rely on fair use would disagree.’ Who says that to Morley Safer?!” she recalls.) But she attributes her ongoing dedication to Wikipedia in part to Barbara Ringer.

“The year I graduated from law school, I overhauled the article about Ringer, the lead architect of the 1976 Copyright Act, the law around which much of my professional life revolves, during a WikiCon edit-a-thon,” she explains (the hero image on this blog post is of Amanda speaking at WikiConference USA in 2014). “There is something meditative about making an article better, about sharing an untold story, that I couldn’t resist wanting to continue experiencing alongside my students. And in the process, I found this stunning quote from Ringer about how the public interest of copyright law should be ‘to provide the widest possible access to information of all kinds.’ It’s hard to hear that and not think of Wikipedia and its mission.”

And now the student has become a professor herself. Amanda’s an Associate Professor of Law and Director, Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center. And she assigns her students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment, of course.

One such student is Laura Ahmed, who is interested in the intersection of intellectual property and privacy law. Laura, who graduated in spring 2020, was both excited and nervous to tackle a Wikipedia assignment, making improvements to current Supreme Court case Google v. Oracle America, on the copyrightability of APIs and fair use.

“It is almost certainly going to have a substantial impact on software development in the United States, so I think it’s important for the information that is out there about the case to be accurate. That is what made me so nervous about it; it’s such a critical issue and I wanted to be sure that anything I was saying about it was adequately supported by facts,” she says. “Amanda was really great though about helping me get started and build up my confidence to edit the page. When we were editing, COVID-19 had just caused the Supreme Court to postpone several arguments, including this case. So Amanda suggested I start there, and once I’d made that one change it felt easier to go into the substance of the case and change some of the article to better reflect the legal arguments that are being made in the case.”

While Laura found the time constraints of a class assignment challenging, she thought the assignment was critical for both Wikipedia’s readers and her own hands-on learning as a law student.

“This assignment made me really think critically about what I’ve learned in law school and how I can use that knowledge in productive, but unexpected ways,” Laura explains. “When you’re a law student, you tend to forget that a lot of legal concepts aren’t common knowledge. So a lot of cases on Wikipedia really could benefit from a first or second year law student going in and just clarifying what the court actually said or what has actually happened with a case. It’s a nice reminder that we have more to contribute than we think.”

This reflection is exactly what Amanda experienced as a student herself, and is now seeing as an instructor. She reflects back on the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct: “As a member of a learned profession…a lawyer should further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more powerful way to further the public’s understanding of law and justice than by empowering law students to improve Wikipedia articles about those laws: it teaches the public, but it also teaches the students the twin skillsets of editing and the value of giving knowledge back to our communities,” Amanda says. “This community isn’t perfect, but I’m so inspired by the many, many volunteers who are striving to make it better. I’m proud to include myself and my students among them, and I’m excited to see where we are another decade out.”

Image: Geraldshields11, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jonathan Obar was teaching at Michigan State University ten years ago when he heard some representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation would be visiting. As the governance of social media was central to Jonathan’s research and teaching, he looked forward to the meeting.

“To be honest, I was highly critical of Wikipedia at the time, assuming incorrectly that Wikipedia was mainly a problematic information resource with few benefits beyond convenience,” he admits. “How my perspective changed during that meeting and in the months that followed. I was taught convincingly the distinction between Wikipedia as a tool for research, and Wikipedia as a tool for teaching. Clearly much of the controversy has always been, and remains, about the former. More to the moment, was the realization about the possibilities of the latter. Banning Wikipedia is counter-productive if teaching about the internet is the plan. The benefits of active, experiential learning via Web 2.0 are as convincing now as they were then.”

Jonathan should know: He joined the pilot program of what’s now known as the Wikipedia Student Program, and ten years later, he’s still actively teaching with Wikipedia. Jonathan incorporated Wikipedia assignments into his classes at Michigan State, the University of Toronto, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and now at York University, where he’s been since 2016. Not only has Jonathan taught with Wikipedia himself, he also spearheaded efforts to expand the program within Canada.

“The opportunity to work with Wikimedia and now Wiki Education continues to be one of the more meaningful academic experiences I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter these last ten years,” he says. “I’ve connected more than 15 Communication Studies courses to the Education Program, and in each course I’ve worked with students eager to learn about Wikipedia, happy when they learn how to edit, and thrilled when their work contributes to the global internet. As a Canadian recruiter for the Education Program I had the privilege to work with more than 35 different classes operating across Canada, meeting and learning with different instructors, while also sharing a fascination with Wikipedia.”

As an early instructor in the program, Jonathan experienced the evolution of our support resources, from the original patchwork wiki pages to the now seamless Dashboard platform with built-in training modules. He notes he appreciates the ways it’s become easier to teach with Wikipedia in the 10 years he’s been doing it. He notes that training he received as an early instructor in the program a decade ago talked about source triangulation; now, the information literacy environment online requires these skills more than ever.

“Students consistently emphasize how Wikipedia assignments help them develop information and digital literacies, which they view as essential to developing their knowledge of the internet,” Jonathan says. “The students are correct as learning about Wikipedia and its social network helps to address many disinformation and misinformation challenges.”

In 10 years, many moments stand out for Jonathan, particularly in the support he’s received and interactions he’s had with Wikipedia’s volunteer community. But he points to one student’s work as being a particular favorite: A York University student in his senior undergraduate seminar created the article on the “Digital Divide in Canada”, including passing through the “Did You Know” process to land on Wikipedia’s main page. York University also recognized the student’s work, giving him the senior undergraduate writing prize, over more than 20,000 other students across 20 departments and programs in the Faculty.

“The recognition by the university emphasizes not only that the community is starting to acknowledge the value of Wikipedia, but perhaps also that the student’s work, supported by the program, helped inform that perspective,” he says.

Jonathan is teaching two more classes this year as part of our program, one on Fake News, Fact-Finding, and the Future of Journalism and one on Information and Technology.

“After attending that meeting all those years ago, I was convinced that Wikipedia was one of the most effective tools for eLearning available (and it remains that way),” he says. “I hope to continue teaching with Wikipedia, and with the Wikipedia Student Program, for many years to come.”

Hero image credit: Alin (Public Policy), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; In-text image credit: Jon Sufrin, on behalf of Faculty of LA&PS, York University, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When we started what is now the Wikipedia Student Program, we wanted to create support for students and instructors participating in the program. An initial plan involved supporting a new volunteer role within Wikipedia: the Campus Ambassador, who would help support participants in-person.

We sought out people who would be newbie-friendly faces on campus, helping students learn the basics of Wikipedia. Paired with a more Wikipedia-experienced Online Ambassador to answer technical questions, many Campus Ambassadors hadn’t edited Wikipedia prior to this role. While we’re no longer using the Ambassador model, we note the role itself had a profound impact on at least two people whose involvement on Wikipedia began as Campus Ambassadors in 2010: Max Klein and PJ Tabit.

“That was basically the entire jumping off point for my whole career,” Max says. “I’ve made a living out of being knowledgeable about Wikipedia and contributing to the ecosystem, mostly through bots and data projects.”

Max taught a student-led class at the University of California at Berkeley that he and collaborator Matt Senate decided to build out entirely on the Wikipedia project namespace. He also served as an Ambassador for other courses. After graduating from Berkeley in 2012, Max’s first job was as a Wikimedian-in-Residence for OCLC, teaching librarians to contribute to Wikipedia. Then Wikidata became a project.

“Wikidata legitimized and exponentiated the idea that Wikipedia could be about data as well as articles,” Max says. “That is a useful way to get involved if you are more, let’s say, numerically-minded. That allowed me to get involved in a way were I could start immediately with large individual contributions. However today I recognize that the best projects merge all the different perspectives of the users, the aesthetes, the editors, and the programmers.”

He built a bot that contributed bibliographic and autographic data from the Library of Congress to Wikipedia, then helped build the WikiProject Open Access Citation Bot. In 2015, Max piloted the Wikipedia Human Gender Indicators, the first automated documentation of biography-gender representation across all language Wikipedias. He helped create an AI-powered version of HostBot to find the best newcomers. Then he supported the Citizens and TechLab experiment to see if wiki-thanking by other users led editors to contribute more. Today, Max is starting project “Humaniki” to provide data and tools to assist systemic-bias-focused editing.

In other words, Max has done a lot from his initial start as an Ambassador!

“It’s defined my career and values,” he says. “Wikipedia is one of the few remaining sites that hold the promise of what we thought the internet would be at the turn of the millennium. We knew entertainment and commerce would come online, but the promise of libraries and public parks and civic-engagement coming on-line has found less of a foothold. Luckily Wikipedia is still ticking showing what a non-commercial internet could be like. I’m motivated by the feeling of collaborating on public-good, socially important projects with humans all around the world.”

While Max branched out from his work with the program to other areas of Wikipedia work, PJ has continued to be involved with the educational efforts. He originally got involved when starting graduate school in public policy at George Washington University.

“It seemed like an exciting opportunity to work on something related to what I was studying and involving one of the most visited websites on the internet,” PJ says.

After supporting courses on campus at GW, PJ traveled to India in 2011 to support the Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts to replicate the program there. When a working group was formed to find a new home for the program, PJ volunteered. And when Wiki Education as a new organization was formed, PJ was elected to the board, initially serving as treasurer. Since 2017, PJ has been Wiki Education’s board chair.

“Simply, I think the work is critical,” PJ says. “Wikipedia stands out as a source of reliable factual information on the internet, and Wiki Education, through the Student Program, helps Wikipedia become more representative, accurate, and complete. I am extremely proud of what this organization and program accomplish.”

PJ points to the scale of Wiki Education’s program and impact as a key success marker over the last decade. He noted that when we were first starting out in 2010, we couldn’t have imagined that 20% of English Wikipedia’s new active editors would come from this program.

And his involvement over the last decade has meant a lot to PJ personally as well.

“I have made amazing friends that I likely would never have met if not for Wikipedia,” he says. “My involvement with Wiki Education and the Student Program have also given me an understanding and deep respect for how Wikipedia gets made, which I would not have gained as just a reader of the site.”

Both Max and PJ hope to see a future in which Wikipedia reflects fewer and fewer systemic biases.

“Wiki Education has made tremendous progress toward ensuring Wikipedia is representative, accurate, and complete, but clearly there is much more to do,” PJ says. “I hope that we eventually resolve Wikipedia’s systemic biases and that it truly represents the sum of all human knowledge.”

“I hope that Wikipedia lives for another 20 years, and beyond. But I also hope that Wikipedia can be a platform for change vis-a-vis the problems of gender, economic, racial, and political justice,” Max says. “I think it’s already stepping in this direction with amazing editors who increase its coverage and fight misinformation. Obviously an encyclopedia can only do so much (although it’s quite a lot despite its medium). Still I imagine there is another project beyond Wikipedia, like Wikidata hinted at, that can utilize the pattern of collaboration that’s existed and has been so fruitful. I don’t know what it is yet, I’ve been thinking about it for 10 years, but I believe it’s there in the future.”

In 2018, Wiki Education launched a three year strategic plan whose three pillars are equity, quality, and reach. Equity, however, has long been one of the defining forces behind Wiki Education and the Wikipedia Student Program since its inception in 2010. Wikipedia aims to represent the sum total of human knowledge, but despite its more than 6 million articles, it still has a long way to go. This is especially true when it comes to topics that deal with historically underrepresented populations, such as women and minorities, as well as more academic subjects. With their access to information, often behind paywalls for the population at large, and with their instructors, experts in their subject-matter areas, to guide them, the program quickly realized that students can play a critical role in making Wikipedia a more equitable space.

Knowledge equity can be an elusive concept and difficult to define. At its core, though, lies two key pillars: knowledge should be accessible both in its creation as well as its dissemination. It means that knowledge should be accurate, representative, and inclusive to those who seek to create it as well as those who seek it out. While knowledge equity has been at the core of our programs since the beginning, it’s taken on new meaning and urgency in recent years with the rise of fake news and the ease with which misinformation is so readily spread.

Equity through participation

Knowledge is only as equitable as its creators and disseminators. Filling in content gaps and correcting the historical record is a critical part of knowledge equity, but who creates knowledge matters. This is especially true on Wikipedia, a site run by a volunteer base composed overwhelmingly of people who identify as white and male. We’ve known since the outset of the Student Program that roughly 60% of the students we support are women. This is representative of college campuses nationwide. Based on recent survey results, we also know that about 17% of our students identify as Asian, 13% as Hispanic/Latinx, and about 6% as African-American. Additionally, 45% of the students in our program speak another language other than English, and roughly 8% identify as having a disability.

While the makeup of the students in our program is fairly representative of college campuses nationwide, it deviates quite dramatically from Wikipedia’s active editing community. We also know that 19% of all new active editors to English Wikipedia come from the Student Program. While Wikipedia strives to promote a neutral point of view in all of its content, our students bring a diversity of perspectives and experiences that ultimately make Wikipedia a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable place. Whether it’s writing about a language they speak, the town they come from, or another topic near and dear to their heart, our students bring new voices to the Wikipedia editing community.

In recent years, we’ve also begun to collect demographic data on the instructors who participate in our program. Where our students are consistent with college campuses more broadly, our instructors deviate dramatically from academia as well as the Wikipedia editing community. More than 60% of the instructors who participate in our program are women, a number that is far higher than the 30% that make up academia. While most of our instructors do not contribute to Wikipedia directly, they are nevertheless important members of the Wikipedia community. They are using their expertise to guide their students and ensure that their areas of subject-matter expertise are accurately represented on Wikipedia. They too influence Wikipedia’s trajectory and diversify its base of knowledge creators. Whether these professors are focused on Women’s and Gender Studies, improving biographies of women, or plant biology, they are making Wikipedia more equitable.

Not content with content gaps

Whether they come to the Wikipedia assignment with knowledge equity in mind or not, all of our instructors and students participate in making Wikipedia more equitable. They do this through their very participation, but also in the content they produce. A content gap is just that, a gap in knowledge, but not all content gaps are created equally. Wikipedia has notable content gaps in subjects related to women, minorities, and other historically underrepresented populations. It also has significant gaps in more academic and obscure topics. The reasons for these gaps are complex. They arise in part due to who edits Wikipedia, but it also is the result of the fact that these subjects are often poorly sourced in the written record. To a large degree, Wikipedia reflects broader societal biases. Reflection, though, need not mean reinforcement. While this is often the case, Wikipedia can be a powerful tool for correcting those inequities in content. We know that Wikipedia is not a one way street. Information flows both into and out of Wikipedia. It is not simply a repository of information, but an agent of knowledge creation and dissemination.

Most notable among these content gaps is Wikipedia’s gender gap. Despite the fervent efforts of WikiProject: Women in Red, only slightly more than 18% of Wikipedia’s biographies are of women. Women are all too often written about as someone else’s wife or mother rather than for their own achievements. The same is true for other historically underrepresented populations.

To help scale our work in filling in these content gaps, we’ve formed several partnerships with academic organizations over the years. In 2014, we began our important work with the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) to tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap. In that time, we’ve worked with 405 courses whose roughly 8,600 students have added more than 6 million words on Wikipedia in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies. Because of our students, the world now has access to information ranging from Mental disorders and gender to Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, American cosmologist and activist.

Equity is as much about producing content as it is about having access to that content. It’s not just about correcting the record so that a female scientist gets proper recognition for her contribution to a field, but that other women seeking to establish themselves in that same field have a role model to which they can turn. Six million words is certainly a lot, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface when it comes to filling in these critical content gaps.

Equity as a skill

While knowledge equity has been a driving force in the Student Program since its inception, we’ve come to realize in recent years that tackling issues of equity is a skill to be learned, honed, and practiced. We know that there is a steep learning curve when it comes to contributing to Wikipedia. To shepherd our students through this sometimes complex and confusing process, we’ve developed a host of training materials to ensure that students can successfully make those first edits. But just as important as it is to learn how to cite work or add media is how to identify equity gaps on Wikipedia and remedy them.

Over the past year we’ve made a series of updates to our resources so that students and instructors are thinking about equity at every step in the process of learning how to contribute to Wikipedia. In fact, it’s our goal to make editing Wikipedia and tackling knowledge equity one and the same. Whether its asking students to think about how to critically evaluate a Wikipedia article, whether the sources they’re using come from a diverse array of authors, or whether their classmates addressed knowledge equity in their peer review, we want to make sure that students are able to identify bias and ultimately to correct it where possible.

We encourage students to think more deeply about Wikipedia through a series of discussion prompts, covering topics ranging from sources and plagiarism to content gaps to thinking about Wikipedia broadly speaking.

It’s long been our goal to help our students develop digital literacy skills, to enable them to discern reliable information from unreliable so that they can become full digital citizens of our modern media landscape. It’s now our twin goal that our students are also able to identify bias and knowledge inequities both on and off of Wikipedia and to correct those inequities where possible. It’s a skill that is undeniably difficult to measure and assess, but we’re highly encouraged by the fact that over 60% of instructors believe that the Wikipedia assignment achieves this very goal.

It’s no surprise that many of our instructors view the Wikipedia assignment as an act of social action. As one instructor put it: “It provides an opportunity for those who have access to reliable information to share it with those who do not have access. It also inspires people who are used to only writing transactionally to shift focus and write to support the common good as part of a community of writers.”

We know that our students will continue to play a critical role in making Wikipedia a more equitable space because knowledge equity does not have a finite finish line. It’s an ongoing endeavor of which we are truly proud to be apart.

Ten years ago when I joined the team that started what became the Wikipedia Student Program, we didn’t have any specialized software to organize classroom assignments and keep track of what student editors were doing. We had to work with what the good Ward gave us: the near-infinite palimpsest of wiki pages.

Several years before joining Wikimedia Foundation, I had attended a talk by longtime Wikimedian Erik Möller that really stuck with me. Erik laid out his vision of the wiki as a technology that empowers users to become technologists themselves — to use the flexibility of wikitext and templates to build the tools they need. I found this idea beautiful and powerful. As an historian with no background in programming, I had never thought of myself as a technologist before. But that sense of being able to make whatever you needed for the encyclopedia — that this technology wasn’t magic, but text — is I think what pulled me into Wikipedia in the first place.

For the first several terms of the education program, wiki tools did much of what we needed. We built templates to provide some structure to wiki course pages, and to give instructors a clear workflow for signing up and getting started. We manually collected usernames, to make sure we knew who the student editors were for each course. For my part, I dove deeper than I ever had into templates, building a set of training modules for introducing instructors and students to the Wikipedia basics. But as the number of courses grew, we strained the limits of what was practical with just wikitext and templates. We needed more powerful and specialized software.

Course: Oblivion

In 2012, Wikipedia assignments went — perhaps a little too boldly — where none had gone before: to a new MediaWiki extension built just for the purpose of supporting course projects. The initial debut of this software created a new namespace on Wikipedia, “Course:”. Unfortunately, deploying this new namespace inadvertently wiped out an article about an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the auspiciously titled “Course: Oblivion“. It had to be turned off immediately, and the joke after that among Wikimedia staff was “whatever you do, don’t piss off the Star Trek editors”. (Looking over the discussions today, everyone seems to have been quite nice about it.)

The aftermath of that deployment is when I first started getting involved with software development. I was tasked to work with the editing community and the developers to find a way forward so that the extension could be re-enabled. My impression at the time was that everything seems so complicated, it’s a wonder that any software ever gets better or that anyone ever understands how it works. But a few months after the initial deployment, I organized a Request for Comment to redeploy the extension in time for the Fall term.

With the extension up and running again, I started compiling an ever-growing list of ways to make this new course management system better — to make work more smoothly with the rest of Wikipedia, to fix the parts that new instructors and students would get stuck on. I also started looking into the code myself. With an enormous amount of help from a new Wikimedia engineer, Andrew Russell Green, I managed to add a new feature to the education program extension, an API for listing all the students in a course and all the articles they were assigned.

The combination of a functional (if buggy) course page system and a whole lot of wiki templates gave the education program a chance to develop over the next few years, becoming an accepted (if occasionally controversial) part of English Wikipedia. It took root in a growing number of other languages as well, as the education team at Wikimedia worked to foster similar programs around the globe. Unfortunately, the extension was increasingly viewed as a technological dead end by the Wikimedia tech team — in fact, one they were eager to turn off because of how much work it took to keep it up and running through each new version of the core wiki software.

The Dashboard

2014 marked a major change for education programs in the Wikimedia community, and a new direction for the technology that supports it. That year, part of the education team at Wikimedia Foundation spun off into a new independent nonprofit focused on English Wikipedia and North America: Wiki Education. I joined as Product Manager, and my first task was to hire a software agency to build a whole new suite of tools to power Wikipedia assignments going forward.

We started out with a web app, the Assignment Design Wizard, that gave instructors a series of choices about how to implement a Wikipedia assignment. At the end, it would translate those choices into a set of templates for a course page and then post them to Wikipedia, integrating with the education program extension. The next term (Spring 2015) we took it much further, launching the first version of the Wiki Education Dashboard. Built with Ruby on Rails and the JavaScript framework React, the Dashboard has been the main focus of our technology efforts ever since.

My role gradually shifted, as I took an increasingly active hand in developing the Dashboard. At first, I learned how to save changes so that I could update instructions and adjust the content of automated wiki edits. From there, I began diving into the Ruby programming language, and was soon adjusting the system’s logic and fixing bugs. By 2016, we were scaling back our budget for software development, but I was also starting to become comfortable enough with the Dashboard code to push things forward myself, developing small new features and doing a large amounts of “refactoring” — rewriting code to make it simpler, more understandable, and easier to extend.

New wikis, new challenges

The Dashboard gave us a platform we could continually extend and adjust to meet the needs of a growing Wikipedia Student Program. With a heroic effort from Wikimedia engineer (and Ruby enthusiast) Adam Wight, we also began taking what we’d built and making into a possible replacement for the MediaWiki education program extension more generally. Wiki Education stopped using the extension when we launched the Dashboard, but it was still being used widely by other Wikipedia education programs globally. To make the Dashboard work for the rest of the Wikimedia movement, we needed it to be compatible with every language version of Wikipedia (and any Wikimedia project). This meant internationalizing the interface, but also integrating the concept of multiple independent wikis throughout the system. The result, after months of work, was the launch of Programs & Events Dashboard in June 2016.

In the years since, the shared Dashboard codebase (which powers both Wiki Education Dashboard and Programs & Events Dashboard) has become a critical piece of infrastructure for not just the Wikipedia Education Program, but a whole host of efforts to bring new contributors to Wikimedia projects. As of October 2020, Programs & Events Dashboard has been used by more than 53,000 people across more than 250 wikis. It has provided a new home for Wikipedia classroom assignments around the world — allowing the MediaWiki education program extension to be retired in 2018.

One of the biggest challenges since 2016 has been keeping up with the scale at which the Dashboard is being used. I’ve had to learn a lot about software architecture and system administration, optimizing the code and finding creative ways to handle the load of tens of thousands of editors, millions of articles, and tens of millions of edits. Another big challenge has been adapting the Dashboard’s user experience to the wide variety of ways people are using, or want to use, it. Initially, it was designed around Wiki Education’s Student Program — college students working on English Wikipedia, with support from Wiki Education staff. Since then, it’s been used for: edit-a-thon series, Wikipedia writing contests, Wikimedian-in-Residence and Visiting Scholar projects, Wikidata curation drives; Wiki Education’s Scholars & Scientists program, and much more. We’ve made it more flexible, added new features to support specific types of programs, and found ways for program organizers and Wiki Education staff to do more with less time.

A big part of the Dashboard story is the interns and volunteers who’ve built new features, fixed bugs, and generally made it better over the years. More than 130 people have contributed since 2015, across nearly 14,000 changes (“commits”). I’m grateful for everyone whose been part of this technology journey with me (both through the Dashboard project, and elsewise), and I can’t wait to see what — and whom — the future brings.

Image credit: Ralf Roletschek, GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons