“I find immense satisfaction in knowing that I am improving an article with accurate and current scholarship,” said Dimitrova, an expert in late medieval and early Renaissance tapestries at the University of San Diego. “In many ways, serving as a Wikipedia editor is like being a super publisher – I can make significant changes instantaneously to a range of subjects and topics for which I have subject expertise – making measurable and meaningful content.”

For Dimitrova, the professional development course designed for pre-modern European art experts was a chance to connect with a new network of scholars, professors, museum curators, and librarians, and to engage with scholarship in a new, incredibly impactful way.

“I truly think that editing on Wikipedia (either editing a current article or creating a new article) is a form of public scholarship that has far-reaching influence, particularly to readers who are outside the walls of academia,” said Dimitrova. “Although I have published a co-edited volume in the field of medieval art history, my contributions to Wikipedia have the potential to make an even greater educational and scholarly impact, in part because the audience is larger and I can also create content on a relatively short timeline.”

Dimitrova’s assessment of Wikipedia’s scholarly impact is supported by research, including studies shared by recent Wiki Education Speaker Series panelist Neil Thompson which highlight how the site can influence the content in academic publications.  

To get started on Wikipedia, Dimitrova explored Stub-class to C-class articles from geographic regions that intersected with her research and teaching interests: Flanders, France, Spain, and Italy. As she began to edit the article on the Pastrana Tapestries, she quickly found herself “tumbling down a rabbit hole”, exploring other linked pages including one featuring 15th century leading tapestry dealer Pasquier Grenier, a name Dimitrova has repeatedly encountered throughout her three decades of research.

“I was dismayed by the sheer lack of sources and inaccurate information about him,” said Dimitrova, who changed course to enhance Grenier’s Wikipedia article. “I learned a lot of intriguing facts about him during my deep dive: he was a dealer not just in tapestries, but also in wine! Who knew!?”

Just as a hyperlinked page brought her to working on Grenier’s article, linked pages within the tapestry dealer’s article led her to editing other related articles, where she took pleasure in providing valuable and precise descriptions of works of art within her areas of expertise.

Although she has now completed her Wiki Scholars course, Dimitrova continues to work in her sandbox and edit on Wikipedia today, emphasizing its crucial role as a source of free, open access knowledge and underscoring the importance of Wiki Education trainings like Wiki Scholars courses and the Wikipedia Student Program for changing misperceptions of Wikipedia in academia.

“Academia’s long-propagated mistrust of Wikipedia as a viable academic source continues and students are still often advised not to use it,” Dimitrova explained. “However, I think that as more and more scholars and students alike become trained editors, they typically realize that Wikipedia’s system of ‘checks and balances’ is quite rigorous.”

Dimitrova expressed deep gratitude for Wiki Education’s Will Kent for his impactful instruction of the course, as well as for the course sponsor, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, highlighting its vital support of pre-modern European art scholars as they work to contribute to the field.

“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.

DeLoatch’s life story is one of championing African American engineers. He provided an opportunity for countless of his students to see him as a role model. That makes him exactly the kind of person who Wiki Education is empowering students like Kimberly to add to Wikipedia, thanks to an initiative funded by the Broadcom Foundation to support diverse students as they add biographies of the hidden figures of STEM to Wikipedia.

“If it weren’t for this assignment I’m not sure if I would have ever been introduced to Eugene DeLoatch and all of the other subjects of my classmates’ Wikipedia biographies,” Kimberly says. “Ultimately I gained an abundance of knowledge while writing this article.”

Kimberly is an elementary school teacher in San Jose, California, who’s pursuing her doctorate in educational leadership from Santa Clara University. She constantly uses Wikipedia but had never thought about contributing herself until her instructor this term, Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles, assigned Kimberly and her classmates to create biographies of diverse figures in STEM.

“I was excited, intrigued, and intimidated all at the same time,” she says. “I knew it was going to take a lot of thought, preparation, and energy to create an article. My initial impression of this assignment was, ‘this is innovative!’ Requiring us to become Wiki editors and create a Wikipedia biography article is unprecedented, and I would choose a Wikipedia assignment over a traditional term paper every time. Not only did we learn a valuable skill, but provided a service to the community.”

Kimberly took Wiki Education’s training and got feedback from Wiki Education staff on her draft. She found the experience meaningful, and intends to contribute content again, as part of her efforts to highlight achievements of African Americans.

“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,” Kimberly says. “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. 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 biography became more than a graded assignment. DeLoatch deserves the type of public recognition that possessing a Wikipedia biography article grants.”

“I’ve referenced Wikipedia extensively throughout my academic career and enjoyed the idea of contributing to it,” says Marina, who just wrapped up her first year of the Social Justice Leadership EdD program.

Her course was participating in an initiative funded by the Broadcom Foundation to create diverse biographies of people in STEM on Wikipedia, so Marina set out to create the biography of Arnaldo Díaz Vázquez. As a self-identified Latina, Marina says she wanted to increase the presence of Latinx scholars on Wikipedia.

But she didn’t stop there. A guest lecture by Dr. Daniel Solórzano in another class she was taking inspired Marina to learn more about his work. She found that many of the scholars whose work she looked up to were connected to him.

“I became curious about what his Wikipedia page might say and how extensive it might be. I was shocked that Dr. Solórzano didn’t have a page despite having hundreds of people study under him for several decades, many of whom have been successful in their own right,” she says. “After my shock subsided, I thought about our assignment and why we were creating the pages in the first place; because of an underrepresentation of people of color on Wikipedia in STEM fields. I realized that underrepresentation might also be the case for scholars of color in Education on Wikipedia.”

Armed with her research mindset and newfound knowledge of how Wikipedia worked, Marina dug deeper. She searched for academics that inspire and inform her work, such as Dr. Angela Valenzuela (aesthetic vs. authentic caring), Dr. William G. Tierney (cultural integrity vs. cultural suicide), Dr. Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar (school and kin support networks), and Dr. Mark Granovetter (social network theory), among others.

“I was disheartened to find that those who identify as people of color, Dr. Valenzuela and Dr. Stanton-Salazar, did not have Wikipedia pages. Yet those who identify as white, Dr. Tierney and Dr. Granovetter, both did,” Marina says. “I wasn’t surprised, and yet I still felt disappointed. This frustration, added to the disappointment of Dr. Solórzano not having a page, caused me to want to do something beyond simply being upset; I wanted to take action. Creating a Wikipedia article for Dr. Solórzano allows me to expand on whose knowledge we value and whom we consider important enough to have a Wikipedia page.”

Marina says she felt compelled  to start a page for Dr. Solórzano after learning how to create and edit Wikipedia articles and is now confident that she can. Given Wikipedia’s neutrality and conflict of interest rules, it’s better for someone like her — who has no personal connection to the subject — to create the article. So she is working on it.

She credits Wiki Education’s staff (with special thanks to Wikipedia Expert Brianda Felix) for  helping her learn the ropes of Wikipedia. Marina says her favorite part of the assignment was sharing her course output  with friends and family instead of a dense, jargon-heavy academic paper.

As a scholar of education and information science, Marina sees the value of the assignment in developing  open educational resources (OERs) like Wikipedia as a way  to support students of color as a future university librarian.

“Most people assume that information literacy is intuitive, but it’s not, particularly when finding and utilizing academic resources such as library search engines,” Marina says. “At the beginning of the quarter, we discussed OERs and how people access information. This conversation, combined with my developing interest in the field of library sciences and  supporting students of color in expanding their information literacy skills, made this assignment particularly impactful. I considered how many people without access to academic resources such as scholarly journals and peer-reviewed articles use OERs such as Wikipedia. I also thought about the frustration that comes with being a student, trying to complete an assignment, and hitting a wall because the institution you belong to doesn’t have access to a particular journal. Despite my extensive experience searching for academic resources, this continues to happen to me. Now, more than ever, I realize the value of OERs and am excited about contributing to one through Wikipedia.”

And she’s grateful for the skills she gained. She hopes the articles she’s adding to Wikipedia will help raise the profile of other scholars of color.

“Without this assignment, I don’t think I would have thought twice about not finding a Wikipedia page for scholars of color that I admire,” she says. “The skills I learned through the experience of completing this assignment will benefit me long after this class ends. I now know more about OERs, adding to them, and will encourage others to do the same. I look forward to completing an initial draft of Dr. Solórzano’s Wikipedia page so that more people learn about his extensive and powerful work. I hope that creating Dr. Solórzano’s page supports communities  of color by amplifying our voices and lived experiences so that the lenses applied to research on our communities aren’t all deficit-based and instead, highlight our strengths.”

Take lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides, for example. This is an important material in the lithium-ion batteries made for electric vehicles and our phones. Why is that? How do they work? Well, you can ask Enoch Rassachack who wrote the Wikipedia article about it as part of an assignment. He’s completing an honours degree in chemistry at the University of British Columbia and entering his final year of undergraduate study. He drew upon his studies and research experience to update this public resource.

“I have some co-op experience working with batteries which helped me find this article,” Enoch shared. “I also hope to work as a researcher in materials chemistry after (hopefully) going to grad school, and this project helped me practice communicating some of the knowledge I acquired. I see climate change as the key issue defining this century as well, so I hoped to work on an article that would educate people on something related to it, whether it be atmospheric and environmental chemistry, or technology that’s helping counteract the climate crisis. Considering all this, the page on lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides fit me perfectly.”

Most of Enoch’s improvements to the article focus on adding new sections about the material’s structure and synthesis. The original version of the article touched upon these points a bit, but Enoch knew he could build upon it with the academic sources he had on hand. He also found the introductory lede section to be difficult to follow without already being knowledgeable on battery materials. This is the beauty of students engaging in this science communication work. They remember what it was like learning about these topics for the first time. But they also have developed some subject matter expertise in their studies. Enoch simplified the opening paragraphs for Wikipedia’s general audience.

“While a majority of my edits involved technical writing, my main goal was to help folks who hand’t heard of NMC materials get a basic understanding of what they are. To this end, the relatively short lead section was the most important part of the article to get right, in my opinion. Of course, my work on the body sections were also valuable, as the summarized technical knowledge would be useful for more savvy chemists/material scientists. But for most readers on Wikipedia, these sections would not be nearly as helpful as the lead.”

For Enoch, this practice in distilling a complex topic into digestible and concise explanations was good practice. He knows he’ll draw upon these skills in his future classes and career.

“There is a lot of focus on more complicated details in an undergraduate chemistry program and even in the technical writing course I did this Wikipedia assignment in, so trying to write for a more general audience was a nice change,” he shared. “Being able to generalize my research later on as a scientist will likely be a useful skill, too. I know that public sentiment can potentially be a factor in getting research funding so spreading knowledge about my own work to people without my chemistry training could help with getting grants. Practicing more concise writing will also help me be clearer in my writing in all aspects of any future career.

“I think Wikipedia can be a great reference tool as well as a good starting point for curious individuals to begin looking into certain topics. Being an online encyclopedia makes it really unique because it’s very convenient for finding generally credible information, but can still be scrutinized since anyone can modify articles. Summarizing topics is Wikipedia’s biggest strength so it is most useful for finding general knowledge in a field without going too much into detail.”

All in all, Enoch found the experience to be valuable in many ways. Considering most students say they’ve been told never to use Wikipedia, diving into its inner-workings and learning to interact with the resource critically and actively is a great experience.

“This was one of the most unique assignments I’ve ever done and gave me a good glimpse behind one of the best Internet resources available. It really showed me a more balanced side to Wikipedia; I knew how the site operated before doing the assignment, but actually taking part in edits gave me much more appreciation for the anonymous users that edit or write huge parts of articles. It’s a lot more work than it seems! My expectations for information from Wikipedia were tempered down closer to reality, too, after seeing how many pages still needed significant work in project pages. It’s still a super useful resource, but its limitations as an ever-expanding collection of knowledge are much clearer, which will ultimately help me use Wikipedia more effectively.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates and resources that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.

This past spring, like most college seniors, I was preparing to say farewell to education as I knew it, at least for the time being. To be clear, I wasn’t planning to simply stop learning after graduation. I only knew that I wasn’t going to have the same formalized structure that I’ve been privileged enough to have for practically my entire life up until now. What I didn’t know was that my approach to being a student would begin to change while I was still in classes.

That process was set in motion because I chose to take Dr. Cecelia Musselman’s science writing course as one of my final electives. As a Music and Writing combined major, I thought it’d be good to incorporate a bit more STEM into my schedule for once. Dr. Musselman’s exploration of science writing as a literary genre provided me with the perfect opportunity to broaden my horizons.

I became even more excited when I found out that Dr. Musselman’s course would entail participation in Wiki Education. While I’d been acquainted with Wikipedia in the past as a reader and had even contributed a couple of minor edits here and there, I’d never thought I’d be qualified enough to add more than a sentence or so to any particular page. Despite having been advised by teachers in the past not to trust information found on Wikipedia, I was really intimidated by the editing community. I could recall many occasions shortly after a breaking news event where I’d been amazed to find that the corresponding Wikipedia page had already been (accurately!) updated. I’d always been astonished at how Wikipedia has managed to maintain the level of order and quality it’s appeared to, especially with today’s volatile social media climate. I assumed that a crack team of expert ninja editors were responsible for ensuring this feat. I didn’t know who they were or what methods they used. It all felt a bit clandestine to me. So, naturally curious person that I am, I was thrilled to get to learn about the inner workings of it all, if a bit nervous to join the ranks of proper Wikipedians.

This same curious nature of mine was what had led me to take an interest in journalism during my time at Northeastern. Alongside Science Writing, I’d also enrolled in a reporting course for which I’d opted to interview a distinguished alumnus as part of my final project. More specifically, I had arranged to interview David S. Ferriero, former Archivist of the United States. Though I’d expected that his long and storied career would contain multitudes, I never imagined that Wikipedia would come up in our conversation.

I would come to learn that Ferriero has been enamored with the concept of a worldwide encyclopedia since the 1990s, years before Wikipedia was officially launched. While working in the libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he encountered World Wide Web Consortium director Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for a similar project. At the time, Berners-Lee’s blueprint lacked a key element that would be crucial to Ferriero’s ultimate engagement with Wikipedia: the democratization of the ability to contribute.

Ferriero would become acquainted with this component of Wikipedia during his subsequent tenure in the libraries of Duke University when he discovered that a Wikipedia page had been made about him. He was impressed to find that some initial infelicities regarding his life and career were quickly rooted out by Wikipedia’s editors. The incident inspired him to direct his staff to place links to materials from library collections into relevant Wikipedia pages, allowing for broader access to quality sources. He would also implement this procedure at the New York Public Library, where he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of The Research Libraries prior to his appointment to the federal government.

Ferriero was nominated to lead the National Archives and Records Administration by President Obama in 2009. The Obama administration had recently made a commitment to transparency by way of an executive order. What became known as the Open Government Initiative encouraged government officials to let the public into their work—in more ways than one.

“The message was, there’s a lot of expertise out there that isn’t being tapped, and how can we take advantage of that?” Ferriero said.

The approach essentially created a two-way street in which citizens would receive further insight into the operations of their government as well as additional opportunities to get involved themselves. In service of this mission, Ferriero continued on with his linking endeavors as Archivist while also hosting events such as edit-a-thons to incentivize citizens to create Wikipedia pages based on National Archives resources. He appointed the first NARA Wikipedian-in-Residence to promote further collaboration between the Archives and Wikipedia. And he even worked with Wiki Education as they trained a wider group of scholars in the art of Wikipedia editing.

His vibrant and well-demonstrated passion helped to further revolutionize my perspective on Wikipedia, as well as how I thought about the way we communicate knowledge in general. Ferriero is highly educated—he has not one, but two master’s degrees to his name. Even more notably, he’s proven himself to be quite a forward-thinking individual. Beyond being able to recognize the potential value of a worldwide encyclopedia as early as the 1990s, throughout his career, he has consistently placed a priority on staying ahead of the curve.

“My direction to the staff always has been: figure out where the people are and get our material in front of them,” he said. “Don’t expect them to find us. You need to be aggressive in determining where they are and what we can learn from them in terms of how they’re discovering information—using information—and how we can then incorporate those kinds of things into our core business.”

This philosophy explains why Ferriero became, for instance, the first Archivist to post on Facebook and Twitter and run a blog, as well as the first to oversee the creation of a completely digitized presidential library. Given how his projections about the lasting relevance of cloud computing and social media have shaken out (Ferriero also oversaw NARA’s transition to remote work during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), it seems it would be wise to take his fervent support of Wikipedia as a reliable indicator of how we will record and convey knowledge in the future. That’s why I’m all the more grateful for Dr. Musselman’s efforts to provide my classmates and me with a crash course in Wikipedia.

In the short term, my Wiki Education participation brought a number of subjects to my attention that I’d previously had no concept of whatsoever. I had the opportunity to peer review my classmates’ work on fascinating pages about marine biogenic calcification and coral dermatitis. Likewise, I was able to inform them about axial spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune disease I have whose page I’d chosen to expand. In addition to allowing me to exercise my growing passion for health communication, this experience drove home the message that everybody has unique areas of interest that are ripe for the sharing. Everyone has something they can teach, or at the very least, something they care about enough to research and ultimately share with others. This realization precipitated my broader takeaway that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the larger movement to rethink the role of gatekeepers in our society. Wikipedia has empowered anyone with an internet connection to disseminate (and acquire) knowledge about almost anything under the sun. Instead of requiring them to go through an agent or publisher to broadcast their knowledge on a given topic, Wikipedia grants its editors the opportunity to create and improve articles immediately. There’s no question that there are still inequities that need to be addressed, particularly in regard to what’s deemed a sufficiently notable article topic. But the tools to address these areas are built into Wikipedia’s infrastructure.

In fact, programs such as Wiki Education are working to make the Wikipedia community and its work more representative of the human story. For example, whereas Wikipedia editors are predominantly male, Wiki Education participants are overwhelmingly female and nonbinary. When students are given the necessary tools, they can translate their passions into articles which can, in turn, inspire others to take an interest in the subject matter at hand. The greater the number and diversity of Wikipedians, the greater the variety of knowledge that can be passed on through this wonderful collaborative project. The richer the knowledge base of Wikipedia’s contributors, the closer Wikipedia comes to achieving its goal of being the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever written.

Knowing what I know now, I would encourage newcomers—whether Wiki Education students or aspiring Wiki Scholars—who feel the way I once did not to let themselves be so intimidated by the top flight editors who keep Wikipedia running. Rather, I would advise them to find solace in their support. If you keep the information that matters to you to yourself, it may very well be lost to time someday. That is in part why archivists such as Ferriero are so keen on Wikipedia. If you choose to record what you know, however, you stand to educate and captivate an unlimited number of people. (Intrinsic learning has been found to be a top motivation for Wikipedia visitors!) Worst case scenario, you’ll receive a correction and wind up learning even more about a topic close to your heart.

Adela just finished the first year of her PhD. “I like to say that I am both an archaeologist and an anthropologist who specializes in primate archaeology,” she says when we are able to connect. Her current field work and what I’m writing to her about are closely related. Adela wrote the book on primate archaeology. Well, she wrote the Wikipedia article anyway.

As part of Justin Pargeter’s course, Adela and classmates were to develop content-rich and well-researched Wikipedia articles dealing with African archaeological sites and related topics. Adela saw it as a great opportunity to build upon her existing interests.

“My current work and fieldwork are directly associated with my Wikipedia assignment. I have always been extremely interested in the study of human evolution with a particular interest in the anatomical and cognitive diversity of early hominins,” she shares. “During my academic career, I have specialized in the analysis of lithic technology and how the use of different technologies affected hominin adaptive strategies. Although I love archaeology and the opportunity to interpret the past through material objects, I wanted to expand my knowledge and interests into new avenues of research that could help me to better connect past actions with their material evidence. For me, primate archaeology was the solution I was looking for.”

Adela quickly discovered, much to her surprise, that no Wikipedia article on the subject existed. Sure, there were some on related topics (e.g., Lomekwi, Kanzi), but none about the field as a whole.

“I realized what would inspire and challenge me the most would be to write a completely new page for primate archaeology,” she shares.

The Wikipedia assignment allows for creativity and personal interest to guide the process. In Adela’s case, it was an opportunity to build upon her PhD research.

“I have always been interested in the study of human evolution. Moreover, I love interdisciplinarity. Thus, a field like primate archaeology that merges multiple fields such as primatology and archaeology seemed like a perfect fit for my academic career. Writing a page about primate archaeology felt like the most reasonable next step in that career.”

As Adela began, she discovered that defining the scope of the article allowed her to participate in a larger conversation within academia about the field itself.

“For me, the most important takeaway from my article is the fact that primate archaeology studies both the present behavior of extant non-human primates and their associated material culture. Thanks to this particular characteristic, primate archaeology is capable of contributing to the study of human evolution because it allows us to try to connect material culture with observed behaviors. An important limitation archaeology faces is that behavior does not fossilize; thus, archaeologists have to reconstruct past actions only through archaeological materials. In my opinion, primate archaeology is a step forward in trying to overcome this limitation for certain temporal periods. Furthermore, I believe that the success primate archaeological research is gaining reflects how the connection of different disciplines into a new one can be a very fruitful endeavor!”

Wikipedia itself is inherently interdisciplinary. Topics connect and connect, leading readers down rabbit-holes of discovery. The curiosity that that process inspires is similar for many of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, who follow their passions and improve Wikipedia content as an act of creativity for the public good.

“After being part of Wikipedia and seeing how it works, I can confidently say that it is an extremely powerful tool for scientific communication. Not only does it allow experts to share their knowledge with the general public, but it could also become a platform in which to discuss and contrast ideas through the ‘talk’ page that comes with every Wikipedia article. Moreover, from the public perspective, Wikipedia is an accessible platform where to find answers to almost any question. Through the expansion of already existing articles and the creation of new ones, the power of Wikipedia could be expanded even further. Scientific knowledge should not be kept in a small circle of experts but rather it should be shared with as many people as possible. Wikipedia is a great tool to help make this feasible.”

“I think this type of assignment is extremely useful for both undergraduate and graduate courses at a university level. Writing a Wikipedia page instead of the more commonly known term paper has given me the opportunity to share my knowledge with the general public in a way that I could not have done otherwise. Moreover, writing a Wikipedia page about primate archaeology has helped me to begin to contribute to this growing discipline with a different and fresh angle that has not gone unnoticed. Overall, I believe writing a Wikipedia page should become the new version of a term paper. It is time to let students actively and publicly contribute to the growth of knowledge in those areas they are most passionate about.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates and resources that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to try my best to produce a comprehensible and precise piece of information about my topic so that I would not mislead anyone into receiving false information,” Yik Tung shares.

He chose to improve the article about mainland China’s one-child policy.

“One child policy in China was especially intriguing to me because the policy did not take effect in Hong Kong, but it left a footprint on the families of many of my peers and friends from mainland China,” Yik Tung says. “They had experienced the effect of the policy, and most of them are the only child in the family. Therefore, one-child policy is a very unfamiliar topic to me that drives my curiosity, and I wish to contribute to the English readers by incorporating information I extracted from some resources and materials that are in Chinese.”

Yik Tung made several improvements, including contextualizing the policy against the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the international political landscape, newly developing social science fields within China at the time, the role of natural scientists in making policy decisions, and government restrictions on pursuing population-related scientific research. He also added information about the public’s response to the policies.

“I wish to add some more complexity to the reasoning behind the implementation of the one-child policy. The economic necessity to decrease new births in China was the most cited reason that people relied upon to justify the policy. But different perspectives also argue against this reason, and some scholars outside China offered their different views towards the policy. I hoped to include these realizations in the Wikipedia article. Evidence exists from arguments in support of and contrary to the necessity to limit childbirth. Therefore, I want to highlight the fact that the one-child policy is never a simple topic that can be accounted for by the very few words and information on Wikipedia. I hope my edits in the article will help readers to further understand the topic, and other knowledgeable people could also step in to improve the article as well.”

The beauty of writing for Wikipedia is that it allows for the very interdisciplinary approach Yik Tung took in representing one topic. Students can take the project in many directions, learning to look for gaps in the existing information about the topic and seek answers in peer-reviewed sources to fill them. As a multilingual student, Yik Tung brought the invaluable ability to draw from an even greater diversity of sources.

“Since I can also read Chinese, I have the chance to read the Chinese version of the one-child policy Wikipedia article. The article appears in much less in length, shows a different piece of information, and cites different sources. One example is that the Chinese version of the article was able to track the Chinese top leader’s decisions regarding the one-child policy during the period as such information was more approachable to Chinese scholars and sources. Such drastic differences between the information from different versions of the article remind me of the importance of perspectives. In this case, language is the main driver of the difference in perspectives.”

Yik Tung was able to help build the bridge between these different language versions, providing value on both sides. And he gained some important skills through the process.

“This Wikipedia assignment helped me to write articles in an informative and concise style. In my other academic works such as history essays, I always have an impulse to use flowery language, which sometimes sacrifices my ability to articulate my statement as I spent more time using complex words and phrases. I realize that precision in formulating and conveying ideas is more important. The writing process also forces me to constantly check my citations and avoid plagiarism. With numerous pieces of information at hand, it is very easy to plagiarize someone else’s work without knowing so. As a result, I spent more time making sure that I am citing and giving credit to others appropriately. Despite the huge amount of time I spent on this, I believe it is meaningful in the way that I now have a good habit of checking for plagiarism.”

Since he improved content, the article has been read more than 466K times by Wikipedia readers. And there was a noticeable upturn in readership this January when China announced its first population decline since the 1960s. Inadvertently, Yik Tung took part in this conversation by providing well-sourced context on one of the most trusted sources of online information out there.

Inviting students to write for Wikipedia as an assignment can provide great value to both the site and the classroom. Students make the assignment their own, finding inspiration in their topic and contributing to the encyclopedia in ways that draw upon their identities, areas of study, and personal interests. To learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course of any discipline, visit 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.