Videos have long been one of our most-requested help materials from instructors and student editors alike. The biggest challenge in producing videos to support our students has been the frequency with which Wikipedia is updated, meaning that our videos will need regular revisions. We recognize that students learn best through a variety of different media, and hope these videos provide another avenue for students to learn some of the ins and outs of Wikipedia.

We chose the topics of moving work live for our first video topic as this can be one of the biggest technical challenges for student editors. While the Visual Editor eliminates the need for students to learn wiki code, it does make it tricky to move work live. One common mistake is copying while not in edit mode, meaning students lose the references they’ve carefully added to their sandbox. Students creating new articles often also get confused by different namespaces on Wikipedia. These videos are designed to help address these common obstacles for student editors moving content from a sandbox for the first time.

Special thanks to Wikipedia Expert Brianda Felix and Scholars and Scientists Program Manager Will Kent for all your hard work in making these videos possible!

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

The numbers

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

Those students:

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

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

Building community on and off line

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

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

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

A pedagogical tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A novel way to build critical skills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To learn more about what these incredible instructors in our program had to say about their experiences running the Wikipedia assignment, watch the session here.

Thank you again to Lisbeth, Kathleen, and Stephanie for joining me at this year’s conference and for all you and your students do for Wikipedia!

I’d like to officially welcome Brianda (She/They) to our staff! Brianda is joining us in the role of Wikipedia Expert, where she will support student editors while they make high-quality content contributions to Wikipedia. She will spend most of her time monitoring and tracking student contributions on-wiki, answering questions, providing feedback, and explaining Wikipedia rules and policies in concise ways to new student editors. I’m very excited to have Brianda join us and think her experience and expertise will be a valuable addition to the Student Program.

Most recently, Brianda worked for the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory’s Opus Project in the role of Community Program Coordinator. In this capacity, Brianda coordinated music instruction, working closely with students, teachers, and their families. Brianda’s deep commitment to equity is evident throughout her experience in education, supporting students from historically marginalized communities in different capacities. Before Opus, Brianda worked as a Program Assistant for the Upward Bound program at CSU-Fullerton where she helped hundreds of historically underserved high school students prepare for college. Brianda has held a number of internship positions further highlighting her passion for equity driven work, including positions at The Justice for Janitors Project at UCLA, Mayme E. Clayton Library & Museum, and the Museum of Social justice.

Brianda was raised in Orange County, CA. She graduated from UCLA with a major in History and a minor in Latin American Studies. While at UCLA, Brianda actually participated in a Wikipedia assignment in a course on Labor History and recalls how impactful the experience was. She is a native Spanish speaker, and is learning French and Korean. In her free time, you can find her exploring the streets of San Diego on her 2-wheeled steed, tracking down the tastiest tacos in Tijuana, or grooving to live music somewhere in SoCal. When not out and about, Brianda enjoys keeping her plant babies alive and trying to squeak out some notes on the clarinet. She’s also content with a good book in hand, accompanied by some light mezcal sipping or a warm cup of hot chocolate.

Join me in welcoming Brianda!

The Numbers

Numbers alone do not make a story, but they are nevertheless impressive! In Spring 2022, roughly 6,000 students from 340 courses:

• Added 4.85 million words to Wikipedia.
• Added almost 50,000 references.
• Contributed to 5,720 articles.
• Created 395 new entries.

Whether contributing to the field of African Politics or Cell Biology, the impact our students have on Wikipedia is profound.

Enhancing Knowledge Equity

Knowledge equity has long been one of Wiki Education’s driving forces. It’s a term with many definitions, and one with which Wikipedia has often struggled. Equity is as much about content as it is about access, and both are incredibly important to us. In the past several years, we’ve made knowledge equity a central part of the Wikipedia assignment. We’ve encouraged students to consider whether an article contains a notable equity gap (i.e. relating to an underrepresented or marginalized population, region, or topic) as well as asking students to evaluate whether the sources they’re using are from a truly representative population. While these efforts are difficult to assess, we think they’re making a difference.

• About 75% of instructors report that the Wikipedia assignment helps their students to become more socially and culturally aware of issues related to bias and equity.
• About 60% of instructors made equity a major focus of their course and encouraged their students to tackle an equity gap when choosing articles.

Content and access go hand in hand, and several of our instructors and students from Spring 2022 remarked on how the Wikipedia assignment heightened their awareness of their relatively privileged position vis-à-vis knowledge. One instructor wrote, “I think I actually learned as much about Wikipedia as my students. I had not thought about the impact of a freely available encyclopedia that does not require access to a University library or money to get behind paywalls. My students were really excited about the idea that they were making knowledge available to more people and the idea that they were writing something that lots of people would read.”

In the words of a student enrolled in a course on Latin American History, “Doing the Wikipedia assignment also is a humbling experience that truly allowed me to value my education even further. I have honestly taken for granted the resources that I have had access to as a college student. It was fulfilling to know that thanks to my work I have allowed others to learn free of cost from resources that they would not have access to otherwise.”

In creating and sharing knowledge, students take on the role of expert and educator. They become peers rather than students, and many faculty note that this new level of relatability brings excitement and energy to their classes. “The students [wrote one instructor] felt more mature as they were contributing to something which will be used by other students around the world. It was nice to be a part of that movement to the next level- to view them more as future peers.” Another instructor remarked, “Students were excited about the project and excited about their own shift in attitude toward Wikipedia. By choosing article topics (New Deal arts and culture projects) that relate to my own research, they saw my own passion and caught a glimpse at my research project.”

With Knowledge Comes Empowerment

In contributing to Wikipedia, students not only become more attuned to their relationship to knowledge, but they realize that they too have a voice and a stake in today’s information landscape. While the public-facing nature of the Wikipedia assignment can often be daunting, it ultimately contributes to the immense sense of pride students feel about their work. As one student wrote, “I really enjoyed working on my project and plan to contribute further to Wikipedia in my free time. After completing the project, I felt proud of myself knowing my work will be seen by others besides my professor. It is rewarding to know that my contribution to Wikipedia will benefit others rather than just my grade in the class.” As described by one of our instructors, “Most students responded with pride to the articles they created and were particularly enamored with the fact that their work would be viewed and used as a resource by the public, versus a traditional research paper which often just gets written and then never looked at again.” Yet another instructor remarked, “the assignment increased my students self-worth in realizing that they can contribute to society’s knowledge at large.”

Pride and satisfaction aren’t the only outcomes from sharing information. In crafting public-facing knowledge, students often express that they better master the content at hand. As one student wrote, “I believe I learned about as much as I would have from doing a paper instead of a Wikipedia article, but I think I learned it very differently than I would have: I’ve honestly found that I can still remember, very clearly, the information I put on my article because I had to write everything in my own words—I can’t say I’ve ever remembered this much information from a typical term paper before, so in that way I think this project was extremely beneficial to the way I learned more about Latin America.” Another student remarked, “Wikipedia is extremely touchy about sourcing: you can’t quote or paraphrase, and of course outright plagiarism is not allowed. But being forced to put everything I learned in my own words was a new experience for me, since I have been so used, in my other classes, to being allowed to quote amply so long as I was able to analyze the information in my own words after. Now, after having to source this way in Wikipedia, I’ve found that I have steered clear of sources that I didn’t understand enough to put in my own words; I have become less reliant on making other authors’ quotes do my writing for me and I have found it easier to make sure my quotes are supporting my own words on a topic.”

It can be difficult to disentangle the different threads of the Wikipedia assignment, but simply put: Constructing and disseminating knowledge helps students to gain confidence in their own abilities as well as develop a range of academic, professional, and even personal skills.

A New Appreciation for Wikipedia

The vast majority of students we support are familiar with Wikipedia, but as passive consumers of information. Many of them come to the Wikipedia assignment with ingrained messaging that Wikipedia is not a reliable resource and should be avoided. In learning to contribute to Wikipedia, students not only learn how to responsibly use Wikipedia, but they gain a critical understanding of how the site works to ensure accuracy.

“The assignment [wrote one instructor] is generally mind-blowing for my students. Wikipedia is such a huge factor in student’s “everyday,” but almost all the messages they have received about it are so overwhelmingly negative, that the opportunity to critically explore the platform tends to radically change their perspective on information and engagement with education.” Another noted, “Without fail, every single student said they had always been told not to use Wikipedia but after this project they see how rigorous the editing process is and they wish they’d known it sooner.”

Wikipedia is undeniably a central piece of our information landscape, and students come away from this project with the tools and know-how to use it expertly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the challenges of the ongoing pandemic continue to plague higher education. We’re especially grateful to our instructors and students for their incredible commitment during these exceptional times. We continue to hope that this project provides a modicum of stability in what is otherwise a time of uncertainty. As always, our instructors capture the essence of this initiative far better than we can. “I love Wikipedia. As a sociologist of knowledge, Wikipedia is totally implausible. No one expected Wikipedia to work the way it does, but it does. I consider it a privilege to be able to contribute and get students literate at engaging and contributing to it, and I hope that its a bug that infects!” And likewise, we consider it a privilege to work with so many incredible faculty and students.

Wikipedia is not just a place where the world goes for quick and reliable information. It’s a place where stories can be reframed, where the record can be corrected, where longstanding inequities can be addressed. This is exactly what Professor Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf’s students at the University of Alberta attempted to do in her Fall 2020 course on Colonialism and the Criminal Justice System in Canada. Content related to Indigenous communities is woefully underdeveloped on Wikipedia, and Professor Lugosi-Schimpf’s students tackled this glaring content gap through the lens of criminal justice.

We wrote about Professor Lugosi-Schimpf’s class last year, highlighting some of the important contributions her students made. With the field being wide open, her students tackled everything from specific court cases involving Indigenous populations to the very broad subject of Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian Criminal Justice System itself. As the student who wrote this article noted, “The most difficult part of selecting a topic was that every relevant topic I considered writing about would have first required educating the reader on the broader context of the Indigenous experience in Canada. This is because there was no relevant or accurate article to backlink to. This was the basis for the decision to write on the broad topic of ‘Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian Criminal Justice System’.”

In her recent paper, Theorizing and implementing meaningful Indigenization: Wikipedia as an opportunity for course-based digital advocacy, Professor Lugosi-Schimpf and two of her students provide a systematic overview of how the Wikipedia assignment can be a critical tool in the process of decolonial-Indigenization. As they note, “To realize decolonial-Indigenization aims, instructors must acknowledge that it is not theoretically or pedagogically possible to understand and teach about Indigenous oppression without attention to how colonialism and systemic racism are intertwined.” In other words, it’s not enough to provide content where none exists, but to carefully curate that content in such a way that accurately represents the experience of Indigenous populations. All too often these communities are presented as victims and this idea is perpetuated in all aspects of society from the media to institutions of higher education. But as the article notes, “Wikipedia, if properly curated, can play an important role in decolonial-Indigenization projects.”

Who edits Wikipedia matters. As Lugosi-Schimpf and her co-authors so eloquently write, “A result of unrepresentative authorship is unrepresentative content.” This is especially true on Wikipedia where the majority of editors identify as white, male, and from Western countries. Wiki Education has long striven to not only diversify Wikipedia’s content, but to diversify its editor base as well. Diversity of content and authorship are two sides of the same coin. Though all Wikipedia articles are supposed to be neutrally written and entirely fact-based, the author ultimately decides which facts to include and which to leave out. Wikipedia can provide a diverse array of communities with an opportunity to shape their own narrative within Wikipedia’s guidelines designed to uphold accuracy and reliability. As Lugosi-Schimpf notes in the article, “Editing Wikipedia was an impetus for students to contemplate what narratives and histories are told, how they are told, and by whom. … Actively engaging the politics of citation affords students an invaluable opportunity to push back against disciplinary canons often found on syllabi to bring scholarship from the margins to the forefront.”

Peoples from historically marginalized communities have largely been left out of the story because they have rarely been given the chance to write their own narratives. If they are injected into mainstream history, it’s often as victims without agency or depth. Wikipedia offers such people a unique space to present history in and on their own terms. As Professor Lugosi-Schimpf notes, “From the course evaluations, it was clear the Wikipedia experience was rewarding for all of the students, and it was especially meaningful for the students that identify as BIPOC and/or sexual and gender minorities whose voices and perspectives are often missing from mainstream media.” And as one of Lugosi-Schimpf’s students confirmed, “As a Black bi-racial woman, I have embodied experiences with misrepresentation and stereotyping that stems from structures of white supremacy and systemic racism. The opportunity to create Wikipedia content that dispelled taken for granted assumptions for another equity seeking group, from within a supported environment, was both empowering and inspiring.”

Wikipedia is in many ways a reflection of the systemic biases present throughout society. Its reliance strictly on written sources means that many peoples and cultures are left out because they have been left out of the written record. It’s often argued that Wikipedia isn’t a place for activism. Its requirements around neutrality dictate that no single point of view should dominate an article. Its notability policies have often been criticized for excluding those who have been left out of the written record — namely historically marginalized communities. In spite of its limitations, Lugosi-Schimpf and her co-authors argue that Wikipedia is in fact a place where longstanding institutional biases can be overturned: “Despite its constraints, we assert that Wikipedia can still be leveraged as a site of digital advocacy to foster positive change. For example, once a reader has more facts and sees an assemblage of colonial projects, it is difficult to refute the damage done by settler-colonialism. Even a balanced viewpoint can cause readers to question their taken-for-granted assumptions. Striving for neutrality, while contentious, opens Wikipedia up to be an ideal place to rewrite history, because history as previously written has not been neutral.”

When students contribute to Wikipedia, it can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities of the project and the demands of the term. At its core though, students are engaging in the politics of knowledge production. They are the ones deciding which facts to include and which to leave out, and it’s our hope that the work they produce makes Wikipedia a more equitable place.

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image: ibourgeault_tasse, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The work our students did would have been impressive at any time, let alone during an unrelenting pandemic. Nearly 6,000 students from roughly 330 courses:

• added 4.72 million words to Wikipedia.
• cited almost 50,000 references.
• edited more than 6,000 articles.
• created 500 entirely new entries.

From improving articles on Molecular biotechnology to Ancient Greece, our students had a major impact on Wikipedia, but in doing so, Wikipedia also had a major impact on them.

Life skills and skills for life

We often think about the Wikipedia assignment in loftier terms. Students, with their unparalleled access to information behind paywalls for most of the population, make the world a better place by making knowledge freely available to the public. As one instructor wrote, “Wikipedia enables me and my students to indulge in our love of ideas while always challenging us to learn new things and to present scholarship to the world.” We sometimes, however, gloss over the very real and practical skills students develop while learning to contribute to Wikipedia. Indeed, the broader goals of the Wikipedia assignment go hand-in-hand with its more pragmatic outcomes.

Over 90% of instructors regularly report that their students gain critical digital literacy skills from the Wikipedia assignment. As one instructor noted, the project is a “Perfect assignment for teaching how to critically evaluate online information.” Another remarked, “Students gained much more awareness of how to verify information and work through policies.” Sourcing is at the heart of the Wikipedia assignment. Students learn how to evaluate the quality of a source and to quickly judge whether a source is reliable or not. Armed with their newly honed digital literacy skills, students are far more prepared to take on the barrage of misinformation thrown at them daily.

Digital literacy is the first step though toward the more amorphous goal of digital citizenship. 98% of instructors report that the project engenders a sense of digital citizenship in their students. As one instructor wrote, “The students came out feeling that they had contributed substantively to scholarship about the region we are studying, and they felt indeed a sense of digital citizenship.” In other words, students not only develop the ability to discern reliable information, but they see themselves as knowledge producers with a responsibility toward a greater community to ensure information they share is accurate and accessible.

Alongside media literacy, instructors report that the Wikipedia assignment also helps students to develop writing and research skills and to better master the course content. Writing for a public audience raises the stakes and often helps to make the material they’re studying take on new relevance and meaning. As one instructor described, “The Wikipedia assignment offers external reinforcement of many of the learning outcomes in the class, so students can see the real-world utility of research skills.” “Wikipedia has provided [wrote another instructor] an opportunity for students to dig into the scientific literature while also making their research widely available. A term paper is great but only the instructor sees the final product. Having student work widely available is incredibly useful for both the students and the scientific community.”

Many instructors often comment that the real pedagogical value of the Wikipedia assignment lies in the processes students undertake while learning how to contribute to the world’s largest online encyclopedia. Put simply, “Students work for themselves and learn how to learn.”

Who’s teaching who?

Nearly all of the instructors we support have no prior experience editing Wikipedia. This means that instructors are often learning along side their students as they embark on their Wikipedia adventures. “Because this was my first time teaching a Wikipedia assignment,” noted one instructor, “and because I was upfront with my students that I was learning alongside them, they appreciated seeing me as a learner as well as a teacher.”

In contributing to a public-facing site, students develop a sense of authority that comes from being able to share expertise. As one instructor remarked, the project “works as a way to transform advanced undergrads from a student mindset to an authority in the field mindset.” Often for the first time, students understand the types of issues faculty face in their own research. “I think it helped them to realize,” offered one instructor, “that the professor grapples with the same kinds of research and writing challenges that they face and that such challenges are a natural and expected part of scholarship.”

Pedagogically speaking, the project offers a rich landscape of opportunities. One instructor wrote that, “I gained a great knowledge of my students’ deficiencies in research from this project. I had made assumptions about their prior knowledge and skills that were inaccurate, and this assignment helped me diagnose the gaps in their skills and knowledge. It was not always pretty to see what I discovered, but it will be helpful to me in the future.” Another noted, “It is the main learning tool I use. The work from the textbook is less creative. The Wikipedia assignment solidifies the learning.” And yet another declared that “Wikipedia helped me improve my confidence and teaching skills!”

More simply, the Wikipedia assignment often engenders a sense of excitement and energy among students and faculty alike that leads to greater engagement. As one faculty member wrote, “It was invigorating as an instructor to talk about the democratization of knowledge with my students, and it was empowering for them to put their research and writing skills into action.” Another commented, “This assignment significantly enhances teaching and learning in the course overall by creating excitement in the students, a greater sense of belonging and viewing themselves as scientists with something to offer, a greater appreciation of the purpose of all of the course material, and a much deeper relationship between student and instructor.”

Taking pride in a job well-done

In the account of one instructor, “A senior indicated that it was the most difficult research project they ever had to do, but also the most satisfying.” This is a common refrain among faculty and students alike. The Wikipedia assignment isn’t easy. There’s a lot to learn before students are able to make their contributions, but the pride and satisfaction students feel at the end of the project is without parallel.

Students understand that the work they put on Wikipedia has real world implications, and as a result, feel more accountable for the information they put out into the world. As one instructor wrote, “Students were very engaged. In final presentations at the end of the semester, many said, “I was surprised how invested I became in this assignment.” Another explained, “Students for the most part came to see their work as meaningful beyond the classroom. They understood the concept of ‘making knowledge’ as something that actually happens more so than just an ideal.”

The pride and satisfaction students experience from seeing their work live on Wikipedia is infectious! As one instructor shared, the value of this project lies in “Witnessing students stepping up to accomplish a difficult task and sharing in their joy and celebration!” Another declared, “Don’t be afraid! I was nervous and I was awe struck by how amazing my students’ contributions were.”

Thank you again to all of the instructors and students who made Fall 2021 an outstanding term for us at Wiki Education and for helping to make the world a better place during challenging times!

As exhilarating as the idea might be, it’s also a daunting one. The very thing that makes the Wikipedia assignment so appealing — its public facing nature — is the very same thing that gives some instructors pause when deciding to adopt the project. Additionally, the mechanics of the project may seem baffling as most people have never actually edited Wikipedia themselves.

Join us on November 2 at 2 PM Pacific as we unpack some of the mysteries surrounding the project. You’ll have the chance to hear how three instructors are using the Wikipedia assignment in their classes: Heidi Schutz is Associate Professor of Biology at Pacific Lutheran University, Katie Holt is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the College of Wooster, and Tobias Fischer is Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. The program will be moderated by Helaine Blumenthal, Senior Program Manager at Wiki Education.

• What: First Hand Perspectives on Running a Wikipedia Assignment
• When: November 2 at 2 PM Pacific
• Registration: Click here to register.

The program will last one hour with opportunities for questions.

We hope to see you there!

Despite the uncertainties of the Spring 2021 term, our students and instructors did an outstanding job! Roughly 6,000 students across 344 courses:

• Added over 4.5 million words and almost 50,000 references to Wikipedia.
• Worked on more than 6,500 articles and created almost 550 entirely new entries.
• And their work was viewed almost 200 million times during the term alone!

The mental and physical challenges of the past academic year were profound, and we were glad to provide our students and instructors with a positive outlet in what was otherwise an academically tumultuous time.

Learning outcomes and skill development

Since its inception in 2010, we’ve known that the Wikipedia assignment excels at teaching students critical digital literacy skills. This has become even more urgent and relevant as disinformation and misinformation floods social media networks. Term after term, the overwhelming majority of instructors report that the Wikipedia assignment helps their students to learn how to critically assess information in digital spaces. This term was no exception.

What we talk about less, however, are the more traditional skills students develop through the Wikipedia assignment. About 75% of our instructors assert that the Wikipedia assignment improves their students’ writing skills, and about 93% assert that the project enhances students’ research abilities. As one instructor wrote, “I will definitely use the Wikipedia assignment again when I teach the course in the classroom. I actually think the students learned more about writing, reading, and research than they would have with a traditional research paper.”

The Wikipedia assignment requires students to take a deep dive into a specific topic and to critically evaluate the available literature. As one instructor noted, “My students gained a deeper understanding of how resources are classified and vetted and they also engaged in conversation about equity in access to those resources.” Not only do students learn how to identify and summarize reliable information, but they learn that knowledge is not equitably available. As members of academic institutions, they often have access to resources that lie behind pay-walls for much of the population. “Students reflected,” wrote one instructor, “on how the Wikipedia assignment enabled them to become attentive to the politics of knowledge production in public digital portals, and they took pride in their roles as engaged digital citizens.”

Students spend much of their academic careers learning to write persuasively. Rarely are they taught to write neutrally and to summarize sources in their own words. The Wikipedia assignment is often the first time students are asked to write encyclopedically, and it can be challenging. In the words of one instructor, “The Wikipedia assignment helped my students grasp the difference between argument-driven writing and encyclopedic writing and the purposes and audiences for both.” Another asserted, “It taught them how to write information qua information. Normally we write thesis-driven papers, but this was about adding information without it serving/proving a thesis or argument.” As difficult as it can be to synthesize information from disparate sources, it can be just as challenging to not make connections between sources and simply report the facts. The Wikipedia assignment offers students a unique chance to learn this particular mode of writing as well as its value.

Let it go!

The vast majority of instructors with whom we work are as unfamiliar with Wikipedia editing as are their students. This makes for interesting and fruitful classroom dynamics. According to one instructor, “These projects help me function more as a mentor/supporter rather than a traditional teacher. It allows me to step away from the spotlight of the traditional lecture class.” Another wrote that, “This project helps students see me as a collaborator rather than an assessor. We interact as fellow Wikipedia editors where once voice is not more powerful than another.” Instructors are often learning alongside their students, a fact that regularly excites and inspires students. “Knowing that the students and I are both servants in the same Global project,” remarked one instructor, “was motivational for both of us.”

Adopting the Wikipedia assignment often requires instructors to let go of traditional expectations around student work and learning outcomes. One instructor put it best when they declared, “Wikipedia proved to help me further release the tight grip on the steering wheel in order to allow students the opportunity to drive themselves! I’ve taken an analogy from the arena of driving to make the point that Wikipedia challenges me to prepare students for a writing assignment and then stay with them in a supportive role even as some of them fail! I’m a better driver (I’ll be the first to admit), of course, than any of my students, but they learn best when they have a chance to crash and burn! And some do! It’s hard to witness . . .especially when the crash appears to cause injury to me! It’s hard to not say, ‘Give me back the wheel!'”

Thankfully, learning how to contribute to Wikipedia carries with it far fewer risks than learning how to drive, and when students do take the wheel, wonderful things can happen. As one instructor remarked, “It allowed me to rely on students learning the key Wikipedia-related skills on their own, while I was able to concentrate on important connections between this project and other course material.” This act of stepping back is what ultimately allows students to feel a real sense of responsibility and pride for their Wikipedia contribution. In the words of one instructor, “I like being more of a facilitator and empowering the students to take ownership over their education to complete the project.”

When contributing to Wikipedia, students know that their instructors may be just one of potentially millions of people that will read their work. In many ways, their instructor becomes yet another member of the public seeking information on the world’s largest encyclopedia. As one instructor noted, “The most important point is that students no longer see me as the sole audience for their writing and consequently feel more invested in and take a greater sense of responsibility for their work.” As another instructor wrote, “Since the audience for each student’s work was much broader than just me, I felt I could make suggestions without sounding like I was saying ‘make me happy because I’m the teacher.’ We were partners in trying to make each article as good as it could be.”

Using facts to uncover bias

Filling in Wikipedia’s knowledge gaps has been a key component of the Student Program since its inception, but in the past several years, we’ve been striving to ensure that equity is at the core of the Wikipedia assignment. Despite its millions of articles, Wikipedia still consists of glaring content gaps and no where is this more evident than in topics and fields related to historically marginalized and underrepresented populations and subjects. We’re happy to say that our students continue to make great strides in filling in these gaps. According to the Spring 2021 Instructor Survey, about 76% of instructors believed that the Wikipedia assignment helped their students to become more socially and culturally aware of systemic bias vis-a-vis knowledge production and consumption. About 66% of our classes made equity a key part of their project, and another 55% reported that they actively asked students to tackle Wikipedia’s equity gaps.

In describing the Wikipedia assignment, one instructor noted, “It was great for discussing systemic biases, and giving students agency in picking their areas of expertise.” Another wrote, “We spend a lot of time in my course talking about decolonizing the practice of archaeology and especially African archaeology — the project became a way to put some of the ideas in this discussion into practice, by specifically addressing knowledge gaps and the underrepresentation of African archaeology in Wikipedia. My students loved the project and many said it was one of their favorite things about the course.”

Learning to identify and remedy systemic bias is a skill like any other, and the Wikipedia assignment excels at helping students to critically assess knowledge gaps and how they arise. “Having the support of Wikipedia to have students edit and create articles of content that has been overlooked or very little written about,” asserted one instructor, “is one of the highlights of my teaching career. As a historian, I am always considering ways to fill content gaps in the literature. Teaching students to hone this valuable skill and understand the real world impact of their work has been one of the most rewarding experiences for them and myself.” As an instructor of science writing put it, “Wikipedia means so many things to me, but in the context of this assignment, it represents a way for me to show my engineering students that their ideas matter — and that writing has social impact. It’s really difficult at times to design a writing course for engineering students that engages them — but this assignment has helped so much.”

We know that adopting the Wikipedia assignment can be daunting, and even more so during a time fraught with so many uncertainties. One instructor put it best though when they wrote, “After an initial period of my thinking, ‘what the heck did I sign on for?’ I enjoyed it quite a bit — and so did my students. Thanks.” We were happy to provide even a modicum of stability and meaning during a tough time. Thanks to all of our students and instructors for another impactful term.