Welcome, Cassidy!

I’m happy to announce that Cassidy Villeneuve has joined our team as Communications Associate. In this role, Cassidy is responsible for general communications tasks across departments, as well as maintaining the Wiki Education blog and social media channels. Cassidy graduated from Scripps College this past May with a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Professionally, she … Continued

New brochure helps students editing history articles

History is one of the most popular disciplines for teaching with Wikipedia — but it’s also an area where students sometimes struggle. In history classes, students tend to do research, drawing conclusions from primary sources. But that’s not how history articles on Wikipedia are constructed as original research isn’t allowed on Wikipedia. Instead, student editors … Continued

Writing a Wikipedia article — the student’s perspective

It’s rare to see a student excited to discover an underdeveloped Wikipedia article — but this was the initial reaction of College of DuPage freshman Stephanie Lemm this spring, when she looked up the “Educational entertainment” article. That’s because it was a topic that interested her immensely, and her English professor, Dr. Timothy Henningsen, had assigned Stephanie and … Continued

Monthly Report, June 2017

Highlights Wiki Education released the results of the Fall 2016 Student Learning Outcomes research. Among the more important findings, Wikipedia assignments give students digital literacy skills, and students are more motivated by a Wikipedia assignment than by a traditional assignment. The results are important to show the impact our program has on student learning. We thank … Continued

Wiki Education to engage at Wikimania 2017

Wiki Education staff and Board Chair PJ Tabit are traveling to Montreal, Canada, this week to attend Wikimania, the annual gathering of editors of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikimania is a great opportunity for us to collaborate with our colleagues who work with Wikimedia projects globally — and, since Wikimania is in Montreal this year, … Continued

Speaking about fake news at Diablo Valley College

Last month, I was honored be part of the Contra Costa Community College District’s Civic Engagement Speaker Series, with the provocative title “Fake news: A threat to our society?” The event was moderated by Diablo Valley College Journalism Department Chair Mary Mazzoco. Joining me on the panel were East Bay Times education reporter Sam Richards, … Continued

Successes and learnings from the Year of Science

In 2016, Wiki Education kicked off the largest targeted content initiative ever undertaken in the Wikimedia world: the Wikipedia Year of Science. When the year wrapped up in December, our programs for the initiative had added nearly 5 million words of content to the English Wikipedia. More than 6,300 students edited more than 5,700 articles on … Continued