SOA’s mission is to address key areas to attain fundamental, systemic change, and ensure the full participation in the STEMM workforce to meet the increasing performance and innovation demands required to keep the U.S. competitive.

As an SOA partner, Wiki Education will help enact a community-developed national strategy to accelerate scientific excellence to power progress, innovation, and prosperity for all by 2050. In alignment with our work, Wiki Education will bolster the SOA’s national strategy’s Discovery pillar to help create opportunity for all in higher education. 

In 2024 alone, our Wikipedia Student Program supported 336 STEMM courses that taught Wikipedia editing to 6,298 students in higher education classrooms, including 57 courses at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. In 2025, we plan to support Wikipedia editing assignments for 7,000 higher education students across 375 STEMM courses, including 65 courses at these diverse institutions, to create more inclusive and accessible STEMM programming for all.

Wiki Education also committed to helping achieve the SOA’s national strategy’s Capstone goals on Strategic Communications, including to:

• Ensure that STEMM professionals depicted in entertainment and media are reflective of the country’s population.
• Effectively illustrate the importance of different perspectives in STEMM and how they are critical to achieving excellence in STEMM.

Throughout 2024, university and college students created 113 biographies of historically excluded STEMM professionals on Wikipedia, raising their visibility in the media. In 2025, we will train 200 students to improve 150 biographies on Wikipedia of historically excluded STEMM professionals to inspire excellence and diverse perspectives in the STEMM fields.

SOA will assist Wiki Education in meeting these goals by providing access to a resource library, funding opportunities, and programming to engage directly with other partners and their communities, as well as forums for planning and implementing the national strategy for equity and excellence. 

In collaboration with SOA partners, Wiki Education will help reimagine and transform the existing STEMM ecosystem to better support the aspirations of untapped talent in this country.

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. 

Visit learn.wikiedu.org to explore our editing courses for subject matter experts.

“Our world is full of rich human stories and horizon-expanding knowledge that should be accessible to all, but that have been left out, suppressed, or otherwise hidden from public view,” says Maria Sachiko Cecire, Program Officer in Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation. “We are delighted to partner with Wiki Education in this ambitious social justice campaign to bring more information about the full range of human creation and expression to the largest and most consulted reference work on the planet. We are especially thrilled that the significant research and writing skills of humanities faculty and students at colleges and universities across the country will power this essential work.”

We define knowledge equity content as that which pertains to the narratives of women and other non-male gender identities, those with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and others whose perspectives have been historically marginalized by dominant groups. Indeed, the dominant group of Wikipedia contributors are currently well-educated white men from North America and Europe. Featured Articles on Wikipedia’s landing page are largely authored by this group and often lacking a social justice lens. 

Wikipedia editors, including new ones, tend to stick with the way things have always been written if not guided to where the gaps exist. Wiki Education’s resources and support will empower students to add content about knowledge equity, while still adhering to Wikipedia’s rigorous rules on sourcing, writing style, and layout. 

Students will specifically focus on re-shaping the landscape of humanities articles pertaining to academic disciplines such as anthropology; archaeology; arts; classics; cultural studies; disability studies; ethics; gender and sexuality studies; history (including history of science); jurisprudence; languages and literature; music; philosophy; racial and ethnic studies; religion; sociology, as well as interdisciplinary topics related to an equitable human experience, like environmental justice.

By the end of 2026, we expect more than 200 million people will have viewed these articles and increased their understanding of communities, cultures, histories, and notable figures that have not received enough media attention elsewhere.

“I’m excited about our partnership with the Mellon Foundation,” says Frank Schulenburg, Executive Director of Wiki Education. “This initiative will significantly impact the students involved and the countless Wikipedia users who will gain free access to representative and trustworthy information. Our Knowledge Equity initiative is a key aspect of our mission, and I’m especially pleased that we’re starting a large campaign to enhance content in the Humanities.”

This project will catalyze our ongoing Knowledge Equity campaign by significantly growing participation among new humanities faculty and supporting Wikipedia use in their courses. Wiki Education will activate its existing network of academic associations and partners and identify new opportunities to collaborate. Our work will be guided by a newly established Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee, composed of seven exemplary humanities scholars who have taught with Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program with a knowledge equity lens. Our program team will onboard and support 800 humanities courses that add over 11 million words, powerfully diversifying who and what you see on Wikipedia. 

Contact Kathleen Crowley, Director of Donor Relations, at kathleen@wikiedu.org if you’re interested in growing this impact. 

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org

About Wiki Education
Wiki Education is a small, high-impact nonprofit organization systematically building and expanding the content on the English Wikipedia. Our goal is to represent the sum of all human knowledge by making Wikipedia more accurate, representative, and complete through our Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program. These programs have trained students in higher education classrooms across the United States and Canada and subject matter experts from around the world how to add their knowledge to the most referenced online encyclopedia. We bring 19% of all new contributors to Wikipedia, who have written over hundred thousand articles viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Mellon Foundation logo used courtesy of Mellon Foundation, all rights reserved.

While the Internet, social media, and generative artificial intelligence tools makes information quick and easy to access, often claims are made without sources to support them, and their credibility can be tainted by biased agendas. ChatGPT can also hallucinate sources and generate content that has no basis in fact. At the same time, a recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that Americans across the political spectrum feel the country is in crisis and at risk of failing. With the rise in civil unrest and discussions of civil war, the need to spread neutrally presented information that can be trusted is all the more urgent.  

In this era where information is abundant but accuracy is often compromised, it is crucial to equip the next generation of leaders with the skills to discern reliable sources and contribute to the creation of factual knowledge. This is especially key to maintaining the integrity of Wikipedia, which consistently ranks in the top ten of all online search results and is largely trusted by the public. Indeed, Wikipedia is free from advertising or the influence of private interests that can distort other online and social media sites. 

Wiki Education has partnered with the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation to foster a more informed, digitally literate citizenry who reads and edits Wikipedia and participates in civic society.

“On behalf of the Rapoport Foundation, we are pleased to support Wiki Education with a $25,000 grant for the Wikipedia Student Program, and we look forward to learning from this partnership over the course of 2024,” said Jenny Peel, Rapoport Foundation Program Officer.

Wikipedia’s rigorous rules and guidelines on writing with neutrality and citing reliable sources have been refined over two decades by the volunteer editing community. Our Wikipedia Student Program teaches students how to follow these strict policies to improve their research and digital media literacy skills. The support from the Rapoport Foundation will help us serve 800 students in 40 courses at universities and colleges across the United States as they learn to tackle misinformation on Wikipedia and hone their ability to detect it. Students will edit or create at least 670 articles that we expect to receive more than 7 million views by the general public, including policymakers, journalists, and more.

Getting information right on Wikipedia can have huge ramifications. Recent research has found articles have the power to influence our democracy and rule of law. When researchers analyzed judges’ decisions out of Ireland’s lower courts, they discovered that the cases with Wikipedia articles were 21% more likely to be cited as precedents and that lower courts drew on Wikipedia articles in framing these precedents and their meaning to make their decisions. The reliance on Wikipedia—used to shape and dictate the way of life in America and abroad—can have a reverberating impact for generations.

In collaboration with the Rapoport Foundation, Wiki Education recognizes this significance and is building a foundation of trust and accuracy in the information landscape. We are immensely grateful to the Rapoport Foundation for their timely support of this work to improve the desperate state of our democracy.

For more information, please contact:
Kathleen Crowley
Director of Donor Relations
kathleen@wikiedu.org

Rapoport Foundation logo used courtesy Rapoport Foundation, all rights reserved.

“Wikipedia articles represent one of the most accurate sources of STEM-related information that are widely accessed. The accuracy of Wikipedia articles is maintained by a near-continuous process of peer review and checks by members of the participating community. The Wikipedia Student Program helps college students review articles on Wikipedia related to their course of study, curate sources, and check articles for accuracy. Not only does this aid student learning, the process adds new members to the pool of Wikipedia reviewers for the future. The twin goals of maintaining sources of knowledge, and supporting youth in using these sources is very much in line with the mandates of GKF, and we are happy to be able to provide support for this project.” –Mukund Padmanabhan, President of Guru Krupa Foundation.

We know that Wikipedia continues to be a top source for health information on the web; it gets more traffic on medical articles than the NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, NHO, or WHO. The Wikipedia readership of science articles is several times larger than the readership of all scientific publications combined. Wikipedia has more links from search engines than any other website, and is often the first search result listed when people look for scientific information.

Because tools like ChaptGPT are far from 100% accurate and can generate false sources, it’s imperative that Wikipedia articles on topics in STEM are devoid of misinformation. Understanding Wikipedia’s strict sourcing rules and policies forces students to discern what is real and fake as they edit an article. We consistently find improvement in students’ skills in digital media literacy, project management, research, and more after finishing the assignment. 

A key result from this project will be the addition of 145,000 words of trustworthy information to hundreds of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia enables free, open access to the latest research and discoveries for greater education of the general public and practitioners in the STEM fields. 

The Guru Krupa Foundation’s grant will boost Wiki Education’s Communicating Science initiative, a staple of the organization’s strategy since the 2016 Year of Science. We are extremely proud of the pedagogical work that more than 52,000 students have undertaken in this area to date, expanding the coverage of science in 46,000 Wikipedia articles collectively viewed over a billion times and counting. This tremendous impact would not have been possible without the generosity of Wiki Education’s committed partners. We express our sincerest gratitude to the Guru Krupa Foundation for valuing a deep learning experience for all. 

A 2015 study concluded that “Wikipedia appeared to be the most utilized online healthcare information resource” in the world. And yet, there are only about 100 articles (out of 6.6 million) that cover developmental disabilities. Thanks to a $55,000 grant from the WITH Foundation, we plan to work with a passionate group of experts to change that.

We’re thrilled to announce that the WITH Foundation has not only renewed–but generously increased–their support of our initiative to improve healthcare and disability-related articles on Wikipedia, ensuring that the world’s largest free information resource is as equitable and accurate as possible. 

“We are pleased to continue our support for this project. We appreciate the partnership with Wiki Education as they work with self-advocates and disability healthcare professionals to enhance healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia.” – Ryan Eastery, Executive Director of WITH Foundation

In three WITH-sponsored Wiki Scientists courses, we will support 45 experts, including more self-advocates (adults with lived experience of I/DD), as they expand between 30 and 40 high-value Wikipedia articles about disability healthcare. Nearly all of the existing Wikipedia articles about adult developmental disabilities are rated as a “start” or “stub” class, meaning the article has a lot of room for improvement in quality and depth of information. 

There’s plenty of work to be done, but thankfully this cohort of experts will be building upon previous iterations of these courses. The WITH Foundation funded a similar project in 2019. The highest rated Wikipedia article in this topic area, Developmental disability, was expanded by experts previously enrolled in WITH Foundation-supported Wiki Scientists courses. Three of the top Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities have received over 170,000 pageviews to date in 2022 alone, indicating strong public demand for helpful resources on related topics.

We’ve also seen a strong demand among disability healthcare professionals, experts, and self-advocates to be part of this initiative. In 2019, we received almost twice as many applications than there were seats available for the two Wiki Scientists courses. In total, 31 experts improved 43 Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities and related topics. All work from these courses are available on Wiki Education’s online Dashboard.

Join us!

We are now seeking participants in these courses who can add accurate, reliable information about developmental disabilities to Wikipedia. We welcome individuals with developmental disabilities to participate, either as course participants if they are academic experts, or by recommending the course to people in their networks. In addition to working with some of our existing partners, we’d love to connect with organizations we haven’t yet collaborated with, especially healthcare and disability studies groups.

If you or your organization is interested in participating in any capacity, please email Jami Mathewson, our Director of Partnerships, at jami@wikiedu.org.

Let’s make a lasting impact

As a recent study has shown, Wikipedia articles have the power to influence hundreds of scientific articles and become highly cited in scientific literature. Researchers have also found that when groups of Wikipedia editors improve a specific content area, the pageviews of those articles and other linked ones increase by 12%. The work from our Wiki Scientists courses will remain accessible on Wikipedia going forward, impacting the public’s understanding of important healthcare and developmental disability studies topics and creating a snowball effect on the amount of healthcare resources available in the future.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded Wiki Education a $25,000 grant to lead a 10-week Wiki Scholars course in the upcoming year that will train scholars in pre-modern European art and architecture how to add their knowledge to a topic deeply underdeveloped on Wikipedia. The Foundation agrees it’s critical that Wikipedia provides accurate, expert, and comprehensive information on art history and architecture for the benefit of museum professionals and art history students, as well as the interested public.

This extensive course will not only disseminate research about pre-modern European art and architecture to a potential audience of millions, but will also train art historians in fundamental, valuable career skills to take forward into all they do in an increasingly digital world. We’ll collaborate with scholarly partners like the Detroit Institute of Arts and address information gaps on Wikipedia related to pre-modern European art and architecture from antiquity to 1830. The quality of these Wikipedia articles varies and there is a strong bias towards Western European work, while Central and Eastern European art and architecture are poorly covered. We aim to bring more balance and diversity to Wikipedia’s coverage in these areas.

Given Wikipedia’s global reach, art institutions are able to connect with audiences in languages and contexts they never could have imagined. Wikipedia has an unparalleled ability to reach audiences around the globe. Averaging 18 billion page views per month, the website is the 7th most visited in the world. Not only that, Wikipedia content has a measurable effect on whether or not tourists plan a visit. Wikipedia drives enjoyment of art as well as learning. And cultural institutions are taking notice.

Take the Met, for example. After adopting an Open Access licensing policy for their images and data, they began reaching 10 million more people per month through Wikipedia – 7 times the reach of their own website. The Smithsonian, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago have followed suit with Wikipedia and Wikidata initiatives of their own. All of these incredible organizations have consulted Wiki Education’s expertise and guidance at some point along their Wikipedia/Wikidata journey. Art historians are seeking the skills they need to do this important open access work, and Wiki Education has a successful track record for facilitating experts’ entry into Wikipedia’s editorial world.

We’re currently looking for additional partners to do this exciting work, so if you or your organization is interested in being involved in this initiative, please reach out to jami@wikiedu.org. We’re excited to work with new organizations in this mission and are extremely grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their generous support as we make Wikipedia better together, for all.

With 450 million readers and 275,000 biographies of scientists, Wikipedia is an extraordinary avenue for recognizing the achievements and contributions of scientists. But women and people of color are underrepresented on the site. This lack of visibility contributes to and is reflective of systemic problems facing the STEM workforce: women and people of color often lack role models in their chosen careers and implicit bias reinforces stereotypes that they don’t belong. Women receive about half of all STEM degrees in the United States, but comprise only 30% of the STEM workforce. As compared to 11% of the overall workforce, Black Americans make up only 9% of STEM workers, while Latinos make up only 7% of STEM workers as compared to 16% overall. Young scientists need to see a greater diversity of successful STEM professionals as role models. And Wikipedia is a great place to show them.

“People find inspiration in those with whom they identify and share a sense of commonality and worldview,” says Paula Golden, the President of Broadcom Foundation. “Broadcom Foundation is excited to partner in the Wiki Education Project that will add biographies and contributions of STEM pioneers of color and gender diversity to Wikipedia, which will enable young people to find inspiration in scientists, engineers and innovators who look like them.”

Broadcom Foundation has generously provided a $150,000 grant to bring the hidden figures of notable people in STEM to light on Wikipedia. In 2022, Broadcom Foundation supported our Equity Outreach Coordinator, Andrés Vera, in recruiting more than thirty instructors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). Broadcom Foundation’s current grant supports Wiki Education’s continued recruitment efforts of faculty and onboarding for students adding these new STEM biographies of women and people of color to Wikipedia for the first time. By the end of 2023, these students will add at least 35 new heroes and heroines to Wikipedia, inspiring young people searching for role models that look like them.

By connecting higher education classrooms to the publishing power of Wikipedia, Wiki Education will help future engineers, computer scientists, and others in STEM — including thousands of women and racially diverse university students — improve biographies on Wikipedia of STEM’s hidden figures and see that they belong in the STEM careers of their choosing.

What’s different about the support Wiki Education offers through this initiative?

As part of our typical Student Program support, all instructors receive:

• A modular online training to introduce students to Wikipedia policies and procedures;
• Handbooks offering advice and guidelines for students and professors; and
• Metrics about student edits, including amount of content added and page views of articles

But through this generous grant, we are able to offer additional support and a stipend for instructors joining us in this initiative, including:

• Assignment design support and help generating lists of articles for students to create;
• Phone, email, and video support during the term for professors and students, including regular check-ins to ensure the students are adding relevant biographies of people in technology; and
• Stipends for instructors who successfully complete the project

Does this sound like something you want to be a part of? Email andres@wikiedu.org.

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. They have a successful history of funding projects that help develop a community of patients and other stakeholders equipped to participate as partners in comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) and disseminate PCORI-funded study results. Through the Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities and organizations interested in and able to participate in, share, and use patient-centered CER.

Wiki Education is the only organization that has demonstrated an ability to improve medical and science content on Wikipedia in a systematic and scalable way. We have perfected programmatic work to engage subject matter experts to improve Wikipedia content over the last 12 years. We are a trusted partner for university instructors, academic associations, and the medical editing community on Wikipedia.

For this project, Wiki Education aims to improve the quality of health information available on Wikipedia about historically underrepresented topics, such as maternal and mental health. To accomplish our goal, we will train medical students in graduate-level classes to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment through our Wikipedia Student Program and partner with subject matter expert organizations to run Wiki Scientists courses that train medical experts on how to edit Wikipedia. Our existing network of medical faculty and partner organizations, including associations like the Society of Family Planning and Association for Psychological Science, will use PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews as key citations for these Wikipedia articles. In collaboration with the University of California San Francisco’s Dr. Amin Azzam, we will champion Wikipedia editing as a class assignment among medical school faculty. We will recruit new participants for both programs to cite more PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews. Wikipedia articles edited through this project are expected to receive millions of page views annually.

According to Greg Martin, PCORI’s Acting Chief Engagement and Dissemination Officer, “This project was selected for Engagement Award funding because it will involve stakeholders in actively disseminating PCORI-funded research results to those who can use this information to inform healthcare decisions. We look forward to working with Wiki Education throughout the course of their 2 year project.”

In the age of disinformation and misinformation, Wikipedia has shone as a beacon of fact-based, neutral information. Even YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites use it for their consumer-facing fact-checking links. The public trusts Wikipedia to provide them accurate information. With this project, we can ensure that important medical topics have information from and links to high-quality PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews.

For more information about PCORI’s funding to support engagement efforts, visit their website.

“Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program is an elegant fit for two of our core priorities: preserving knowledge and nurturing students in higher study programs,” said Mukund Padmanabhan, President of the Guru Krupa Foundation. “Wikipedia is already an impressive free resource, but it takes work to make sure it continues to reflect advancements in knowledge. I’m thrilled that our foundation can support a small but mighty organization improving STEM communication and information on Wikipedia.”

In our program, STEM students gain critical communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and digital media literacy skills while adding a wealth of knowledge to one of the most far-reaching sources of information in the world. Wikipedia has more links from search engines than any other website, and is often the first search result listed when people look for scientific information.

The impact of our Communicating Science initiative is not only in the student learning, but also that hundreds of millions of people get greater access to high-quality, reliable scientific information on Wikipedia thanks to the pedagogical work the students do. So far, 44,000 students have worked on 44,000 scientific articles, adding nearly 40 million words to Wikipedia. This is nearly as much content as was in the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. The new science content added by students has been read billions of times!

When it comes to scientific literacy, undergraduates are in a unique position. They are studying advanced science and understand the jargon of their field, but are still connected to those who are not, and remember what it’s like. The challenge of explaining what they have come to learn (not just for an exam, but to really be understood) makes them ideal candidates for bridging the gap between dense academic scholarship and a curious public.

Thank you again to the Guru Krupa Foundation for your support of learners everywhere.