The gender gap on Wikipedia extends across subjects and biographies to its contributors themselves – a gap that individuals, organized groups of editors, and organizations like Wiki Education are tackling head on.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, I had the pleasure of bringing together four scholars from across the country to explore the ongoing efforts to close the gender gap on Wikipedia. As part of Wiki Education’s monthly Speaker Series, the event “Persistence & Progress: Confronting Wikipedia’s gender imbalance” sparked meaningful dialogue between the panelists and our global audience.

Despite the ongoing and concentrated efforts of individuals and organizations alike, why do these gaps continue? One key reason is the precarity of labor as it relates to who contributes to Wikipedia, explained panelist Kira Wisniewski, Executive Director of Art + Feminism.

“It’s truly incredible that Wikipedia is the effort of millions of volunteers, but who actually has the ability to volunteer?” asked Wisniewski. “[For example], there have been many studies about how women, and particularly women of color, have been disproportionately affected by COVID. When you think of the factors of who is even able to volunteer, it helps reveal more answers on how these gaps appear and persist.”

Information activism and the work to support new editors is more important now than ever, emphasized Wisniewski: “What do people edit about? They edit about things they know…so that’s why working with students and getting people editing is so important.”

And there’s no doubt that professors like panelist Caroline Smith and her students are making significant progress in filling these gaps. Through their Wikipedia assignments, Smith’s students have collectively contributed 100,000 words to Wikipedia – and their work has been viewed more than 8 million times!

From the first time Smith incorporated the assignment into her Communicating Feminism course at The George Washington University, she noted how the coursework on Wikipedia resonated with her class. When her students looked for gender gaps in the online encyclopedia, they were surprised by just how much was missing – and that surprise created a sense of urgency to improve it, Smith observed.

“[They] found it so interesting and rewarding, and I think it spoke to some of the historical issues we were discussing throughout the semester in a really real, tangible way,” said Smith, who shows her students Wikipedia articles about their own institution to highlight gender gaps. “They were shocked to find that the amount of space devoted to the [Women’s Leadership] program is much less than some of the other things that happen on George Washington’s campus. Students see that and realize, even in this space I’m occupying right now, we’re seeing these imbalances.”

Like Smith, panelist Siobahn Day Grady also teaches with Wikipedia with free support from Wiki Education, empowering her students to add notable women and other historically excluded figures to the encyclopedia. Initially unsure about bringing a Wikipedia assignment into her course, Grady ultimately found the experience rewarding, just like her students.

“There are so many times when people don’t even recognize that they are worthy to have a Wikipedia article, that their contributions matter,” said Grady, a professor at North Carolina Central University. “I really take these moments as pure joy to celebrate the achievements of women doing amazing things that may not have an opportunity to have their work shared, if not through this work that we do with Wiki Education.”

Panelist Whitney James enrolled in a Wiki Education editing course in summer 2024 to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia herself, then incorporated Wikipedia assignments into her first-year writing courses. 

But the University of Notre Dame professor didn’t stop there – she joined two more of our editing courses to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women herself. As a new editor, James worked to improve existing content and created new Wikipedia articles for notable women including investor Tracy Gray and corporate sustainability expert Esther An.

“I feel like this work has a low barrier for entry and a really high impact,” said James. “It’s also very rewarding for me personally, which is an important self-care thing to think about. This is a really important space right now, and I’m happy to be part of it.”

As we wrapped up the discussion, I asked the panelists if they had advice for anyone who found our conversation interesting and liked the idea of a more inclusive Wikipedia, but didn’t feel like their individual efforts could make a difference on closing the gender gap. Smith kicked us off with a simple answer and a laugh.

“I would just say, no, that’s wrong,” said Smith. “Every voice matters and can make a difference. Maybe that’s oversimplifying, but I feel like it takes a lot of little movements to create broader change.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel and join us for our next webinar on Tuesday, April 22!

En “abling” Change: How Wiki Education is tackling disability on Wikipedia

Tuesday, April 22, 2025
11 am Pacific /  2 pm Eastern
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Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? 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.

Connect with Art + Feminism at artandfeminism.org.

Joined virtually by attendees from across the globe, our panelists explored how the public and healthcare professionals alike turn to Wikipedia for reliable information, the impact of Wikipedia content on patient-physician communications, and the critical need for ongoing improvement of healthcare topics on the encyclopedia.

Whether our search for information is sparked by something we read in a book, watch on the news, or learn from a medical diagnosis, Wikipedia is the first stop we make online, emphasized panelist Maureen Richards, assistant professor and assistant dean at University of Illinois College of Medicine.

“Patients get a diagnosis, they receive a test result, and they Google it,” explained Richards. “If they have been using Wikipedia in all other facets of their life…they’re going to click on it and believe what it says – which means that those of us who have had the opportunity to study [healthcare] have a responsibility to ensure that information on Wikipedia is accurate and well-founded in scientific research.”

Richards, who first incorporated a Wikipedia assignment into her courses in 2020, noted her appreciation for how the project provides her medical students with the opportunity to practice the language of research and to learn how to synthesize primary literature for a greater audience. 

Like Richards, professor Amin Azzam assigns coursework on Wikipedia to his own medical students. Azzam underscores the critical, real-world nature of the work to his classes by encouraging them to explore the readership trend on any health-related Wikipedia article.

“When you look at article traffic statistics, there’s always a five peaks and two valleys pattern that reoccurs,” noted Azzam, who challenges his students to explain this pattern. “It’s weekdays and weekends, because exactly as Maureen said, people get diagnoses, and then they go home and read about them on Wikipedia. It really is incumbent upon us to make it as accurate as possible.”

Lending her perspective as a new Wikipedia editor herself, physician and policy researcher Gabriela Alvarado echoed the assertions made by her fellow panelists. As Alvarado explained, the platform’s accessible nature is a significant draw for those seeking answers to healthcare questions. She noted Wikipedia’s understandable language, clear visual formatting, and of course, one very simple but powerful characteristic of accessibility – it’s free to read.

“My family members will search for something and a paywall comes up on a journal,” shared Alvarado, who participated in a Wiki Scientists course focused on improving reproductive and women’s healthcare content. “The average person who isn’t affiliated with a school library can’t pay $50 for each academic journal they want to read. It’s a recurring conversation that academics have with themselves – are we screaming into this echo chamber? Why are we doing the work that we’re doing, who’s actually reading it, and who are we serving with our research?”

Just like Alvarado, health researcher Izidora Skracic was compelled to join the Wiki Scientists editing course to help improve public access to critical healthcare information. While Alvarado created a new Wikipedia article on breastmilk storage and handling, Skracic lent her efforts to enhancing high-traffic articles including Unintended pregnancy, Intrauterine device, and Contraceptive implant.

When asked for her best advice for new editors, Skracic recommended newcomers start small and work their way up to large-scale editing.

“In order to start, pick one sentence somewhere on any Wikipedia article that you’re reading, and just say, I’m going to make this sentence better – whether that means adding a citation, adding a second part of a sentence, or just adding more updated information,” said Skracic. “And as you build confidence, go bigger.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “The Experts Behind the Edits: Expanding public understanding of healthcare,” and join us for our next webinar tomorrow, February 18!

Beyond the Classroom: Student editors improve Wikipedia
Tuesday, February 18 (10 am PST / 1 pm EST)
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Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? 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. 

Schulenburg opened the program with a warm welcome to attendees, emphasizing the critical role of all program participants to the decade of growth and impact of Wiki Education. 

Speaking to the instructors, Schulenburg noted that Wiki Education did not invent the concept of teaching with Wikipedia, but rather was inspired by the instructors around the world who were already using the platform to enrich student learning and improve knowledge equity. The mission of Wiki Education stemmed from a desire to support these efforts, he explained – and what started as a small group of instructors grew to more than 6,500 classes and 130,000 students supported over the past decade.

Schulenburg also reflected on the organization’s milestone moments, including the creation of the dashboard, the Scholars & Scientists program, and the Communicating Science initiative, as well as its efforts to help healthcare experts add their knowledge to Wikipedia during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognizing the significance of Wiki Education’s work, Iskander underscored its wide-reaching impact beyond metrics.

“It’s one thing to run programs and have impact measures,” said Iskander. “It’s quite another thing to contribute to narrative change and perception change at a societal level. When I think about how Wikipedia is understood and received by educators, by institutions of higher learning, it’s a huge change. All of you here really should take pride in that.”

As a member of the working group that helped create Wiki Education, Strassmann remembered the many brainstorm sessions, Post-it notes, and what she called her biggest accomplishment – persuading Schulenburg to lead the new organization. 

In addition to her role as founding Board Chair, Strassmann has also engaged with Wiki Education as an instructor, receiving support for Wikipedia assignments in her courses at Rice University.

“With the support of Wiki Education, I had students say it was the most impactful assignment at Rice University during their entire four years,” said Strassmann, joking about her less successful attempts to teach with Wikipedia before Wiki Education existed. “The role of Wiki Education is more than filling content gaps, it’s giving students and those who are supported by the program a sense of the agency they can have in the world to change it.”

Tabit echoed Strassmann’s sentiments in his message to the audience, emphasizing both the skill development and personal growth experienced by program participants as they improve public access to knowledge.

“This is a critical moment for Wikipedia, for our educational institutions, and for our public discourse,” said Tabit. “Through the millions of words our program participants add to Wikipedia and the media literacy and research skills they develop in the process, we are helping prepare the public to navigate an increasingly complicated information landscape.”

During the event, Schulenburg led a moment of silence for three community members who are no longer with us, thanking them for their contributions to Wiki Education’s mission and programs: Founding Wiki Education Board Member Adrianne Wadewitz, North Dakota State University psychology professor Jim Council, and Wikipedia advocate at Smithsonian Institute Effie Kapsalis.

He also recognized Wiki Education’s current and former board members, current and former staff, contractors, interns, and fellows, and our many technical contributors and funders. Deputy Director and Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis joined Schulenburg to honor Wiki Education’s “10-Year Superstars,” celebrating the longtime engagement and contributions of participants from both programs.

The event concluded with an interactive activity which invited the audience to share their own memorable moments and learning experiences with Wiki Education – ranging from humorous to heartfelt, and everything in between.

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 professional development courses for subject matter experts.

Explore previous webinars and register for our next program, “The Experts Behind the Edits: Expanding public understanding of healthcare” at wikiedu.org/-speaker-series. 

To date, more than 150,000 people have engaged with the Dashboard through our educational programming and nearly 4,000 instructors have used it for their courses. But the impact of this open source technology reaches beyond even our own programming – used by the broader Wikimedia community, our global Programs & Events Dashboard has supported more than 110,000 users and thousands of editing events worldwide. 

As an open source technology, the Dashboard is developed through public collaboration and its source code is freely available for anyone to use. But who exactly works to create and sustain the Dashboard, and how? Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross and a few of its many contributors took us under its hood during last month’s Speaker Series webinar, “Open Source Technology: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard.”

“A huge number of other people [beyond myself] have come along to make major contributions to this code base,” said Ross, recognizing the work of nearly 200 Dashboard contributors since its inception.

Panelist Matthew Fordham, a software developer based in Seattle, helped oversee the initial development of the Dashboard and has collaborated with Ross for many years.

“It’s amazing and so gratifying to hear how what we started so long ago has continued to evolve and grow, and become so much deeper and more sophisticated,” said Fordham. “With open source and with this project, there’s a lot of potential.” 

Ross and Fordham were joined by university students Sulagna Saha and Om Chauhan, who discussed their experiences working to improve the Dashboard.

Saha, a senior at Mount Holyoke College studying computer science, came to the project in summer 2023 through Outreachy, a program that provides internships in open source and open science. 

In the year since her internship, Ross said he “[hadn’t] had to touch [Saha’s] code at all,” something that’s rare in a field where maintainers frequently have to tweak older code so it can work with changes elsewhere in the code base. “It makes me really proud as a mentor. You made a product worth its weight in gold.”

When asked to reflect on her experience working on the open source project, Saha explained how she transitioned from feeling nervous to feeling welcome.

“Open source is kind of like entering a room where it feels like everyone knows everything, because it’s collaborative,” explained Saha. “But because it is collaborative, it is the best space to feel safe and ask anything.”

Chauhan, a junior at Bennett University, brought his experience as a computer science major to the Dashboard this past summer through Google’s Summer of Code program. Like Saha, Chauhan underscored the community-driven nature of working on open source technology, as well as the importance of exploring the documentation and existing contributions when entering an open source project.

“For someone who is new to the project, be patient, integrate gradually, and engage with the community,” advised Chauhan.

Fordham, who works in both open source technology and the private sector, finds that contributing to open source projects can be particularly rewarding.

“The more open source contributors, the more opinions on what the goal is, so it’s a totally different thing [than the private sector], and in so many ways, more gratifying,” said Fordham. ”It doesn’t simplify things to have more cooks in the kitchen, but the reasons they are there are sometimes more heartfelt.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard,” and join us for a very special edition of our Speaker Series on Tuesday, December 10: 

Celebrating 10 Years of Wiki Education

Tuesday, December 10 at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern

Learn more and register now

For panelist Mack Scott, visiting assistant professor of slavery and social justice at Brown University, incorporating the Wikipedia assignment into his courses like “This is America” and “Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies” gave students the chance to participate in a more meaningful project.

“Students have expressed how much they enjoy the assignment and how much harder they work on it,” said Scott. “They know that it’s not just me looking, and they feel the need to get it right – it adds more significance and more importance.” 

When she first introduced the assignment in 2017 while teaching at Howard University, Arizona State University’s Tracy Perkins wanted to give her students a real-world project and a much larger audience for their coursework. She also recognized the opportunity to engage her students in discussions surrounding Wikipedia and social justice within the context of the course.

“Wikipedia has been a very rich place to talk with them about different forms of knowledge inequality and knowledge distortion, and how that happens, and where that happens in academia and the press in particular,” said Perkins, noting how similar dynamics influence what and how content is shared on Wikipedia. 

Similar to Perkins, the other panelists use the assignment and the idea of Wikipedia itself to prompt powerful classroom dialogues. Delia Steverson, who specializes in 19th and 20th century African American literature at the University of Alabama, begins by asking her students a straightforward yet not-so-simple question: What is knowledge?

“How do we think we acquire knowledge?” said Steverson, continuing the line of questions she asks her students. “What does it mean to create knowledge? We have a very fruitful discussion about how and what we think about what actually is knowledge.” 

Panelist Jennifer Stoever taught with the Wikipedia assignment for the first time this spring at Binghamton University, incorporating the project into her course “Black Women and Creativity.” Stoever challenged her students to consider how underrepresented histories have been kept out of the academic and media publications that serve as sources for Wikipedia articles.

“[My students] are like, well, why don’t oral histories count?” said Stoever. “And that took them a step even farther back into the production of knowledge and the politics of knowledge production – we had some really incredible conversations. History is only as equitable as its sources and its writers.”

Each panelist also emphasized how courses of all disciplines can engage in the work to improve representation on Wikipedia – not just those which explicitly cover social justice topics. 

“Looking at knowledge production as a collective mission is key,” said Stoever.

Enhancing Wikipedia content related to historically underrepresented or misrepresented people and topics has been a driving force for Wiki Education since its inception, noted roundtable moderator Helaine Blumenthal, who manages the Wikipedia Student Program. 

When emphasizing a reflection made by Scott, Blumenthal summed up the critical influence of Wikipedia and its contributors: “The way we write about the past affects how we think about the present.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “Wikipedia & Social Justice: How students are enhancing representation and equity,” and join us for our next program tomorrow, October 24!

Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard

Thursday, October 24 at 9:30 am Pacific / 12:30 pm Eastern

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Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? 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. Apply by December 1, 2024 for priority consideration for spring 2025.

In August, five scholars from across the country gathered virtually to share their efforts to enhance this critical access by improving election-related content on Wikipedia. Drawing from their experiences as participants of our Wiki Scholars election courses, the panelists reflected on their work to combat misinformation and bridge information gaps on Wikipedia.

The Wiki Education Speaker Series event, “Wikipedia & Politics: Improving articles for a more informed public,” brought together an audience of faculty, students, scholars, and community members from around the world. The discussion explored themes including public access and understanding of election information, the civic duty to share expertise with others, and the rewarding and challenging task of editing political content on Wikipedia.

Prior to starting his PhD at Rutgers University, panelist Anderson De Andrade taught public school. During the discussion, he drew parallels between his approach to teaching and his work on Wikipedia, including the importance of maintaining neutrality and awareness of his own biases.

“As I was going through this [course] thinking about knowledge creation itself…it’s just so complex and so tricky,” said De Andrade. “It has to be done in this kind of democratic process, where you have different people all editing the same piece to create a more fluid and more objective kind of piece.”

Panelist Muhammad Hassan Bin Afzal, visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, underscored his appreciation of Wikipedia’s ability to keep up with an ever-changing political landscape.

“The beauty of Wikipedia is that it’s an iterative document,” explained Afzal. “As a researcher, it takes time to edit and publish something. I really appreciate Wikipedia – if something suddenly changes, it can be very difficult for academic journals to update and inform the public accurately, but Wikipedia has more scope to fill that gap.”

Panelist Tasha Bergson-Michelson, instructional and programming librarian for Castilleja School, stressed the power of Wikipedia as a constructor of authority, particularly in topics of critical social importance like election content.

“[Wikipedia] creates authority for people who should have it and aren’t necessarily granted it,” said Bergson-Michelson. “And I think we grow in ourselves when we edit and learn about new parts of the world we don’t know about, new people we don’t know about.”

Hillel Gray, recently retired from Miami University of Ohio, also highlighted the opportunities for both personal and professional growth when editing Wikipedia.

“You learn a lot about yourself,” said Gray. “You can be an introvert in certain respects, and then you can find yourself in Wikipedia feeling freeform.”

Both Gray and Bergson-Michelson emphasized the public impact scholars can make by bringing information out from behind paywalls to share with all through Wikipedia.

“We have access to really high-quality sources and all sorts of knowledge,” said Gray, noting the breadth of research and academic publications available through institutional credentials. “Just putting these sources into Wikipedia will start to improve the media literacy of people who visit Wikipedia.”

While each panelist shared several key takeaways from their experience improving election-related content on Wikipedia, Yao Yao of the University of Georgia offered one simple yet impactful piece of advice:

“Don’t be afraid of editing Wikipedia,” said Yao. “Everyone can contribute their knowledge and expertise, or even simply update an article when there’s new data, and everyone will benefit.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on YouTube, including “Wikipedia & Politics: Improving articles for a more informed public,” and join us for our next program this Wednesday: 

Wikipedia & Social Justice: How students are enhancing representation and equity

Wednesday, September 25 at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern

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Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

“It feels like where theory means practice in a really powerful way for students,” said panelist Dean Allbritton, who teaches with the Wikipedia assignment at Colby College. “[My students] are saying, I’m not just researching or understanding the plight or the lives of LGBTQ people throughout the world, but I’m actually making the invisible feel visible in a way that they feel personally and ethically edified by. And it’s just beautiful.”

The associate professor of Spanish enjoys the pivotal moment where the assignment “clicks” for his students – at the beginning, students often tell Allbritton that they’ve been taught to mistrust information on Wikipedia, but when they understand the need to cite all added content, their perceptions change.

“I just love that moment of discovery for them of what Wikipedia can do, and what it can offer particularly to groups that have been underrepresented throughout history,” emphasized Allbritton, reflecting on the Wikipedia assignment’s role in his course “Queer Spain”. “They learn a different, fact-based style of writing, research skills…and all of this is available through the Wiki Education program, which is incredible.”

Panelist Juana Maria Rodriguez, professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, echoed Allbritton’s experience in empowering students to add LGBTQ+ content to Wikipedia as part of their coursework. Students quickly realize they are writing for a global audience and can’t simply jump to analysis without substantive research to support their edits, she explained. 

“It actually gives [my students] a sense of the incredible resources they have,” said Rodriguez, noting their access to information held behind paywalls. “That sense of reaching out, speaking to the world, is really impactful for them. Some have taken that extra step to translate pages, coming from their own desire to make this information more widely available.”

The panel also featured the perspective of historian Dan Royles, who traded his usual role of professor to become a student himself in a 2022 Wiki Scholars course focused on enhancing LGBTQ+ histories and content on Wikipedia. 

Drawing from his deep expertise and research for his book To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle for HIV/AIDS, Royles completely transformed the Wikipedia article on American AIDS activist Reggie Williams, expanding the brief text by adding nearly 3,000 words and 20 references.

Royles explained that just like students, he developed an appreciation for the rigor required to significantly improve a Wikipedia article. As part of his edits to Williams’ article, Royles added the names of William’s notable collaborators to encourage future additions on Wikipedia of their own impactful histories.

“The kind of iterative nature of Wikipedia, where our work is the groundwork for the work other people do later, is really valuable,” said Royles.

Margaret Galvan, Speaker Series panelist and assistant professor of Visual Rhetoric at the University of Florida, has taught with Wikipedia for several years, primarily in her course “Queer Comics”. 

“Wiki Education’s platform makes it really easy to teach with Wikipedia,” said Galvan. “They have modules where students learn about Wikipedia throughout the semester that you can adapt to your course.”

Galvan encouraged fellow faculty to teach with Wikipedia, underscoring the opportunity to engage students in critical discussions on topics including the idea of notability, particularly when editing content about underrepresented people or subjects. 

Catch up on our Speaker Series on YouTube, including “Who is preserving LGBTQ+ history?”, and explore recaps of our most recent programs on our blog:

• Wikipedia and education, globally 
• Wikipedia can shape the world, not just reflect it

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education provides to instructors in the United States and Canada.

Last month’s Speaker Series program, “Wikipedia and Education, globally”, explored this very question as our international panelists and attendees came together to examine the vast network of organizations and individual volunteers actively working at the intersection of Wikipedia and education. 

Moderated by Wiki Education’s LiAnna Davis, the discussion featured program leaders from Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, and Serbia, who shared histories of engaging students and instructors of all education levels with Wikipedia and offered insights on initiatives within their respective countries.

Wikimedia Serbia, one of the first groups in the Wikimedia movement to officially launch a Wikipedia and education program, collaborates with primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions to integrate Wikipedia into their curricula and enhance content on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikibooks.

The perception of Wikipedia among educators in Serbia has evolved over time, noted panelist Nebojša Ratković of Wikimedia Serbia.

“In earlier stages, Wikipedia was often viewed with skepticism by educators in Serbia,” said Ratković. “Over time, as Wikipedia’s quality control mechanisms improved and efforts were made to enhance the accuracy and reliability of its content, educators in Serbia began to recognize the value of Wikipedia as a learning tool.”

Recognizing the shared experiences between the panelists, EduWiki Nigeria’s Bukola James echoed Ratković’s reflection on the evolution of educator perspectives surrounding Wikipedia. 

“Once [educators] get more familiar with how Wikipedia works, they begin to really appreciate it, in fact, they preach the gospel of using Wikipedia in the classroom to their colleagues,” said James. “Introducing Wikipedia to them isn’t really about them using [the site], but also about exposing them to different kinds of open education resources that could help support their teaching and student learning in their classrooms.”

Wikimedia Argentina also has a longstanding history of supporting educators, having trained thousands of teachers and university instructors in pedagogical approaches to incorporating Wikipedia into their classrooms.

“Our turning point was during the pandemic,” explained panelist Luisina Ferrante of Wikimedia Argentina. “We were able to strengthen our networks with teachers and educational institutions, collaborate with public programs launched by the government in the context of the emergency, ally with public universities, and were more present than ever in designing open tools and resources.”

As the conversation turned to the future plans for each program, the four panelists considered the ever-changing political, educational, and technological landscapes in their respective countries.  Each speaker underscored the importance of continuing to serve as the connection between education and Wikipedia, noting the invaluable social impact of high-quality, open-access information.

“When knowledge is limited to the walls of institutions, it fails to meet its objectives of contributing towards social improvement,” said Alexander Hilsenbeck Filho of Wiki Movimento Brasil. “It is important to disseminate knowledge and make it accessible to society so that it can be put to good use.”

Interested in hearing more from our panelists and other scholars featured in previous webinars? Catch up on our Speaker Series programs on YouTube, including “Wikipedia and Education, globally.” 

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, training, and support that Wiki Education offers to instructors in U.S. and Canadian accredited higher education institutions.

Wikipedia can shape the world, not just reflect it, according to research by panelist Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Our experimental studies about Wikipedia have demonstrated the ways Wikipedia content makes its way into other knowledge production systems,” said Thompson, who led randomized control trials to examine the impact of Wikipedia content on scientific publishing and case law. In both studies, Thompson’s findings were clear: Wikipedia content influences real-world decisions and behaviors – in the case of his research, the decisions made in a court of law or in the development of scholarly publications.

“Because of Wikipedia’s scope, and how it is used and trusted, it has a lot of effect on the world,” said Thompson. “It’s pretty exciting, but it also speaks to the importance of getting the content as right as we can.”

Panelist Kai Zhu’s own research curiosities led him to explore how editing Wikipedia articles generates more attention paid to those articles and related articles, and the role of hyperlinks in driving this process.

“Wikipedia is not only a collection of textual content, but it is also a network of knowledge,” said Zhu, an assistant professor at Bocconi University, who emphasized the importance of the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia. “When there is a new link created, not only will more people read the linked article, but it also brings more content contribution because of that visibility.”

When panelist Shira Klein jumped into a Wikipedia talk page discussion in 2018, she never predicted it would lead to a two-year collaborative research study and a subsequent publication with nearly 55,000 views and counting. 

“The skirmish [on the talk page] was the tip of the iceberg,” said Klein, associate professor of history at Chapman University, who joined a debate between editors to support the citation of “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz,” a book published by Princeton University Press and Random House in 2006. This experience led Klein to discover a group of editors working systematically to simplify and distort Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia.

In her research, Klein found that misleading information about Jews in Poland has been added to Wikipedia despite its policy violations, noting how the organized efforts of groups of editors to maintain the misinformation can lead to unchecked distortions in articles.

Along with her co-author, Klein studied 25 public Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 back pages, including noticeboards, arbitration cases, and talk pages. Together with interviews with editors and statistical data from Wikipedia, the analysis demonstrated how the addition of content that violates Wikipedia policies can evade scrutiny, leading to distortions and misinformation.

“One thing I’m curious about is what other areas on Wikipedia have this burning issue,” said Klein. “Is there a correlation between the amount of disinformation on a topic and the amount of dispute it has triggered on Wikipedia?”

For more than ten years, panelist Rosta Farzan has studied the social experience of new Wikipedia editors, including why people begin to edit and what helps them not only continue to edit but also contribute higher quality content to articles. According to Farzan’s research, intentional socialization practices for new editors can lead to their long term engagement with Wikipedia. 

Farzan, an associate professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, emphasized the positive impact of the structure and support provided by Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. 

“The students feel proud of working on Wikipedia articles,” said Farzan. “Newcomers who join through classes are more likely to continue editing on Wikipedia compared to other comparable newcomers. They write more, they write better quality, and they stay on Wikipedia longer.”

Interested in hearing more from the panelists and other featured scholars? Catch up on our Speaker Series programs on YouTube and be sure to join our next webinar, “Wikipedia and Education, globally”, on Tuesday, May 14, 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT.