• June marked the end of our Spring 2020 cohort of courses, and we couldn’t be more proud of our instructors and students. To say that Spring 2020 was a challenging term is a gross understatement, and we’re incredibly grateful to and impressed by all of our instructors and students as they forged ahead with their Wikipedia assignments in spite of the upheavals brought about by the pandemic. Students edited 6,390 articles, created 591 new entries, and added 5.27 million words and 56,700 references.
• In June we debuted our three week long Wikidata Summer Institute. The idea behind this new approach was to condense the length of the course and meet twice a week instead of once. Scheduling has proven to be challenging during the pandemic and this seemed like a worthwhile change to test. Although total edits were significantly lower than the longer courses, the engagement and enthusiasm of the participants was as active as ever. Take a look at this Dashboard to see a detailed list of their accomplishments. We were thrilled to work with participants from Western Canada, LACMA, and some independent data consultants.
• In June, we were happy to work with the American Academy of Developmental Medicine & Dentistry (AADMD) to meet their members virtually. Several AADMD members joined our Wiki Scholars course sponsored by the WITH Foundation, and we enjoyed speaking to members about Wikipedia’s missing coverage of healthcare access for people with disabilities. We’re excited to see the work those members will do in our current course to make Wikipedia more equitable.

Organizational updates

Take our survey

We’ve been publishing this Monthly Report in the same format for many years now. As we turn to our new fiscal year on July 1, we are interested in determining if the report still meets our stakeholders’ needs. We’ve created a survey about our Monthly Report. If you read our report, please take a few minutes to give us your feedback.

Staffing

At the end of June, we said goodbye to several staff members, a painful decision necessitated by the economic uncertainty in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We express our deep gratitude to the following individuals for their contributions to Wiki Education:

• Paul Carroll joined us in February as our Director of Institutional Funding. While we didn’t work with Paul long, he dove right into Wiki Education’s world. Paul made every effort from the first day to use his considerable network in the philanthropic community to support our work. We appreciated his enthusiasm for our work.
• Elysia Webb worked for us as a Wikipedia Expert for nearly two years. She supported countless student editors and participants in our Scholars & Scientists Program, answering questions and providing excellent feedback on work. More recently, she taught some of our Scholars & Scientists Program courses, where her knowledge of Wikipedia enriched the participants’ experiences.
• Cassidy Villeneuve has served as the voice of our organization since 2017. She has expertly guided our blog, social media, training material development, marketing, and any other communications task we threw her way. Cassidy’s work is read by thousands of our program participants each year as they seek out her clear explanations of complex Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and we know her work will continue increasing our visibility and informing our participants
• Ozge Gundogdu’s work as office manager, executive assistant, and human resources manager entailed tracking a lot of little details, from ensuring we paid our rent on time to making sure our time off was accurately recorded. She worked closely with our ED, supported our external accountants, and served as the liaison to the board. Throughout it all, Ozge made everyone feel supported and appreciated.
• Shalor Toncray single-handedly supported thousands of new Wikipedia editors each year as a Wikipedia Expert. As the first Wikipedian many of our participants engaged with for the last three years, Shalor showcased the best newbie welcome Wikipedia can offer. She was exceptionally dedicated to ensuring Wikipedia’s quality got better while student editors had a great experience.
• Ryan McGrady worked for Wiki Education for more than five years, serving in a variety of Program Manager roles. He’s overseen our Wikipedia Student Program, our Visiting Scholars Program, and most recently built our Scholars & Scientists Program’s Wikipedia courses. His deep engagement with both Wikipedia and academia shines through everything he does, and his dedication enriched every program he’s worked on. His influence will elevate our work for years to come.
• Samantha Weald joined Wiki Education in 2014, and for many instructors in our Student Program and participants in our Scholars & Scientists Program, she has been the first person they meet. Her outreach skills have brought participants into every program we’ve run, and her ability to make literally hundreds of individuals feel personally welcomed simultaneously is nothing short of astounding. Samantha has been instrumental in establishing processes that have helped Wiki Education scale our impact with limited resources, and we’re grateful for her adaptability and role as a team player.

We wish these seven individuals all the best in their future endeavors.

Programs

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2020 in numbers, as of June 30:

• 409 Wiki Education supported courses were in progress (268, or 65%, were led by returning instructors).
• 7,498 student editors were enrolled.
• 54% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 6,390 articles, created 591 new entries, and added 5.27 million words and 56,700 references.

June marked the end of our Spring 2020 cohort of courses, and we couldn’t be more proud of our instructors and students. To say that Spring 2020 was a challenging term is a gross understatement, and we’re incredibly grateful to and impressed by all of our instructors and students as they forged ahead with their Wikipedia assignments in spite of the upheavals brought about by the pandemic. 

The Student Program team spent much of June closing out courses from the spring term and planning ahead for the fall. We know the Fall term will also be full of uncertainties, and we’re striving to support our program participants in the ways that help them most.

Student work highlights:

The idea that plants, which lack a brain or nervous system, are capable of “behavior” may seem odd to many, but that’s the focus on Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh’s Plant Behavior class. Students in the class created articles on hydraulic signaling in plants, plant nucleus movement, Mechanoreceptors (in plants), root phenotypic plasticity and plant memory. Another student tripled the size of the plant root exudates article, which had been created by a student in an earlier iteration of the class back in 2018, and another expanded the kin selection article, an important concept in evolutionary biology, to include information about plants.

For the fourth consecutive year, students in Ashleigh Theberge’s Meso and Microfluidics in Chemical Analysis course continued to expand and improve the droplet-based microfluidics article that students in a previous class created in 2016. Other students in the class made major improvements to related articles like microfluidic cell culture, digital microfluidics, paper-based microfluidics as well as the main microfluidics article.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Wikidata

We’re excited to be trying out a new version of our Wikidata program. In June we debuted our three week long Wikidata Summer Institute. The idea behind this new approach was to condense the length of the course and meet twice a week instead of once. Scheduling has proven to be challenging during the pandemic and this seemed like a worthwhile change to test. Although total edits were significantly lower than the longer courses, the engagement and enthusiasm of the participants was as active as ever. Take a look at this Dashboard to see a detailed list of their accomplishments. We were thrilled to work with participants from Western Canada, LACMA, and some independent data consultants.

This group did some excellent work. Check out the newly-improved item for Salome Bey, a Canadian singer, composer, and actor. One participant also did some excellent work on the Plan of laying out the ground of Publick Square, London (Ontario) item.

This new approach to the Wikidata courses will create new opportunities for more participants to take the course and we hope the new schedule will be easier to fit into participants’ already-busy weeks.

Wikipedia

This month we wrapped up our first COVID-themed course and launched a second 6-week intensive course. The idea behind both of these courses is to focus on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of COVID-19 pandemic information, specifically state-specific articles. Since responses vary so much from state to state, capturing this information has become even more vital. This original blog post details how we are able to run a course at no cost to participants in order to shore up this essential content.

From the course that wrapped up, you should spend some time looking at how much the North Dakota article has expanded. Similarly, new sections have appeared on the New York article. Although these courses are condensed, the urgency around this topic places a special emphasis on the timeliness of high-quality information on these articles. We have yet to see how this will impact continued editing after the courses wrap up, but it is our hope that these participants are able to continue to add to these articles and develop them.

Our second COVID-themed course has also begun. We are thrilled to be working with these 17 editors, most of whom have not edited Wikipedia before. The approach to this course is identical to the first one. A set of editors in this group have taken to improving the impact section of the articles. Most impact sections have, so far, only addressed the pandemic’s impact on sports. These participants acknowledge that the impact of the pandemic extends into other aspects of life – education, economy, workplaces, and specific communities of those affected by the pandemic. Spend some time on the South Carolina and Arizona articles to see these newly expanded sections. We’re looking forward to all of the contributions this group will be making to these articles.

We are pleased to announce that we have started a second Wiki Scholar course with the WITH Foundation. As with the first course, the focus of this course will be improving articles in the field of disability and individuals with disabilities. We are just a few weeks into the course, getting to know these 14 excellent participants. As the weeks go by, keep your eye on this Dashboard to track their hard work and new developments.

This month we launched our fourth course Wiki Scholars course in partnership with the Society of Family Planning (SFP). As with the previous courses, this course will focus on training SFP members to improve Wikipedia articles related to abortion, contraception and related topics. We know that Wikipedia plays a significant role in the personal research people do about health and medicine, and we are happy to work with SFP to ensure the public has access to the highest quality information about family planning. Visit this Dashboard to keep up with their contributions to free knowledge. 

Advancement

Partnerships

In June, we were happy to work with the American Academy of Developmental Medicine & Dentistry (AADMD) to meet their members virtually. Several AADMD members joined our Wiki Scholars course sponsored by the WITH Foundation, and we enjoyed speaking to members about Wikipedia’s missing coverage of healthcare access for people with disabilities. We’re excited to see the work those members will do in our current course to make Wikipedia more equitable. 

We confirmed a Wiki Scientists course with the American Physical Society and will spend July and August recruiting members who are eager to expand Wikipedia’s coverage of physicists. 

Finally, we spent the month recruiting scholars and scientists to participate in our third Wiki Scholars course about state and regional responses to COVID-19. We look forward to seeing the great work this engaged group does to bring regional data to the public.

Communications

Blog posts:

• How to leverage the Wikipedia assignment in a job interview
• New application process for Student Program in Fall 2020 term
• What kind of source is Wikipedia?
• Be the change you want to see in the world

Technology

June was a busy month for the Wiki Education technology. We deployed a bevy of updates to the Dashboard and wikiedu.org to prepare for our Wikipedia Classroom Program plans for Fall 2020, and our two Google Summer of Code students, Amit and Shashwat, got off to very productive starts to the official “coding period” of their projects.

For the upcoming Fall 2020 term and the new application process for the Wikipedia Student Program, Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross worked with Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal to update our instructor orientation, the Dashboard course creation process and assignment wizard, and many of the automated emails that the Dashboard sends to instructors before, during and after the term. Sage began preparing an FAQ system for the Dashboard, which will replace our earlier question-and-answer system (ask.wikiedu.org) in July. We also finished up and deployed a feature developed by former Outreachy intern and Outreachy mentor Khyati Soneji: tracking contributions to specific sets of articles defined with the PagePile tool, which is an alternative to using Categories or templates to identify a relevant set of pages.

We also fixed several bugs that affected specific browsers, and updated the Dashboard for the domain switch from tools.wmflabs.org to the venerable toolforge.org.

Returning Summer of Code student Amit Joki implemented a set of changes that reduce the amount of JavaScript required to load the Dashboard. This will improve site load times a little bit, and may make a substantial difference for Programs & Events Dashboard users with significant bandwidth limitations. Summer of Code student Shashwat Kathuria integrated better error tracking into the Dashboard stats update processes, so that each course can now show program organizers when there has been a problem importing recent editing activity for their event. These projects continue through August, and we anticipate both students will move on to some of their stretch goals for the final weeks.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of June were $167K, ($16K) under the budget of $183K. The Board was under ($9K) by moving the Board Meeting from In-person to Remote. Fundraising was over budget +$3K due to employment costs +$4K while under ($1K) in Travel. General & Administrative were over +$7K due to Indirect overhead allocation change +$5K, Payroll Costs +$1K, and Administrative Costs +$4K while under in Professional Fees ($2K) and Location Expense ($1K). Programs were under by ($17K) including Payroll ($7K), Travel ($2K), Communications ($2K) and Indirect costs ($6K).

The Year-to-date expenses $2.219K were ($58K) under the budget of $2.277K. The Board was under budget by ($16K) due to a combination of +$4K in payroll costs while under ($20K) in Board Meeting expenses. Fundraising was over +$19K due to interim consulting work +$10K and Payroll +$10K, while under ($1K) in Indirect Costs. General & Administrative were over +$129K. +$136K in Indirect Cost allocations, +$8K in payroll, +$7K in Travel, +$4K Furniture and Office Expenses, and +$4K in Communications while under budget ($6K) in Professional Fees ($24K) in Occupancy Costs. Programs were under ($190K), of which ($136K) were Indirect Costs, ($62K) in Travel, ($22K) Communications, (3K) Office Supplies, ($3K) Professional Fees while showing overages +$36K in payroll.

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Finalizing the annual plan & budget for fiscal year 2020–21
• Annual Board Meeting (Zoom)
• Dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our organization

In early June, Frank sent the final version of the annual plan and budget for fiscal year 2020–21 to the members of Wiki Education’s board. Given the severity of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy and the uncertainty around the endowments of institutional funders, we don’t expect to generate the revenue that would be necessary for keeping Wiki Education’s operations on the same level as in the past. That’s why the new annual plan calls for moving the organization fully online to save the money we’re currently spending on our office space in the Presidio of San Francisco. Furthermore, the plan for fiscal year 2020–21 calls for reducing Wiki Education’s headcount significantly, yet in a way that will allow the organization to provide our core services to an extent that is reasonable under the current conditions.

On June 5th and 6th, the board held its annual board meeting. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s board meeting took place virtually through Zoom. On the first day, Frank reflected on the past year, which – until COVID-19 hit the United States – had been on a very good trajectory. Then, Frank presented the annual plan for next fiscal year, followed by LiAnna and Sage who talked about our plans for Programs and Technology. Subsequently, the board approved the plan & the budget. On day two, the board renewed the terms of some of its members and then discussed the current status of Philanthropy and Education in the United States before moving into the Executive Session.

During the rest of the month, Frank, supported by Ozge, dealt with the layoffs due to COVID-19.

• In May, we launched a Wiki Scientists course in partnership with 500 Women Scientists, facilitating as 20 members of 500 Women Scientists learned how to expand Wikipedia’s biographies of women in STEM. Thanks to a high demand from their members, we have continued searching for additional funding to support more women scientists as they join the Wikipedia community.
• Our first two Wikidata courses of 2020 just wrapped up. The Beginner course had 10 participants who created 67 new Wikidata items, made more than 1,220 edits to Wikidata, and added 74 references to statements, improving the data quality for all of those claims. The 10 participants of the Intermediate course created 205 new items and edited over 5,100 existing ones. One of the participants was working on a project for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and uploaded over 5,000 images to Wikimedia Commons which can be used on Wikidata. Additionally, this course had several participants who are working on the LINCs project. This project aims to connect humanities research in Canada through linked data. The perspectives these individuals brought to this course demonstrated how Wikidata can influence other large scale linked data initiatives and, in turn, how these initiatives can influence Wikidata. To see some of the outstanding work these course participants did, follow this link. This record number of items edited is nothing short of inspiring. We hope this indicates that more institutions are willing to invest in Wikidata or that more driven participants are finding their way to our course. Either way this is a large body of high quality work that will benefit Wikidata and the larger linked data community.

Programs

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2020 in numbers, as of May 31:

• 409 courses were in progress (268, or 65%, were led by returning instructors).
• 7,496 student editors were enrolled.
• 55% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules
• Students edited 6,200 articles, created 556 new entries, and added 5 million words and 54,100 references.

While a handful of spring quarter courses are still working on their Wikipedia assignments, May saw most of our courses wrap up for the term. Spring 2020 was a time of upheaval for our instructors and students as their courses abruptly switched to online platforms in the middle of the term. Despite these challenges, our students contributed 5 million words to Wikipedia, even tackling articles related to COVID-19.

Though a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the Fall 2020 term, Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal began to prepare for the following academic year. We are paying close attention to what institutions of higher education are planning as the pandemic unfolds and trying to adapt our materials to better serve our instructors and students in their changed classroom circumstances. Helaine hopes to look more deeply into best practices for online teaching and to assemble a robust list of library resources so our students can continue to access high quality sources despite being unable to physically go to their university libraries. 

Wikipedia Experts Shalor Toncray, Elysia Webb, and Ian Ramjohn were busy closing out courses and identifying the great work our students did this term.

Student work highlights:

On May 5, student work was featured on the main page of Wikipedia. A student improved an article about a moth species called the slender Scotch burnet. The article received nearly 1,300 views the day it was featured. Student work also appeared on the main page of Wikipedia again on May 29, where it was viewed an impressive 7,500 times! Climate of Pluto was created by a student in Vincent Chevrier Planetary Atmospheres course at University of Arkansas.

Gay and lesbian bars have long been a part of society. Some have needed to remain relatively secret in order to escape persecution while others have openly advertised their services to the local community. Daniel’s, which opened in late 1975, was one of the first lesbian bars in Spain and one of the first LGBT bars in Barcelona. Opened by María del Carmen Tobar, it originally was a bar and billiards room but expanded to have a dance hall. The bar attracted women from a wide variety of backgrounds including non-lesbian women. In the early years of the Spanish democratic transition the bar was accepted because its owner was well connected in the local government through her band-mate Daniela. Despite this, the police still occasionally raided the bar during its early years. Tobar played an active role in making Daniel’s the center of lesbian life in Barcelona, sponsoring sports teams and a theater group. The bar also sold feminist literature, including the magazine call Red de Amazonas. The bar later closed, but would be remembered in books and exhibits for its importance in the lesbian history of Spain. This article was expanded by a Colby College student in Dean Allbritton’s Queer Spain class, which sought to expand Wikipedia’s knowledge on LGBT history in Spain.

Many have heard of Amelia Earhart, but have you heard of Grace Muriel Earhart Morrissey? Morrissey was Amelia’s younger sister and a high school teacher, author, and activist. Earhart taught at the high schools in Medford and Belmont, MA, and she remained an active member of the Medford community until her death. She spent decades documenting Amelia’s life and managing her legacy, devoting significant time to coordinating her sister’s posthumous affairs, setting up donations, marshaling information, and dealing with Amelia’s fans. Morrissey also spoke out against the speculations that arose in the wake of Amelia’s death. She denied, for example, that her sister died while on a spy mission, as some theorists have past suggested. She wrote two books about Amelia, Courage is the Price and Amelia, My Courageous Sister. This article was created during May by a student in Lisa Gulesserian’s Kindred Spirits class at Harvard University, who allowed Amelia’s sister to shine. 

There are many Black men and women who fought against the injustices perpetuated against African-Americans seeking equal and fair treatment. Curlee Brown, Sr. is one such person who chose to challenge the inequality in the education system, as he launched a legal case that resulted in the integration of what would become the West Kentucky Community and Technical College. In 1950 Brown had attempted to enroll in the school, only to be rejected due to a then recently amended 1904 state law that prohibited desegregation in schools. He brought a lawsuit against the school and the U.S. District Court at Paducah ruled that the college must allow Brown and other Black applicants to enroll; however, the school fought against this. Their appeals were ultimately unsuccessful and the college was eventually integrated. For his tireless work with activism and the Paducah NAACP, Brown Sr. received multiple awards and honors and to honor his legacy the Kentucky NAACP created the Curlee Brown Scholarship. The Paducah branch of the NAACP created the Curlee Brown Award, which they grant to individuals who have made a visible impact in the field of human rights. In 2010 Brown Sr. was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Another notable individual was Cyrus Field Adams, a Republican civil rights activist, author, teacher, newspaper manager and businessman. Adams fought a key battle in civil rights for African Americans. He used his variety of positions through his life, whether that be working for the newspaper, teacher, or working for the treasurer to advocate for civil rights. In his later life after being appointed by Theodore Roosevelt to be the Assistant Register at the US Treasury, he used this platform to write a book titled, The National Afro-American Council, Organized 1898: a history etc. In 1912, Adams decided to leave his position at the Treasury and join President Taft’s re-election campaign as asked to do so by Taft himself. This was an attempt to get Adams out of the treasury position as Taft had promised that position to another African-American man who supported Taft. Taft lost this election and President Wilson took over, he replaced every Republican that had worked for Taft including Adams. In the years to follow, an investigation was launched regarding the time Adams spent at the treasury to try to discredit his career. It’s thanks to University of Kentucky students in Nikki Brown’s African American History, 1865 to the Present class that we now have these articles. 

Joanna Mary Boyce (7 December 1831 – 15 July 1861) was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She is also known by her married name as Mrs. H.T. Wells, or as Joanna Mary Wells. She produced multiple works with historical themes, as well as portraits and sketches, and authored art criticism responding to her contemporaries. Boyce first exhibited her artwork publicly in 1855 at the Royal Academy. Though Boyce exhibited two pieces, it was her painting Elgiva that won Boyce the admiration of such critics as John Ruskin and Ford Madox Brown. In it, Boyce depicted model Lizzie Ridley as a tragic heroine from Anglo-Saxon historical legend, possibly following the precedent of Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais who had depicted Elgiva eight years prior. Following her first exhibition, Boyce continued to pursue artistic excellence through extensive sketching and international art-viewing expeditions. She spent 1857 in Italy, and in December of that year married miniaturist Henry Tanworth Wells (later a Royal Academician) in Rome. Boyce used her time in Italy to work on paintings such as The Boys’ Crusade and La Veneziana, a portrait of a Venetian lady. In addition to her own artistic practice at this time, Boyce also continued a lifelong practice of seeking out and analyzing the artwork of her contemporaries. Boyce published some of this analysis as art criticism in the Saturday Review, wherein she lauded the “sincerity” and principles of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, and noted the positive influence of John Ruskin on the English art world. At the time of her death, contemporaries remarked on Boyce’s talent as an artist: Dante Gabriel Rossetti described her as “a wonderfully gifted woman”, and another obituarist called her a genius. Later critics have observed that Boyce’s reputation was somewhat constrained by her early death, but her art has been highlighted in exhibitions up until the present day. Who do we have to thank for the expansion of this article? None other than a UW Madison student from Anna Simon’s Art Librarianship class!

The Rio Grande sucker is a freshwater fish species native to the American southwest. Like many fish species in the area, populations have declined as a consequence of land use change, habitat loss, environmental degradation and competition from non-native species. As a result of this, the Rio Grande sucker is considered endangered in Colorado and a “species of concern” in Arizona. But before a student in Derek Houston’s Biology 667 class created an article about it, there was no Wikipedia article about the Rio Grande sucker. Given the important role that Wikipedia articles serve as a starting point for research into a topic, the presence of this article might have an impact on regulators who are trying to manage this fish species.

Little things run the world — in particular, the microorganisms that make up most of the living things on Earth. Rhodobacter capsulatus is a type of purple bacteria, which are bacteria that are able to make their own food using photosynthesis, much like plants do, but purple bacteria use a purple molecule to capture light instead of the green pigments that plants use. Rhodobacter capsulatus is also able to make gene transfer agents, small packages of DNA that allow them to transfer genes to other bacteria, without using sex. Before a student in Kelly Bender’s Prokaryotic Diversity class started editing it, Wikipedia’s article about this species of bacteria was just a three-sentence stub which mostly talked about the Latin roots of its scientific name. The student editor was able to expand the article into something very informative, adding sections about its genomics, morphology, ecology and significance, among others. Other students in the class made similar improvements to the Pseudomonas stutzeri and Chlamydia felis articles.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Wikipedia

This month we launched a 6-week intensive course focused on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of COVID-19 pandemic information. Specifically, participants are focusing on state-specific articles. In the United States, many of the actions taken that affect people’s lives most happen at the state level, and out of a commitment to public knowledge on Wikipedia we decided to run a course at no cost to participants in order to shore up this vital content. The scope of the course was more narrow than usual, and the duration a bit shorter, which allowed Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady to develop a custom curriculum to guide participants to maximize their impact in a relatively short period of time.

We still have a couple weeks left in the COVID-19 Wiki Scholars course, but participants are already doing some incredible work. Highlights include a significantly expanded section of the Maine article that focuses on the impact on education; a near tripling of the size of the Wyoming article, including a major update to the timeline, impact on the economy, impact on colleges, and effects on the Northern Arapaho tribe and Yellowstone; several updates to the Florida timeline; increasing the size of the North Dakota article from about 6,500 to 45,000 bytes; and the addition of a significant section on the impact on voting in the New York article. At the start of the course, Wikipedia already had articles on all 50 states, but one Wiki Scholar ran into a challenge: how should we cover the well-documented impact on the Navajo Nation, which has the highest per capita rate of infection in the country and covers parts of three states? The answer seems obvious in hindsight, but nobody had done it yet: to create a brand new article about the COVID-19 pandemic in the Navajo Nation. Thanks to that Wiki Scholar, the impact on this community is covered on Wikipedia.

We were also excited to launch a course in partnership with 500 Women Scientists, focused on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women in science. We’re less than half way through the course at the end of the month, and participants are still developing their articles, but we already have several great examples of biographies created or improved:

• Rana Fine, whose research concerns ocean circulation processes over time through use of chemical tracers and the connection to climate.
• Abigail Thompson, a mathematician who specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology.
• Rachel Green, a professor of molecular biology and genetics researching ribosomes and their function in translation.
• Deborah Kelley, a marine biologist studying hydrothermal vents, active submarine volcanoes, and life in those areas of the deep ocean.

The Women in Red Wiki Scholars course we kicked off last month started to hit its stride in May. We still have a few weeks left to go, but here are some of the biographies of women Wiki Scholars have created or improved this month:

• Mary Carson Breckinridge (1881-1965), American nurse midwife who founded the Frontier Nursing Service.
• Jane Sharp (c. 1641 – ?), an English midwife who wrote The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered in 1671.
• Anne de Graville (c. 1490 – c. 1540), French Renaissance poet, translator, book collector, and lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude of France.
• Madeleine Brès (1842-1921), the first French woman to obtain a medical degree.
• Montserrat Calleja Gómez, Spanish physicist who specializes in bionanomechanics.
• Anne-Marie Lagrange, French astrophysicist whose work focuses on extrasolar planetary systems.
• Natalie Roe, experimental particle physicist and observational cosmologist who is the Director of the Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Last month we highlighted some of the articles improved through the course we ran with the American Physical Society. It wrapped up early this month, but not before participants added a few more articles to their list of pages created or improved:

• Peter F. Green, materials scientist and Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
• Tulika Bose, physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research focuses on developing triggers for experimental searches of new phenomena in high energy physics.
• Henry T. Brown, chemical engineer who was the first African American director of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1983.
• Rayleigh theorem for eigenvalues, a concept in mathematics concerning the behavior of the solutions of an eigenvalue equation as the number of basis functions employed in its resolution increases.

We also finished our third course focused on family planning topics in partnership with the Society of Family Planning. As with previous courses, participants improved several high-impact articles on abortion, contraception, and related topics. Among the improvements this month were: the addition of a section on teleabortion to the telehealth article; updates to a wide range of state-specific abortion articles, like Abortion in New York and Abortion in Guam; extensive edits to the Title X article, the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventative health services; and a variety of improvements to the pregnancy test article.

Wikidata

Our first two Wikidata courses of 2020 just wrapped up. These two courses were able to a staggering amount of work in six short weeks.

• Beginner: This course had 10 participants who created 67 new Wikidata items, made more than 1,220 edits to Wikidata, and added 74 references to statements, improving the data quality for all of those claims. The participants in this course were engaged and excited about the course material. We were lucky to host several individuals from City College, part of CUNY, in New York. Having multiple perspectives from one institution emphasized just how many applications Wikidata has. We also had a participant work on a collection of theater posters. Take a look at this well-modeled item for Yosef Bulof in Gidon. One item, William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, received more than 20 new references, bolstering the accuracy of their respective statements. The interests of this group varied greatly. this link to see a complete list of items they edited.
• Intermediate: Ten editors participated in this course. They created 205 new items and edited over 5,100 existing ones. One of the participants was working on a project for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and uploaded over 5,000 images to Wikimedia Commons which can be used on Wikidata. Additionally, this course had several participants who are working on the LINCs project. This project aims to connect humanities research in Canada through linked data. The perspectives these individuals brought to this course demonstrated how Wikidata can influence other large scale linked data initiatives and, in turn, how these initiatives can influence Wikidata. To see some of the outstanding work these course participants did, follow this link.

This record number of items edited is nothing short of inspiring. We hope this indicates that more institutions are willing to invest in Wikidata or that more driven participants are finding their way to our course. Either way this is a large body of high quality work that will benefit Wikidata and the larger linked data community. 

Advancement

Partnerships

In May, we launched a Wiki Scientists course in partnership with 500 Women Scientists, facilitating as 20 members of 500 Women Scientists learned how to expand Wikipedia’s biographies of women in STEM. Thanks to a high demand from their members, we have continued searching for additional funding to support more women scientists as they join the Wikipedia community. 

We spent some time in May reworking the Scholars & Scientists end-of-course survey for participants, making sure we continue learning about their experiences in the course, motivations for participating, and how they assess their learning outcomes. We deployed the new survey to Wiki Scientists who completed the American Physical Society course, and we’re excited to use the information to demonstrate the value of working on Wikipedia to others’ employers and organizations.

Communications

Attabey Rodríguez Benítez has tips for folks stuck at home: learn how to add photos to Wikimedia Commons like she did in our Wiki Scientist course!

Dr. Lilly Eluvathingal learned how to add content to Wikipedia pages in her area of expertise through one of our Wiki Scientist courses. This month,  shared on our blog what she thought of the experience. 

The Wikipedia page Andrew Oh drastically improved achieved Good Article status when he continued to edit it after his course. Read more about what he found so valuable about the experience.

Blog posts:

• From your Instagram to the encyclopedia: photos for the greater good (May 1)
• Becoming a Wiki Scientist (May 5)
• Join the second cohort of WITH Wiki Scientists (May 11)
• When a student’s pride in their work lives on (May 13)
• Family planning doesn’t stop during a pandemic, so neither do the experts (May 15)
• Students use Wikipedia to highlight forgotten victims of nuclear weapons (May 20)
• Public scholarship can combat misinformation and prejudice surrounding disability healthcare (May 27)
• Monthly Report, March 2020 (May 28)
• Students document workplace health risks on Wikipedia amidst global pandemic (May 28)

External media:

• Join the second cohort of WITH Wiki Scientists. WITH Foundation. (May 7)
• Wikipedia Editing Course Gives a Voice to Women and Minorities in Physics. Leah Poffenberger. APS Physics.

Research:

• Guven T, Geraci C, Green J, Neist J, , et al. 2020, ‘Learning through Osmosis: A global Wikipedia editing course for medical students‘, MedEdPublish, 9, [1], 109, https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000109.1

Technology

In May, we turned our attention from our project to improve the user experience for students and instructors — which we had been iterating on through April — to the long-term foundations of the Dashboard. Google Summer of Code interns Amit Joki and Shashwat Kathuri, while not scheduled to officially start the ‘coding period’ until June, have already started making major strides to modernize the Dashboard’s JavaScript infrastructure by replacing deprecated libraries and features and replacing them with more stable and well-supported alternatives. This work will accelerate into the summer, as Amit focuses on streamlining our JavaScript and reducing the amount of code that browsers need to download, while Shashwat develops a system to better keep track of system errors and data bottlenecks.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of April were $174K, ($16K) under the budget of $190K. The Board was under ($9K) by moving the Board Meeting from In-person to Remote. Fundraising was over budget +$6K due to a personnel change creating a need for consulting work +$2K and employment costs +$3K and +$1K in Indirect Costs. General & Administrative were over +$11K due to Indirect overhead allocation change +$6K, Professional Fees +$4K, and Administrative Costs +$1K. Programs were under by ($24K) including Payroll ($5K), while under in Travel ($8K), Professional Fees ($2K) Communications ($2K) and Indirect costs ($7K).

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Finalizing the annual plan & budget for fiscal year 2020–21
• Dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our organization

In May, Frank continued working on putting the annual plan & budget for next fiscal year together. Relying on a multitude of different data sources, as well as numerous conversations, he tried to come up with a realistic picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic and other destabilizing events in the United States could affect Wiki Education. In particular, his goal was to understand how institutional funders might move forward given that times of crisis always trigger a reaction from philanthropy that might threaten the survival of nonprofits which – like Wiki Education – depend on continuously unlocking new funding opportunities from institutional grantmakers. Frank ran through different scenarios and possible ways to mitigate a situation where grantmakers wouldn’t accept any new grantees for the foreseeable future, and where they would focus on protecting their endowments instead. 

After sending a first draft of the potential annual plan for 2020–21 to the board, Frank started extensive conversations with individual board members. He highlighted the extreme uncertainty that made coming up with the best path forward difficult, and he listened to how the board members assessed the situation. Discussions included projections about the situation in our country in general, about the possible reaction of the philanthropic sector, as well as effects on higher education and knowledge institutions like museums, archives, and libraries. All these conversations lasted through May and the board generously agreed to extend the timeline for the delivery of the final version of the annual plan in order to find the best solution for Wiki Education and the many millions of people being positively impacted by our organization’s work.

• Amid the challenges facing higher education institutions in April, the Wikipedia Student Program reached an important milestone. For the first time, Wiki Education supported more than 400 courses. This number is a testament to our ongoing commitment to our instructors and our students as well as our commitment to Wikipedia and knowledge equity.

• We wrapped up two Scholars & Scientists courses this month: #Envision2030, the Wiki Scholars course run in partnership with Keene State College and the WITH Foundation-sponsored Wiki Scientists course focused on disability content on Wikipedia. Participants from both courses made significant contributions to many articles like Black Queen Hypothesis, Mitrofanoff procedure, and muteness (an article that receives almost 500 views every day where the participant’s edits account for 87.1% of its content!). Wiki Scientists also improved the article about diagnostic overshadowing and the sexual abuse and intellectual disability article. We published a guest blog post written by one of the WITH Wiki Scientists showing what a difference an image can make.
• We announced a partnership with 500 Women Scientists, an organization working to transform the leadership, diversity, and public engagement in science. We began recruiting scientists to participate in a Wiki Scientists course which will train participants how to add and expand biographies of women scientists to Wikipedia.

Read more…

For student work highlights; examples of great work from our Scholars & Scientists, Wikidata, and Visiting Scholars Programs; finance and fundraising updates; and more read our full report here.

• As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Wiki Education closed its office in the Presidio and moved all its operations online. In order to deal with the new situation, staff created a contingency and a crisis communications plan for each program. We also instituted a weekly COVID-19 briefing aimed at creating a shared understanding of how the pandemic affects our organization. A “Friday virtual social hour” helps staff deal with being isolated at home.
• March 2020 also saw dramatic changes to the higher education landscape as the vast majority of courses in the U.S. moved to online platforms as a result of the outbreak of COVID-19. It was a chaotic time for our instructors and students as they all adjusted to this new mode of learning, and Wiki Education was there to help. Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal checked in on courses to see if they needed additional help and to let them know that Wiki Education’s support would remain uninterrupted. We were truly heartened to hear from so many of our instructors as we all adjust to these new circumstances both in our professional and personal lives. We are grateful that we can continue to work with our instructors and students during this challenging time, and hope we can provide our students with a meaningful educational experience whether they are on or off campus.
• We launched the third Scholars & Scientists course in partnership with the Society of Family Planning (SFP) to improve Wikipedia articles related to abortion and contraception. We know that Wikipedia plays a significant role in the research people do about health and medicine, and we are happy to work with SFP to ensure the public has access to the highest quality information about family planning.

Read more…

For student work highlights; examples of great work from our Scholars & Scientists, Wikidata, and Visiting Scholars Programs; finance and fundraising updates; and more read our full report here.

Header/thumbnail image by Marcela McGreal (CC BY 2.0) shows protesters in New York, was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by a student in Amy Carleton’s English course at Northeastern University, and is used in the Wikipedia article Asian American university resource center. Read this month’s report for more examples of great student work.

• December saw the wrap up of the Fall 2019 term. Students moved their work into the article main space and put the finishing touches on their articles. Another cohort of students can proudly say that they helped to improve Wikipedia and in doing so, the world’s access to good and reliable information.
• In December, we signed a contract with the American Physical Society (APS), who is sponsoring a Wiki Scientists course beginning in February 2020. APS is supporting its members as they learn how to add women physicists to Wikipedia.
• Our two final Wikidata courses of 2019 just wrapped up. This was the largest group of participants we have worked with and they made a lasting impact on Wikidata. We are eager to see what they will do with their Wikidata knowledge and if their institutions will invest in Wikidata in the future. We were very pleased with both course’s contributions and look forward to the sustained impact they will have on Wikidata.

Programs

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Fall 2019 in numbers, as of December 31:

• 388 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (221, or 57%, were led by returning instructors)
• 7,532 student editors were enrolled
• 67% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 6,390 articles, created 648 new entries, added 5.62 million words and 56,200 references.

December saw the wrap up of the Fall 2019 term. Students moved their work into the article main space and put the finishing touches on their articles. Another cohort of students can proudly say that they helped to improve Wikipedia and in doing so, the world’s access to good and reliable information.

As the Fall term was coming to a close, Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal was busy getting ready for Spring 2020. There are a lot of moving parts when supporting close to 400 courses a term, and Helaine makes sure that all of our courses are set up for success. As courses wound down, Wikipedia Experts Ian Ramjohn, Shalor Toncray, and Elysia Webb carefully reviewed each course to make sure that all student content made it into the article main space where appropriate.

During December, Helaine also had the opportunity to visit UC Berkeley where she talked about the Student Program alongside Naniette Coleman, long time program participant. During the talk, several of Naniette’s current and past students presented on their Wikipedia experience. We hope to welcome some of the attendees into our program going forward.

Student work highlights:

Assimilation. It’s not just just something that happens when the Borg come across certain Star Fleet Captains. It’s something that can occur as a result of a minority group takes on the traditions and culture of the majority, which in turn runs a strong risk of the minority abandoning or changing parts of their own culture. Sometimes this cultural assimilation is voluntary, such as an immigrant adopting new behaviors and culture in order to ease the process of integrating into a new country. Other times it’s forced upon the individual, as was the case with Native American children who were often forcibly taken from their homes and placed in Indian Residential Schools, such as the ones in Wisconsin. Children were told that they must learn about Euro-American culture and subject matters and that their old ways were “barbaric”. The children would be given Western-style clothing, haircuts, and names, as well as encouraged to learn and speak in English. Schooling was often harsh and sometimes even deadly, as the children could be punished if they didn’t speak in English, try to run away, or otherwise rebel. Conditions in some schools were terrible and children were kept in dirty, unsanitary locations with poor access to proper health and nutrition. Some Native Americans who lived in these schools reported that they received sexual, manual, physical, and mental abuse from the very people who were meant to care for them. Not all of the schools were seen as completely horrible and inhuman, however, as in the case of the Tomah Indian Industrial School in Wisconsin, which reportedly was such a model school that Native Americans who lived near the school wished to send their children to the school in order for them to receive a formal American-style education. Although it has been decades since the last boarding school closed, it’s important to remember that this happened so that society and humanity can learn from and hopefully avoid the events that occurred. It’s thanks to the students in Rebekah Willett’s LIS301 class at UW-Madison that an article on American Indian boarding schools in Wisconsin now exists on Wikipedia, as this can help ensure that this part of American history will not be forgotten.

Science is shaped by Wikipedia, highlighting the importance of accurate scientific content. Florida State students in Hank Bass’s Advanced Molecular Biology course contributed greatly to topics in molecular biology this term. Students added paragraphs of content and dozens of citations to articles like C9 and LINE1, both important genetic concepts. Students also created three new articles: A8V and D145E, both genetic mutations, and Bernhard Brenner, a muscle fiber researcher. When students learn how to improve Wikipedia articles, their work actually ripples through future scientific literature. A study examining chemistry content on Wikipedia found that its content doesn’t just reflect science, but it actually influences the future direction of science. The terminology and citations that these students added are more likely to crop up in future scientific publications, an outcome that is very unlikely in traditional writing assignments.

Serialized novels have been a popular way to tell stories and has endured over the centuries, albeit changing and adapting to the times as technology has made it easier for writers to release their work directly to the reader via methods such as podcasting. Prior to this, however, it was common for serial novels to be distributed in print through methods such as pamphlets or newspapers. One student in Larry Hanley’s English 480 class at San Francisco State University chose to create a new article on Blake; or the Huts of America. Written by Martin Delany, who drew upon current and historical events as material, it was initially published in two parts. The first in 1859 by the Anglo-African Magazine (AAM), and the second, during the earlier part of the American Civil War, in 1861-62 by the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine (WAA), however the novel is incomplete due to historians being unable to locate any copies of the issues that would presumably complete the novel. Scholarship and awareness of the book was minimal following the last serial installment, however it gained more attention in the 40s through 60s, partially informed by its ideological influence on the types of Black revolutionary thought seen in the Black Power and Pan-Africanism Movements.

In April 1951, Barbara Rose Johns and other African American students at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, protested the educational qualities and horrible conditions in the school system. Theirs was not an isolated case, as other African American students were also not given access to the same quality of education that their white peers enjoyed. This led to the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, where the Supreme Court deemed segregation unconstitutional and that traditionally white schools should admit black students. Attempts were made by Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, Governor Thomas B. Stanley, and his successor J. Lindsay Almond to defy the ruling via the Stanley Plan and Massive Resistance, but were unsuccessful. In Norfolk the segregationist school board was willing to admit African American students — but only if they were able to pass an admissions exam and go through entrance interviews. Unbeknownst to the applicants, they were tested on material that was 1-3 grades above their current level and as a result all of the reported 151 students failed the exam. District Court Judge Walter E. Hoffman, who wasn’t to be fooled by the school board’s plans, expressed disbelief that all of the students failed the exam and demanded that some be admitted. As a result the Norfolk 17, six boys and eleven girls, were integrated into all-white schools on February 2, 1959. They were prepared beforehand for both the educational lessons that white students received as well as for the abuse that those same white students and others would likely try to inflict upon them. Instructions were given on what to do if they experienced actions such as being spit on or pushed down stairs and the Norfolk 17 have described the school environments as hellish, stating that they were spit on, knocked down stairs, and had personal belongings destroyed. They were also instructed to sit by the door in case they needed to escape easily and to sit at the front of the class where the teacher could see if one of their peers did something to them. Their fellow students would also cover up their faces as the African American students entered the room. Despite being met with hostility, the Norfolk 17 stated that they did not miss a day of school and that they endured the pain every day to ensure that desegregation would happen. Prior to the article being moved live there was no article of this group on Wikipedia, so it’s thanks to a Columbia College student in Sarah Lirley McCune’s African American History class that this amazing group of people now have an article on Wikipedia.

Art is an amazing thing. It can tell tales that will continue being told long after the artist’s death. It can help researchers learn more about the artwork’s original context and meaning in antiquity. However those details aren’t the only things of interest about an older artwork: There is also much to learn about its “grounding” — the circumstances of its modern re-discovery, excavation, restoration and display. A student in Richard Teverson’s Roman Art class at Fordham University chose to expand the article on the Meroë Head. Also known as the Head of Augustus from Meroë, is a larger-than-life-size bronze head depicting Rome’s first emperor that was found in the ancient Nubian site of Meroë in Sudan. Long admired for its striking appearance and perfect proportions, it is now part of the British Museum’s collection. It was looted from Roman Egypt in 24 BC by the forces of Queen Amanirenas of Kush and brought back to Meroe, where it was buried beneath the staircase of a temple.

Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) has become popular as a recreational drug and dietary supplement, although it is not approved for any drug use and is illegal in several countries and US states. Mitragynine is the most abundant alkaloid in kratom, and the main psychoactive compounds in the drug, but until a student in Benjamin Wolozin’s Systems Pharmacology class created the article, Wikipedia had very little information about the compound. When kratom is often presented online as either a dangerous drug or a panacea, a Wikipedia article that simply summarizes the chemistry of its main constituent is especially beneficial. Other student editors in the class expanded on articles about EIF4A1, a protein produced by humans, and GrpE, a bacterial protein.

African topics are generally covered in less depth on Wikipedia than are comparable topics in other parts of the world, which makes the work done by students in Mark Daku’s Introduction to African Politics class especially important. Student editors in the class made major improvements to topics ranging from Gender equality in Rwanda, to Education in Equatorial Guinea, 2002 Mombasa attacks, the Politics of the Comoros, and Seychelles.

Three student-authored articles appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page in the Did You Know? section: Rhagoletis juglandis on December 2, Coelopa pilipes on December 17, and Hirtodrosophila mycetophaga on December 18.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Wikidata

Our two final Wikidata courses of 2019 just wrapped up. This was the largest group of participants we have worked with and we were very pleased with their impact on Wikidata.

• Beginner: This course had 18 editors who created 15 new Wikidata items, made more than 575 edits to Wikidata, and added 147 references to statements, improving the data quality for all of those statements. This course had a healthy mix of participants with linked data experience and some with less Wikidata experience. One item, William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, received more than 20 new references, bolstering the accuracy of their respective statements. The interests of this group varied greatly. Follow this link to see a complete list of items they edited.

• Intermediate: Eleven editors participated in this course. They added 217 references to statements and edited 178 items with 834 distinct edits. This course featured a particular emphasis on court cases, which is essential to help address the content gap with law-related items on Wikidata. You can follow this link to see a full list of articles this group worked on.

This record number of participants made a lasting impact on Wikidata. We are eager to see what they will do with their Wikidata knowledge and if their institutions will invest in Wikidata in the future. We were very pleased with both course’s contributions and look forward to the sustained impact they will have on Wikidata.

Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent was able to visit some course participants at the Art Institute of Chicago in December. Participants Josh Andrews, and Illya Moskvin, along with their supervisor, Nikhil Trivedi discussed the outcomes of the course and the impact that linked data will have on museums like the Art Institute. The Art Institute recently launched a public API that anyone can use to learn more about their collection data. During their meeting they covered a lot of ground, identifying the following areas of interest in museums that linked data will affect:

• All museum collections have incomplete data about their works. Other institutions or editors may be able to help fill in those gaps on Wikidata
• Having a persistent URL on Wikidata will increase the visibility of items thanks to Google’s (and other search engine’s) emphasis of Wikimedia URLs in search results
• Applying collection authorities will allow institutions to be a more definitive source about collection data (if the museum knows the most about a particular work, they would have the most detailed data – sharing that on Wikidata would further establish that authority)
• Additional discoverability/linking through identifiers across other databases (any other museum or the Getty thesaurus for instance)
• Having collection data structured across several institutions, the ability to query across collections becomes possible
• These queries can answer any number of questions posed by patrons, artists, publishers, researchers, museum leadership, or colleagues from other institutions

We couldn’t be more proud of these course participants leading the conversation on linked data at their institution. We look forward to hearing how linked data projects continue to develop at the Art Institute.

Wikipedia

This month, our Living Knowledge Wiki Scientists began improving Wikipedia articles on biology topics. Though most are still in the drafting phase, working in sandboxes, examples of the topics they are improving include stretch reflex and reporter gene. These two important concepts in human physiology and genetics have Wikipedia articles which have been tagged with problems for many years, making them ideal projects for subject-matter experts to tackle.

The Women in Red at UMass Lowell Wiki Scholars course wrapped up this month. Participants did much of their editing last month, and when we reconvened after the Thanksgiving break we shifted the conversation to teaching with Wikipedia. Unusual for our Wiki Scholars courses, we included two weeks preparing participants to incorporate Wikipedia into their classes using Wiki Education’s Student Program. This was part of a larger initiative the university is running under the heading of “Women in Red at UMass Lowell,” working to improve Wikipedia, faculty skills, and pedagogy. Several of the Wiki Scholars did continue to edit this month, however, resulting in multiple new articles:

• What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, an 1881 cookbook written by Abby Fisher, a former slave. It is believed to be the first cookbook written by an African-American.
• Eliza Jane Cate (1812-1884), a New England writer of fiction who also worked in several cotton mills.
• Mico Kaufman (1924-2016), a Romanian-American sculptor who made inaugural medals for Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush, Sr.

Visiting Scholars Program

The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge half dollar is a commemorative fifty-cent piece struck in 1936. Designed by Jacques Shnier, it celebrates the opening of the Bay Bridge that year. One one side is the bridge itself, and on the other a large grizzly bear. The bear was chosen as a symbol for California, but there was controversy because the design itself may have been modeled after a captive bear in a cage in Golden Gate Park. Unusually, one of the ways it was sold was through booths on either side of the bridge. This month, George Mason University Visiting Scholar Gary Greenbaum successfully brought the article on the coin up to Featured Article status, marking it as one of Wikipedia’s very best.

Advancement

Partnerships

In December, we signed a contract with the American Physical Society (APS), who is sponsoring a Wiki Scientists course beginning in February 2020. APS is supporting its members as they learn how to add women physicists to Wikipedia. This collaboration started after Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics and did not meet Wikipedia’s notability standards until the award was announced. With the resulting controversy, APS saw the importance of ensuring women physicists are recognized for their work and achievements. In March 2019, Wiki Education attended the APS annual meeting to get members excited about adding women to Wikipedia. This month, we took the collaboration further by committing to running an in-depth training in early 2020 to build more Wikipedia expertise into the membership. We look forward to seeing their excellent work on Wikipedia in the new year.

Fundraising

In December, we received notification from the Wikimedia Foundation that our Annual Planning Grant was approved in the amount of $400K. This money will be used to support our work. We submitted an interim grant report to the Michelson 20MM Foundation, describing our work on improving the functionality of the Dashboard for both students and instructors. We also drafted and submitted a final report for our grant from the Moore Foundation.

Throughout the month, we prepared for the departure of Chief Advancement Officer TJ Bliss, who was scheduled to end his tenure at Wiki Education in early January 2020. This preparation included ensuring all notes, data, and other information related to the past 2.5 years of fundraising activities were carefully documented and organized. We also held several senior leadership team meetings to thoughtfully strategize about how to ensure continuity of fundraising efforts into the future. As part of this strategy, a decision was made to retain TJ as a part-time consultant for a few months, in order to provide sufficient time to onboard a replacement and maintain relationships with key funders.

Communications

December is an especially great time to get instructors excited about teaching with Wikipedia in the spring, so we published quite a few guest blogs from Student Program participants. Kai Medina, a student of ecology, shares why he has continued to edit Wikipedia in his free time after completing the assignment earlier in 2019. Rachel Tamar Van taught a Wikipedia writing assignment in a classroom full of history teachers, and shares why she fell in love with the assignment. We spoke with Heather Sharkey, whose students at the University of Pennsylvania felt connection to local history while writing Wikipedia page for a local mosque. And Melissa Kahili-Heede and Richard Kasuya explain how they threw a pizza party for the student group who improved their assigned Wikipedia article the most.

We also featured a blog by a Wiki Scientist in our Society of Family Planning sponsored Wikipedia training course. In it, she explains how she combined her personal and professional experiences with doulas to improve the Wikipedia article about them.

Blog posts:

• Support free and universal access to information this #GivingTuesday (December 3)
• Students of foreign literature improve Wikipedia (December 9)
• Bringing the community together: WikidataCon 2019 (December 10)
• Improving medical Wikipedia pages as an expert and a consumer (December 11)
• One big way to amplify your knowledge and make a chance in the world (December 16)
• If you give a mouse a Wikipedia page… (December 17)
• An ecology student becomes a Wikipedian (December 17)
• Wiki Education awarded Spark Grant to update Dashboard
• When we join hands to bring women to Wikipedia (December 19)
• Updating the student user experience for Spring 2020 (December 19)
• Writing with a purpose: history teachers revise Wikipedia (December 20)
• Early career scientists interest in science policy can make a difference (December 20)
• Penn students feel connection to local history while writing Wikipedia page for local mosque (December 23)
• Adding to Wikipedia as an assignment? It’s a pizza cake… (December 24)
• Celebrating your students’ work at the end of the term (December 26)

External media:

Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Danielle Picard, Mary Anne Caton and Wikipedia Editing. Faith Rovenolt. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. (December 15, 2019)

Technology

In December, we finished up and deployed the initial version of the Progress Tracker interface for guiding students through the main stages of Wikipedia writing assignments. This new set of features is ready for the incoming wave of Spring 2020, and we’ll be conducting usability tests with students in the first weeks of 2020.

We also improved how Exercise modules integrate into course pages, and made a number of dependency and test updates to keep the Dashboard codebase up-to-date.

Our two winter Outreachy interns started work this month; their projects will continue from now until March 2020.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of December were $177K. It is ($5K) under the budget of $182K. Fundraising was right on target. Governance was over by +$1K, due to a payroll increase. General and Administration was over by +$5K. +$15K in indirect costs not allocated, +$1K in payroll, while underspending ($11K) in Professional Services, we expect to see these expenses in Q3. Programs was under ($11K), ($15K) in Indirect Costs not allocated, ($5K) in Travel, ($2K) in Communications, with an increase in Payroll Expenses of +$11K.

The Year-to-date expenses $1.073K, ($40K) under the budget of $1.113K. Fundraising is under by ($3K), of which ($2K) is Indirect Costs and ($1K) is under in Travel. General and Administration is over by +$51K. +$77K in indirect costs not re-allocated to Programs and Fundraising, +$5K in Travel, while underspending ($27K) in Professional Services and ($4K) in General Expenses. Programs is under ($89K), of which ($75K) relates to Indirect Costs, ($11K) in Communications, ($33K) Travel, ($2K) in Administrative Costs while over in Payroll Expenses +$19K, and Outside Services +$13K.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:
• Hiring of a new fundraiser
• Finalizing the audit for fiscal year 2018–19
• Preparing for the in-person board meeting in January

In December, Executive Director Frank Schulenburg started the search for a new fundraiser. With TJ leaving Wiki Education in January to take on a new role as Chief Academic Officer at the Idaho State Board of Education in his hometown Boise, Frank will hire a fundraiser focused on institutional funding. In order to find a good candidate in a very tight job market in the Bay Area, Wiki Education will work with recruiters at m/Oppenheim, who have been successful in sourcing positions for our organization in the past. Beginning in January, Frank will oversee the Advancement Team’s work in the areas of earned income and grants.

Together with members of the senior leadership team, Frank continued working on the fundraising outlook analysis, as well as on a number of opportunities for future programmatic work. He also finalized work on mapping out the services that Wiki Education will offer over the next couple of years. In order to get a better picture of what our work in fiscal year 2020–21 might look like, Deputy Director LiAnna Davis and Frank continued the discussion of potential areas of collaboration between Wiki Education and the Wikimedia Foundation with Alex Stinson, Senior Strategist, Community Programs at Wikimedia.

Visitors and Guests

Abhishek Suryawanshi visited Wiki Education’s office to collaborate on ideas on how Wiki Education can help him on his project to translate our dashboard into regional local languages.

***

• We had our All Staff Meeting, a week-long opportunity for remote staff to join the San Francisco-based team members for a week of meetings, collaboration, and socializing.

• In February Paul Carroll began as Director, Institutional Funding. Having spent his professional career at the nexus of philanthropy, government, and nonprofits, Paul is a great fit for establishing and cultivating Wiki Education’s relationships with institutional donors; managing day-to-day fundraising activities; and ensuring that all of us here at Wiki Education deliver on our giving agreements.
• One of our most successful and long-term Wiki Scholars collaborations has been with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It was about a year and a half ago that we ran our first course in support of their exhibit, Rightfully Hers, celebrating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States. This month Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady and Executive Director Frank Schulenburg and two program participants visited NARA. We met with NARA staff to discuss the collaboration and went on a tour of the excellent and timely exhibit we have worked hard to support. Thanks to NARA for hosting us. We are looking forward to possible future collaborations!

Programs

This month, we had our All Staff, a week-long opportunity for remote staff to join the San Francisco-based team members for a week of meetings, collaboration, and socializing. The schedule enabled the Programs team to spend some time as a group, kicking off our planning process for next fiscal year. Our Wikipedia Experts also came into town one day earlier, giving them an opportunity to have a pre-meeting gathering to discuss their team processes and collaboration.

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2020 in numbers, as of February 29:

• 352 Wiki Education courses were in progress (232, or 66%, were led by returning instructors).
• 5,741 student editors were enrolled.
• 57% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 1,960 articles, created 65 new entries, and added 691,000 words and 7,460 references.

Throughout February, students began to dive deeper into their Wikipedia assignments. Now that they learned some of the basics of Wikipedia editing, they began to choose their topics, collect their research, and begin some initial drafts of their work. Some ambitious students even began to move their work into the article main space!

We launched some major enhancements to our course dashboard for both instructors and students, and we’re excited to see how these new features help faculty and students both navigate the Wikipedia assignment and ultimately improve Wikipedia.

In February, Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal participated in a webinar run by Cleveland State University’s Center for Faculty Excellence. During the program, Helaine discussed some best practices for running a Wikipedia assignment as well as the motivations for doing so. Wikipedia Experts Shalor Toncray, Elysia Webb, and Ian Ramjohn were busy tracking student work and ensuring that students were on the right path for success with their Wikipedia project.

Student work highlights:

One student-authored article appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page in the Did You Know? section: Template:Did you know nominations/Diversity ideologies, on February 1.

This term, Middle Georgia State University students in Gerald Lucas’s Writing in Digital Environs class worked to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of various topics ranging from substances poisonous to dogs to history. However all of the students worked together to expand an article for Norman Mailer’s The Faith of Graffiti, a 1974 essay about New York City’s graffiti artists. Through interviews, exploration, and analyses, the 12,000-word essay explores the political and artistic implications of graffiti. Like several of his other non-fiction narratives, Mailer employs new journalism: he adopts a persona, here the A-I or “Aesthetic Investigator”, to provide both an objective distance from the topic and to engender the text with the creative and critical eye of the novelist. Unlike many of Mailer’s other works, this received less attention from critics. It was also considered to be controversial when originally published due to Mailer’s apparent glorification of the graffiti artist. One of the students also created an article for Madwoman, the fourth collection of poetry by Jamaican American poet Shara McCallum. The poems in Madwoman discuss three different stages: childhood, adulthood, and motherhood, in relation to the study of identity and what it means to be a woman.

Before medical staff perform a procedure on a patient, they are expected to discuss the treatment with the patient and/or guardian and gain their consent to treat. Called informed consent, this allows the individual to make an educated decision on whether or not a procedure is worth the potential side effects or risks. Informed consent has evolved over the years; it wasn’t until the Enlightenment movement in the 18th and 19th centuries that it was believed that patients were sufficiently educated to understand their doctors’ requirements and prescriptions. Even then, it was still not believed that patients could reliably form their own opinions nor make appropriate medical decisions for themselves. Flash forward to the 1950s. A man named Martin Salgo was diagnosed with a blood vessel blockage in his abdomen by Stanford physician Dr. Frank Gerbode, who recommended an investigative procedure using sodium urokon to discover the exact location of the blockage and if successful, a subsequent operation to remove it. Salgo was admitted and the investigative procedure conducted, however the next day Salgo woke up paralyzed in the lower extremities. In the resulting malpractice suit, Salgo v. Leland Stanford Jr. University Board of Trustees, lawyers for the plaintiff argued that neither Salgo nor his family were made properly and fully aware of the potential risks and practices associated with the procedure, which the physicians eventually acknowledged. There were also additional concerns that the procedure was not necessary and was performed incorrectly, as the physicians used anywhere from approximately 2-5 times the highest dose recommended by the sodium urokon manufacturer. While today the lack of informed consent would be obvious, during Salgo’s case, it had not yet been clarified in court what was needed for a patient to be considered “reasonably informed.” The courts determined that while Salgo was able to prove that the physicians were negligent, Gerbode was not held liable as there was no explicit agreement that he would perform the surgery, as it was common practice for the attending physician to not be present for the procedure. This helped to set a precedent for the following cases in terms of the patient being adequately informed. If there was a failure to disclose information, danger, and alternatives, there was cause for legal action. However, what adequate information looked like would be established with later cases. A landmark case, there was previously no article for Salgo v. Leland

Stanford Jr. University Board of Trustees on Wikipedia until a student in Benjamin Mako Hill’s Interpersonal Media class at the University of Washington noticed that it was missing.

Representation matters, and our students are changing the face of what a scientist looks like by adding biographies to Wikipedia. In addition to adding biographies of women scientists, our students add and improve scientists of other underrepresented groups. In the WiSE course at Saint Mary’s College, students were challenged to “research a scientist who represents a group that is underrepresented in science, and you will contribute to a Wikipedia article about them”. Articles like Squire Booker, an African-American biochemist, were greatly expanded from a mere 46 words (exactly two sentences) to more than 600 words! African-American chemist Gregory H. Robinson didn’t even have a biography, despite his 150+ publications, numerous awards, and status as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The dedicated efforts of these ten students brought more than 17,000 words to Wikipedia, well-sourced with more than 250 references. Because only 9% of STEM workers in the US are black, the public might be used to thinking of scientists that look a certain way. The more than 8,000 visitors to the pages edited by these students hopefully left with new perceptions of who can be a scientist.

Beach pollution is an important consequence of marine pollution, and can include everything from plastic bottles and fishing gear to oil spill clean-up. A student in Julio Postigo’s Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change class converted Wikipedia’s short article beach cleaning into a substantial and well-referenced one. Another student converted the short and fairly uninformative article on Climate change in Mexico into a lengthy and informative one. Readily-available information about environmental issues like this in developing countries is often hard to find, so this article fills an important need. A third student fleshed out the fishery cooperative article, which was a short and poorly-developed outline.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Wikipedia

One of our most successful and long-term Wiki Scholars collaborations has been with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It was about a year and a half ago that we ran our first course in support of their exhibit, Rightfully Hers, celebrating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States. We ran a total of six courses on the subject, including one Advanced course that brought the Nineteenth Amendment article itself up to Good Article status. At the end of this month, Ryan and Frank traveled to Washington, DC, to visit NARA. We were happy that two program participants were able to join us, too: Bonnie Burns and Rose Anne Ullrich. Over the course of a day, we met with NARA staff to discuss the collaboration and went on a tour of the excellent and timely exhibit we have worked hard to support. Thanks to NARA for hosting us. We are looking forward to possible future collaborations!

We wrapped up our 8-week Science & Society Wiki Scientists course this month, with several great contributions:

• Adriana Ocampo is a Colombian planetary geologist and Science Program Manager at NASA. In recognition of her valuable contributions to space exploration, Ocampo has the unusual distinction of having an asteroid named after her. A Wiki Scientist significantly expanded coverage of her accomplishments and rewrote the lead.
• Dead Birds (1963 film), a 1963 documentary by Robert Gardner about the ritual warfare cycle of the Dugum Dani people in the western part of the island of New Guinea. A Wiki Scientist more than quadrupled the size of this renowned ethnographic film.
• The entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae now has a picture and has been significantly expanded.
• A Wiki Scientist expanded the article on American author and suffragist Mary Stewart Cutting Jr.. Importantly, when the course started, the subject’s article and the article about her mother had the same birth year! That has now been corrected, of course, and citations added, among other improvements.
• A Wiki Scientist also uploaded several high-quality images of frogs, which are now used in Wikipedia articles like Raorchestes jayarami

Participants in the course we are running in partnership with Keene State College, which started last month, are beginning to work in sandboxes. We are excited by the topics they are choosing, which focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

We also launched three new courses this month. As announced in January, the WITH Foundation has sponsored a Wiki Scientists training course for scholars working in disability studies and/or healthcare. Though they are just getting started now, through our 12-week course, participants will learn to edit Wikipedia and will contribute to two articles relevant to disability. Another Wiki Scientists course began this month in partnership with the American Physical Society. In that course, scientists will work to improve or create biographies of women in physics.

Finally, we launched our second ever Advanced Wiki Scholars course. With so many capable subject-matter experts having gone through our Wiki Scholars and Wiki Scientists courses, we put out a call for participants interested to take their skills to the next level while diving into high-impact voting rights articles. We only just started at the end of this month, but excited to get to work improving these articles that so many people read every day.

Wikidata

February saw continued research into various online learning platforms. We are working to establish a set of best practices that we can use to inform the creation of our self-directed Wikidata courses. We have created a survey to gather data about what we like and don’t like about these platforms. We will be analyzing this data next month to establish best practices and identify next steps. We also published a blog about Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent’s trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he visited participants he had taught in his Wikidata courses. It was a great opportunity to hear how they plan to implement their new expertise into their existing work.

Visiting Scholars Program

Susan Hale (1833-1910) was an American author, traveler, and watercolor painting. She spent most of her life in New England, but traveled extensively and studied under English, French, and German painters. Her biography is the latest to be improved by long-time Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who regularly creates or improves the quality of articles on women writers using resources available to her through Northeastern.

Another achievement this month comes from George Mason University Visiting Scholars Gary Greenbaum, who successfully brought the article on the Albany Charter half dollar to Featured Article status. This fifty-cent piece was one of several issued in 1936 and marked the anniversary of the city’s municipal charter 250 years prior. It was designed by sculptor Gertrude K. Lathrop, and depicts a beaver on the obverse side (front).

Advancement

Fundraising

In February Paul Carroll began as Director, Institutional Funding. Having spent his professional career at the nexus of philanthropy, government, and nonprofits, Paul is a great fit for establishing and cultivating Wiki Education’s relationships with institutional donors; managing day-to-day fundraising activities; and ensuring that all of us here at Wiki Education deliver on our giving agreements. For much of the past twenty years, Paul has worked as a grantmaker with the Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation that addresses international security. Paul served as the program director with responsibilities for a roughly $6 million annual grantmaking budget. He has also served on the steering committee of the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG), an international network of foundations and individual donors interested in a broad range of peace, human security, and development issues. Paul has lived on both sides of the fundraising/grantmaking table – experience that adds to his understanding of and appreciation for the craft of development, communications, and partnership-building. Welcome, Paul!

Paul’s initial week was the All Staff meeting with reviews of recent Wiki Education work and outcomes, initial thoughts about the year ahead, and staff team-building and learning. Paul immersed himself in the meetings and activities and began the formal onboarding process comprised of administrative tasks and briefings with colleagues about the history of Wiki Education, Wikipedia, our financial supporters, etc.

Paul also worked with former Chief Advancement Officer TJ Bliss via video calls to understand existing funding obligations, the relationships with our donors, and the needs ahead with respect to reporting, seeking follow-on funds, and prospecting for new sources of support. In the latter half of the month, Paul began reaching out to his own network to make inquiries about funding priorities and “get the Wiki Education” name out there.

Partnerships

This month, Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson joined colleagues from other organizations in the Open Access / Open Educational Resources (OER) community. Members of the MIT Open 2020 Working Group gathered in Palo Alto to discuss the future of OER and how we’d like to advance the movement in the next ten years. Wiki Education is excited to work with our colleagues at MIT, Creative Commons, the Hewlett Foundation, the Internet Archive, and so many other organizations working hard to advance the mission of bringing open knowledge to the world.

Communications

This month, we compiled some of our favorite guest blogs from students, who discuss why they liked their Wikipedia writing assignment so much. Students echo what we’ve found in research about the learning objectives the assignment achieves. Read more! We also published three testimonials from instructors in our Student Program. Dr. Josh DiCaglio reflects on having students understand Wikipedia’s editing culture by participating in it. Dr. Melissa Weininger and some of her students were interviewed about tackling Wikipedia’s gender gap in their Jewish women’s history course. And Dr. Stephennie Mulder discussed the benefits of trying something new in an already popular class.

This month, the communications team began implementing marketing and communications suggestions from marketing consultant M+R, who Outreach and Communications Associate Cassidy Villeneuve and Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson began working with in the fall. The project focused on understanding the best messaging and approaches for recruiting partners and individuals interested in a Wikipedia training course related to women in STEM. Cassidy and Jami worked closely with the consultants to catch them up to speed on our recruitment strategies and also amend those strategies based on market research. M+R interviewed past participants in the Scholars & Scientists program, current partners, and some champions of our community about what they considered most valuable about Wiki Education’s training courses. We are thrilled with the work they did to help us understand our opportunities and best paths forward for expanding the Scholars & Scientists Program.

Blog posts:

• What do students think of adding to Wikipedia as an assignment? (February 3)
• Changing Wikipedia for the better (February 6)
• Catering to diverse GLAM needs to improve Wikidata (February 11)
• Wiki Education welcomes Director, Institutional Funding Paul Carroll (February 13)
• Wikidata at the Art Institute of Chicago (February 13)
• Dashboard interns Khyati and Amit join Wikipedians in the SWASTHA initiative (February 19)
• New Dashboard feature helps with grading your Wikipedia assignment (February 20)
• Wikipedia’s gender inequality tackled by Rice students writing activist articles (February 21)
• Reading Wikipedia’s editorial culture (February 26)
• Trying something new in an already popular class (February 28)

External media:

• Wikipedia’s gender inequality tackled by Rice students writing ‘activist’ articles. Katharine Shilcutt. Rice University News and Media Relates Office of Public Affairs. (February 10)
• Thursday’s Show: Bloomberg Campaigning In Texas, And Representation Of Women On Wikipedia, Michael Hagerty, Houston Public Media (February 27)

Technology

Our focus in February was to complete the initial set of features for making it easier for instructors to find and evaluate the key stages of Wikipedia assignment. In mid-February we launched a redesigned Students tab, which provides access to the specific sandbox pages where students are guided to prepare bibliographies, draft articles, and review each other’s work. The next phase of this project will be to conduct a series of usability tests with instructors to learn how these updates fit into their grading workflows and identify key areas for improving the interface further.

February also marked the last stretch of our winter Outreachy internship projects, which conclude at the beginning of March. Lalitha Reddy completed a partial conversion of the Dashboard’s campaign pages to the React framework we use throughout most of the rest of the site. This lays the groundwork for a smoother and faster user experience for exploring and monitoring sets of courses and projects. Glory Agatevure built out a number of new features to our experimental Android app version of the Dashboard, including adding support for browsing campaigns.

Software Developer Wes Reid began work on migrating our system for sending high-volume emails from Salesforce to dedicated email platforms. We typically send emails to large groups of instructors who have expressed interest in using a Wikipedia assignment in the coming term, as well as people whom Wiki Education staff met at conferences. Salesforce provides some support for mass emailing, but has strict volume limits and limited support for the ‘unsubscribe’ options we want to add to these marketing-type emails.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of February were $208K, +$9K than the budget of $199K. The Board was under ($8K) due to timing, as the expenses budgeted for February occurred in January. Fundraising was over +$8K with overages of +$4K in Payroll Costs, +$2K in Outside Services, +$1K Travel, +$1K in Indirect Costs. General and Administrative were over +$11K with overages of +$2K in Indirect Costs, +$8K Staff Meetings that were budgeted in January, +$2K in Office Furniture for the new Staff Member, +$2K in Travel, while under ($1K) in Occupancy. Programs were under ($2K) due to ($3K) in Indirect Costs, ($4K) Travel, ($2K) in Communications, while over +$7K in Payroll Costs.

The Year-to-date expenses $1.509K were ($21K) under the budget of $1.530K. The Board and Fundraising are right on target. General and Administration is over by +$87K of which +$100K in Indirect Costs, +$3K in Communications, +$7K in Travel, +$3K in Payroll, +$2K in Furniture, while under ($14K) in Professional Services, ($5K) in Occupancy and ($9K) in Staff Meetings and Office Expenses. Programs are under ($108K) of which, ($98K) in Indirect Costs, ($3K) Office Expenses, ($14K) Communications, ($36K) Travel while over +$38K in Payroll Costs and +$5K in Professional Fees.

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• All-staff meeting in San Francisco
• Onboarding of our new fundraiser
• Taking steps related to the COVID-19 outbreak

In the first week of February, Wiki Education held its traditional spring all-staff meeting in San Francisco. The meeting officially kicked off with a welcome reception at our office in the Presidio. On the second day, we started celebrating last year’s successes. We then discussed where we are with implementing the strategy, in order to get a better understanding of what needs to be done next fiscal year. On day three, individual staff members shared their learnings, including a presentation about learnings from their work with communications firm M+R by Cassidy and Jami, an update on her equity work with Alexandra Lockett from Helaine, an introduction to WikiProjects by Elysia, a presentation about Wikidata-powered math formulas by Will, a review of important Wikipedia community discussions by Ryan, and an introduction to the concept of “deep work” by Jami. On the fourth day, Frank provided staff with a big picture view on where the organization is heading in the future; subsequently, the different departments started their work on next fiscal year’s annual plan and budget. The last day being traditionally filled with social activity, staff had breakfast together before going on a cruise on the San Francisco Bay.

Also in February, Frank and Ryan met with representatives of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and two participants of our 2019 NARA Wikipedia courses in Washington D.C. Wiki Education had supported NARA’s exhibition “Rightfully Hers”, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, by empowering several cohorts of subject-matter experts to improve Wikipedia’s coverage on topics related to women’s voting rights. The meeting served as a postmortem of the cooperation between Wiki Education and NARA and also to discuss opportunities for future collaborations.

At the end of February and in reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak in California, Frank made working out of our Presidio office optional. The measure aimed at reducing the spread of the virus and at protecting those staff members that could potentially get infected by using public transportation or rideshare services.

Visitors

• While most of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Education team — Nichole Saad, Melissa Guadalupe Huertas, and Vasanthi Hargyono — was in town for their All Hands meeting, they stopped by Wiki Education’s offices for lunch and a discussion of our work on our Student Program.
• We welcomed “The Invisible” team, an EdTech web service based in South Korea. Their purpose of visit to Wiki Education was to conduct on-site research regarding EdTech Industries and Technologies in the US market.

***

• This month, we worked with our partners at the Society of Family Planning (SFP) to launch the second iteration of SFP Wiki Scholars courses. SFP is sponsoring additional courses to train their members—primarily medical practitioners—how to add scientific information to family planning articles.
• This month the English Wikipedia celebrated a major milestone: 6 million articles! As the number climbed closer to that figure, many members of the editing community worked feverishly to create articles in the hope that theirs would be number 6,000,000. The article’s creator was none other than Northeastern University Visiting Scholar Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who told the Wikipedia community newsletter, The Signpost that she “woke up at 3:30 AM the morning of January 23rd. Unable to go back to sleep, I went into the living room. I opened up my laptop to Wikipedia and noticed we were a few hundred articles shy of the 6 millionth article. I decided to create an article about a woman writer, my preferred focus, on the chance that when I would be ready to click Save, it would miraculously be the right moment.”
• The board met in San Francisco for an in-person meeting. The board approved the creation of an Advisory Board, the extension of our current strategic plan, and two new board members: Jon Cawthorne, Dean of the Wayne State University Library System and incoming president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), and Meaghan Duff, Owner & Principal of Mercy Education Partners and former Senior Vice President for Partnerships & Strategy at Faculty Guild.

Programs

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2020 in numbers, as of January 31:

• 279 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (193, or 69%, were led by returning instructors).
• 4,381 student editors were enrolled.
• 67% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules
• Students edited 869 articles, created 18 new entries, and added 165,000 words and 2,030 references.

January marked the beginning of the Spring 2020 term, and as always, that means that students were busy signing up for Wikipedia usernames, getting familiar with the Dashboard, and generally introducing themselves to the ins and outs of Wikipedia editing.

Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal was busy approving course pages and making sure that all of our Spring 2020 courses are set up for success. She also launched a new feature of the Student Program where instructors receive an end of term email summarizing the work their students did along with links to easily share their successes on social media. Wikipedia Experts Ian Ramjohn, Elysia Webb, and Shalor Toncray were busy wrapping up courses from Fall 2019 and helping students as they plunged into their Wikipedia assignments.

Student work highlights:

Three student-authored articles appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page in the Did You Know? section: Affect labeling on January 5, School belonging on January 6, Cognitive inertia on January 9, and Jellyfish bloom on January 13. Cognitive inertia was viewed over 6,700 while it was on Wikipedia’s main page, while jellyfish bloom received over 3,300 views.

Drosophila subobscura was promoted to Good Article status on January 18. Good Articles represent a tremendous effort from an editor, and it’s especially impressive that the student from Joan Strassman’s Behavioural Ecology course kept editing after their term ended to see the article through the peer review process.

Art is an enduring part of human life, as people have been drawn to create depictions of how they see and interpret their lives and the world around them. Students in Alice Price’s The Modern North class at Temple University, Tyler School of Art chose to create articles on topics and persons such as Isaac Levitan, a classical Russian landscape painter who advanced the genre of the “mood landscape”. During his life Levitan faced several challenges, one of which occurred toward the beginning of his art career when he along with many other Jewish people were forcibly deported from the big cities of the Russian Empire after Alexander Soloviev’s assassination attempt on Alexander II. Levitan was later allowed back into the city after several of his fans pleaded his case with the authorities. He was friends with famed writer Anton Chekhov, however the two had a falling out in 1892 over Chekov’s “The Grasshopper”, which Levitan believed was based on his romantic relationship with Sofia Kuvshinnikova. Although Chekhov apologized the two remained estranged until January 1895. Two years later Levitan was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts and only a few short years after that Isaac Levitan died at the age of 39 at Chekhov’s home in Crimea. Although he suffered from heart complications throughout his life and his last works were increasingly filled with light. During the year after his death an exhibit of several hundred Levitan paintings was shown in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg.

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most accessed resources for people who want to learn more about health content, so we’re thrilled to support courses like this one out of University of Central Florida. When these health professions students learned how to edit Wikipedia, they applied their skills and knowledge towards high-impact articles like Anticoagulant, which is viewed nearly 1,000 times every day. Student editors greatly strengthened the section “Adverse effects”, which is critical information for consumers of health information. Altogether, the students rewrote over half of this page. Another topic of high importance edited by the students is Nephritic syndrome, which is a kidney disease. Before the student began editing, this page only had 10 references. Now, not only is the content much more robust, it is more verifiable, with a total of 46 references to high-quality sources.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Wikipedia

This was a busy month for the Scholars & Scientists program, wrapping up one course and starting three more!

First, we wrapped up Living Knowledge, our Wiki Scientists course focused on biology. Among the articles participants improved are:

• Reporter gene, genes used in research which help scientists identify and measure other genes. The article had been tagged as needing more references since 2008! At the start of the course, it had only 5 sources. A Wiki Scientist not only added information to the article but significantly improved the sourcing, increasing that number to 23.
• Stretch reflex, a muscle contraction in response to stretching in the muscle. A Wiki Scientist improved sourcing while adding quite a bit of information to the lead and several sections.

Early in the month we launched our exciting Science and Society course to improve currently relevant science topics. At the end of the month, we are only a few weeks into the process, with the group of 14 scientists working in sandboxes while learning to share their passion and knowledge on Wikipedia, but we see several fascinating articles to look forward to.

Toward the end of the month we also launched a course, #Envision2030, in partnership with Keene State College. Through it we will be teaching faculty and staff from Keene as well as nearby Plymouth State University to improve Wikipedia articles related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Finally, we had our first meeting of a new kind of Wiki Scientists program. Last year we ran two successful courses with the Society of Family Planning, training its members to improve Wikipedia articles related to family planning, like abortion and contraception. Based on positive outcomes from those courses, SFP will be running two more courses this year. Additionally, we will be supporting members who have gone through the program in an alumni program. Through this initiative, we use a dedicated Slack channel, monthly standing meetings, and a monthly newsletter to foster ongoing engagement between Wiki Scientists and Wikipedia. Additionally, we are setting up a form to allow other SFP members to participate in the initiative by submitting opportunities for improvement that they see while reading Wikipedia. We know that scientists can do excellent work through out training programs, and we are excited to start this ongoing support model to facilitate contributions after the courses, too.

Outside of regular courses, Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady attended the American Historical Association conference in New York to present on a panel, “Wiki Scholars: Historians and the National Archives Team Up for a Course to Improve Wikipedia’s Articles about Women’s Suffrage”. Ryan joined three of our past Wiki Scholars, Lindsey Wieck, Cassandra Berman, and Erin Siodmak, to talk about our long-term collaboration with the National Archives to improve articles relevant to women’s suffrage.

Wikidata

This past month we began collecting best practices to create a self-directed Wikidata course. This process involves looking at other online course-delivery platforms, analyzing our current Wikidata training modules, and weighing what kind of features we would like this learning experience to have. We are excited to have multiple ways to deliver online learning opportunities about Wikidata and the various skills people may need to get the most out of Wikidata. We hope to release this new delivery method later this year.

Program manager Will Kent was also able to visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to check in with some past Wikidata course participants Marla Misunas and Ian Gill. They discussed what was useful about the course and what SFMOMA has been working on since the course ended. Ian has been busy adding exhibition data about SFMOMA exhibitions to Wikidata. He created this query to track all exhibition data from 1935-2020. Feel free to follow the link and click the blue “play button” to see the full list of over 3,000 SFMOMA exhibitions.

This kind of query shows the impact that Wikidata can have not only at an institutional level, but also at a global level. Now that this dataset is open and freely accessible on Wikidata, other museums and individuals can see this data and use it in their own projects.

Visiting Scholars Program

This month the English Wikipedia celebrated a major milestone: 6 million articles! As the number climbed closer to that figure, many members of the editing community worked feverishly to create articles in the hope that theirs would be number 6,000,000. Due to technical limitations, determining which article it was took both art and science, but ultimately settled on a biography for Maria Elise Turner Lauder (1833-1922). Lauder was a Canadian teacher, linguist, author, and philanthropist best known for her works about her travels. The article’s creator was none other than Northeastern University Visiting Scholar Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who told the Wikipedia community newsletter, The Signpost that she “woke up at 3:30 AM the morning of January 23rd. Unable to go back to sleep, I went into the living room. I opened up my laptop to Wikipedia and noticed we were a few hundred articles shy of the 6 millionth article. I decided to create an article about a woman writer, my preferred focus, on the chance that when I would be ready to click Save, it would miraculously be the right moment.” You can read more about the milestone and Rosie’s perspective in the Signpost piece here.

In other exciting news, the George Mason University Visiting Scholar, Gary Greenbaum, promoted three Featured Articles this month. Most editors do not achieve three Featured Articles across their Wikipedia career, but this is not even Gary’s first time with three in a month. Two of them are for commemorative coins. There is the New Rochelle 250th Anniversary half dollar, celebrating the city’s settlement in 1938, and the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Centennial half dollar, issued two years earlier for the hundredth anniversary of the city’s incorporation.

The third Featured Article is a big one: Apollo 13, the 1970 mission to the moon famous for its nearly catastrophic oxygen tank failure just two days in. Many people know it best through the 1995 Ron Howard/Tom Hanks film, but more than 2 million people a year go to Wikipedia for information about the real mission. Thanks to Gary’s efforts, in collaboration with another editor, User:Kees08, what people will find is one of the highest quality articles on Wikipedia.

Advancement

Fundraising

On January 31, 2020 we signed an agreement for a new fundraising staff member. After working with Lisa Grossman at Oppenheimer Associates for search services, Paul Carroll joined the staff as the Director, Institutional Funding, effective February 3, 2020. Paul joined Wiki Education on the first day of our All Staff meeting week just after our January Board meeting.

On January 2, 2020, TJ Bliss, as part of his work under contract, submitted the grant report to the Moore Foundation for the Communicating Science grant ($485,000, grant ended 11/5/2019).

Partnerships

This month, we worked with our partners at the Society of Family Planning (SFP) to launch the second iteration of SFP Wiki Scholars courses. SFP is sponsoring additional courses to train their members – primarily medical practitioners – how to add scientific information to family planning articles. Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson joined two alumni Wiki Scholars in a webinar to announce the initiative to their members and inspire them to apply. After the amazing work SFP Wiki Scholars did in 2019, we’re excited to facilitate these courses with a new cohort of medical professionals and researchers.

In January, we started two additional courses. We’re working with faculty from Keene State College and Plymouth State University as they work on topics related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. We’re supporting members of the American Physical Society as they add women physicists to Wikipedia. We’re thrilled to bring so many content experts to Wikipedia and look forward to sharing their impact.

Communications

Curious about what it’s like in our beginning Wikidata course? Digital Collections Associate Lisa Barrier and Digital Collections Manager Kathryn Gronsbell from Carnegie Hall will walk you through it in their guest blog this month, as well as their linked data plans for the future. Jackie Shieh, a Descriptive Data Management Librarian at Smithsonian Libraries, also walks through the course experience in a guest blog. And Jake Kubrin explains a specific project he started developing in our intermediate Wikidata course.

Wiki Scientists sponsored by the National Science Policy Network were also prolific on our blog this month. Daniel Puentes improved articles related to nuclear policy. Dilara Kiran walked us through why she found the course particularly valuable for early career scientists like herself.

New York Academy of Sciences Wiki Scientist Jyoti Patel spoke to the personal reasons behind her commitment to science communication.

One of the Wiki Scholars sponsored at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Dr. Bridget Marshall, shared what she has learned being part of the course and her plans for teaching Wikipedia writing assignments in the future.

We also republished a great piece by Faith Rovenolt of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching about Dr. Danielle Picard’s Wikipedia writing assignment last fall.

Blog posts:

• A linked data platform with the potential that metadata professionals long for (January 9)
• Improving information about disability healthcare on Wikipedia (January 13)
• Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt (January 14)
• What students fighting misinformation online looks like
• Wikipedia as a platform for Science Policy (January 16)
• How to share an oral history collection more widely (January 17)
• The value of being a Wiki Scientist (January 21)
• Monthly​ ​Report,​ October 2019 (January 22)
• Monthly​ ​Report,​ November 2019 (January 22)
• On becoming a Wiki Woman Scientist (January 23)
• What to try next: Wikipedia assignment ideas across disciplines (January 23)
• 6 million articles on Wikipedia! (January 27)
• Remembering the unnamed women of history as a Wiki Scholar (January 28)
• How “Join the open data movement: a beginner Wikidata course” changed our view and use of collection data (January 31)
• Why members of the Society of Family Planning are getting involved with Wikipedia (January 31)

Technology

In January, we pushed forward our work on Wiki Education Dashboard student user experience improvements and a better interface for instructors to evaluate student work at each phase of the Wikipedia assignment. The technology team conducted in-person usability tests with several University of Washington students, and made a number of adjustments, bug fixes, and feature improvements to the “My Articles” widget and the training system based on what we learned. Software Developer Wes Reid also worked on a substantial reorganization of the “Students” tab of Dashboard, adding key information about each assigned article and peer review for individual students, which will go live in mid-February.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of January were 227K, +$10K than the budget of $217K. The Board was over budget by +$7K due to timing, this $7K will go against the February budget. Fundraising was under ($5K) due to a staffing change ($7K) while adding Outside Contracting support +$2K through transition. General and Administrative are over +$25K due to +21K in Indirect Costs, +$15K in audit fees budgeted in prior months, but were billed in January, +$1K Payroll Costs and under ($12K) in staff meetings that got pushed to February. Programs are under ($17K) due to ($20K) in Indirect Costs, ($8K) in Outside Professional fees and over +$11K in Payroll Cost.

The Year-to-date expenses were $1.330K, ($30K) under the budget of $1.300K. The Board was over +$8K, of which +$7K of January overage due to timing that will even out in February and +$1K in previous Payroll Costs. Fundraising was under ($8K) due to ($3K) in Indirect Costs, ($7K) Staff Change in January, and +$2K in Outside Support. General and Administrative was over +$76K, of which +$99K in Indirect Costs, +$5K Travel, +$2K Payroll Costs, +$3K Communication, while being under ($17K) Staff Meetings and Office Expenses, ($12K) Professional Fees, ($5K) Occupancy Costs. Programs were under ($106K) of which ($95K) in Indirect Costs, ($32K) Travel, ($12K) Communications, ($2K) Office Expenses, with an overage of +$30K Payroll Costs and +$5K in Professional Services.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:

• In-person board meeting
• Hiring of a new fundraiser
• Getting ready for the all-staff meeting in February

In January, board members gathered for their in-person board meeting at the Omni Hotel in San Francisco. The two-day event started with a meeting of Wiki Education’s Finance and Audit Committee which Jordan Daly from SFBay Financials and Susan Malone from Hood & Strong joined in person. Then, Frank provided the board with a report on the current status of the organization, followed by an outlook on the fundraising situation and a discussion. Afterwards, LiAnna Davis gave the board an update on Wiki Education’s programmatic activities. On the second day, Sage Ross provided an update on the recent work of the technology department. Then, Frank and LiAnna presented different options for what to focus on in next fiscal year and discussed these options with the board. Subsequently, board members Carwil Bjork-James and Bob Cummings gave a presentation titled “Five Major Trends in Higher Ed/OER and How they May Impact Wiki Education.” At the end of the meeting, the board approved the creation of an Advisory Board, the extension of our current strategic plan, and two new board members: Jon Cawthorne, Dean of the Wayne State University Library System and incoming president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), and Meaghan Duff, Owner & Principal of Mercy Education Partners and former Senior Vice President for Partnerships & Strategy at Faculty Guild.

Also in January, Frank finalized his search for a new fundraiser. With the help of Lisa Grossman from recruiting firm m/Oppenheim, he hired Paul Carroll as Director, Institutional Funding. Prior to joining Wiki Education, Paul worked as a grantmaker with the Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation that addresses international security. Paul served as the program director with responsibilities for a roughly $6 million annual grantmaking budget. He has also served on the steering committee of the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG), an international network of foundations and individual donors interested in a broad range of peace, human security, and development issues. Paul has lived on both sides of the fundraising/grantmaking table – experience that adds to his understanding of and appreciation for the craft of development, communications, and partnership-building.

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Many Wiki Education staff members attended WikiConference North America in Boston. Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent, Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady, Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn, Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson and Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross presented at the conference alongside many Wiki Education program participants and faculty instructors in our programs. Wiki Education won the Education Impact Award during the conference.

• November was a busy month for partnerships. Jami joined faculty at Western Colorado University to promote the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. While in Cambridge for WikiConference North America Jami had the opportunity to visit Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University and presented to instructors. Also, Jami and Customer Success Manager Samantha Weald attended the Women’s Forum Global Meeting to run a 3-day session teaching conference attendees about Wikipedia’s gender gap and how they can help curb it.

Programs

The Programs and Technology teams had a joint offsite meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, prior to WikiConference North America. Agenda items included an overview of the current fiscal year for both Programs and Tech, each program manager sharing survey results and what they’ve learned from their programs, learnings from professional development staff have taken recently, and a revisiting of our process maps. We also engaged in a team activity around our DISC profiles. After we wrapped up the meeting part of the day, we all did a walking tour of Harvard Square — focused on chocolate. We learned about the process of producing chocolate, and then tasted it in a variety of forms, from chocolate bars to cookies to ice cream to balsamic vinegar. The offsite was a great way to both share learnings and touch base on our work and engage in team-building activities.

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Fall 2019 in numbers, as of November 30:

• 388 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (222, or 57%, were led by returning instructors)
• 7,451 student editors were enrolled
• 62% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 4,960 articles, created 417 new entries, added 3.61 million words and 37,600 references.

As always, November is one of the busiest months for the Student Program as students begin to move their work into the article main space. While our Wikipedia Experts were hard at work reviewing student work and responding to requests for help, Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal began to plan for the Spring 2020 term in earnest.

Each term, Wiki Education works with hundreds of instructors, but we rarely get to meet our program participants in person. In November, we had two opportunities to do so. At this year’s WikiConference North America, held in Boston, Helaine got to both present along side several of our instructors as well as attend a number of presentations about how instructors are using Wikipedia in their classrooms. We also had a chance to meet up with several of our instructors at this year’s National Women’s Studies Association conference held right here in our home base of San Francisco. Helaine, along with Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis, met with a handful of instructors to learn more about what instructors have to say about the Wikipedia assignment and what we here at Wiki Education can do to make it a better experience for both students and instructors alike.

Student work highlights:

Literature has always been a great way to impart experiences and knowledge, as well as help people see things from an all new point of view. This is why Pearl Cleague’s debut novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day is so important, as one proponent of the book stated that it showcases the empowerment of women in the face of undeniably difficult life challenges and that Cleage’s focus on the challenges associated with AIDS, drug addiction, and domestic violence offers an intuitive look into the realities of social issues that are dealt with at surface level by traditional societal institutions. Shortly after its release at the end of December 1997 this book became part of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and spent nine weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. We can thank University of Florida instructor Delia Steverson, who taught her first class with us this fall, for the creation of this article, as one of the students in her Gender and Sexualities in African American Literature class chose to work on this remarkable novel.

Eugenics has a dark and dirty shadow that continues to haunt humanity. Given the atrocities that have been committed in the name of “better humans”, it is important to remember what has come before so we as a society can work towards preventing further harm. Vanderbilt University students in first time instructor Danielle Picard’s Eugenics and Its Shadow course worked on and created several articles, two of which are on the Race Betterment Foundation and the sculpture Average Young American Male. The Race Betterment Foundation was a eugenics and hygiene foundation founded in 1906 at Battle Creek, Michigan by John Harvey Kellogg (yes, the man behind the breakfast cereal) due to his concerns about race degeneracy. The foundation supported conferences, including three National Conferences on Race Betterment, publications (Good Health), and a eugenics registry in cooperation with the ERO (Eugenics Record Office). The foundation also sponsored the Fitter Families Campaign from 1928 to the late 1930s and funded Battle Creek College (not what is now Andrews University). The foundation controlled the Battle Creek Food Company, which in turn served as the major source for Kellogg’s eugenics programs, conferences, and Battle Creek College. The Average Young American Male was a 22-inch plaster statue sculpted in 1921 by Jane Davenport Harris as a composite model for the eugenics movement in the United States. The statue was exhibited at the Second and Third International Congresses of Eugenics in 1921 and 1932, respectively, as a visual representation of that which eugenicists considered to be the degeneration of the white race. While the statue received mixed responses from contemporary critics, it inspired the creation of additional composite statues as propaganda for the eugenics movement throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Human communication by talking is complex and sophisticated, though you’d be wrong to think we’re the only animals capable of complex communication! This term, David Wilson’s Animal Behaviour course out of Memorial University of Newfoundland explored the myriad ways that animals behave and communicate with each other. Students in the course were busy, editing 74 articles total, including 5 new creations. Cleaner fish, an article about fish that remove dead skin and parasites from other fish’s skin and gills, saw huge growth, with the student now responsible for almost 80% of the article. Another article that saw growth was egg tossing, an article about, as expected, when birds dump eggs from a nest. Though it may seem counterintuitive for birds to throw eggs from their own nests, they may have good reasons, including tossing eggs of competing birds of the same or different species. Some egg tossing is done by nest parasites like cuckoos, who remove eggs from the nest of a host bird to add their own. Cuckoo hatchlings will even knock the host birds’ eggs out of nests so that they get all the attention from parents. The students’ edits brought detail and sturdy referencing to a fascinating array of articles on animal behavior.

Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music that developed in the 1940s in the United States Appalachian region. Countless musicians have performed in this genre, which include Reno and Smiley. They were an American musical duo that was composed of Don Reno (May 17, 1925 – October 16, 1984) and Red Smiley (February 21, 1925 – January 2, 1972). They were one of the most acclaimed duos in the country, now bluegrass, music in the 1950s and early 1960s. It’s thanks to East Tennessee State University students in Lee Bidgood’s Bluegrass History I class that this article has been expanded and improved.

Calypso Rose is an iconic Tobagonian calypsonian with a career spanning almost 65 years. At the age of 78 she was the age of 78 was the first calypsonian to perform at Coachella and the oldest person ever to do so. Students in Kavita Singh’s Caribbean Literatures course rewrote most of the article, greatly improving Wikipedia’s coverage of an important artist from the Caribbean. Beryl Gilroy is a Guyanese teacher and novelist who has been called “one of Britain’s most significant post-war Caribbean migrants”. A student editor in the class substantially improved Gilroy’s Wikipedia biography, adding content and context to her career and achievements. Other student editors in the class made major improvements to the biographies of Rita Indiana, a writer and singer-songwriter from the Dominican Republic, and Patrick Chamoiseau, a writer from Martinique. Another student editor added information about the indentureship process to the Chinese Caribbeans article.

You’d probably expect that more complex organisms have more genes that very simple ones, but the reality is that there’s no relationship between the complexity and the number of genes — humans have about the same number of genes as a nematode, while the water flea, Daphnia pulex, has more than 60% more. This state of affairs is known as the G-value paradox. The article was created by a student editor in Dan Graur’s Advanced Ecology and Evolution class. Another student in the class worked on the broader Genome size article, adding to it a discussion of the concept of genome miniaturization. One student in the class created new articles about the enemy release hypothesis, which suggests that the reason invasive species succeed in that they have escaped from the pests, predators and pathogens that normally keep them in check, while another created the herbivore effectives on plant diversity article.

Most ant species produce winged reproductives (alates) which emerge from the nest in large swarms and mate. The females then go and found new colonies, while the males die. But for about 55 species of ants, the reproductives are wingless like the workers, and are called ergatoids. Before a student from this class started working on it, Wikipedia’s ergatoid article was short — four sentences long — and quite hard for the average reader to make sense of. Thanks to a student editor, this article is now lengthy, fairly comprehensive and, maybe most importantly, it’s readable and informative to someone who may never have heard the term before.

Two student-authored articles appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page in the Did You Know? section, Leptoconops torrens on November 21, and Syritta pipiens on November 22.

Scholars & Scientists Program

WikiConference North America

November saw many Wiki Education staff attend WikiConference North America in Boston. Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent and Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady joined Helaine to talk about how Wiki Education’s programs engage subject-matter experts in different ways. The question of how to encourage people with advanced knowledge to edit Wikipedia is one that comes up regularly at Wikipedia-related conferences, and one that Ryan and other Wiki Education staff have even presented on there in the past. What excited us this time was to present about programs that are actually doing that. Ryan explained the idea behind the Scholars & Scientists program, how it overcomes several of the well-documented obstacles to subject-matter expert engagement, the model of support we use, and some of the successes we have seen in the nearly two years the program has been running. Will addressed ways in which seeking subject specialists differs with Wikidata than Wikipedia. He explained why expertise is helpful in standardizing Wikidata’s ontology, seeking consistency across items, and identifying gaps on Wikidata that non-specialists may miss. Click through the above link to see a description, notes, and a link to the recording of this session.

Will also presented about building a Wikidata curriculum. This session framed Will’s curriculum development process around the new Wikidata courses. Specifically the session addressed some of the challenges around developing a Wikidata curriculum including, what to include/exclude, how to make it approachable, how to make it relatable, how to measure understanding, and how to construct assignments that make sense for the participants. This session also generated a dynamic question and answer session allowing for participants to share their thoughts on curriculum development. The intention of the session was to encourage others to pursue creating their own version of a Wikidata curriculum. Judging from the question and answer session, many hurdles remain, but there are many manageable ways of training others to use Wikidata. The above link also contains a description, notes, and a link to the session recording.

Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson joined Judy Davidson, Sara Marks, and June Lemen from the University of Massachusetts Lowell to talk about their Women in Red at UMass Lowell initiative, fostering digital literacy among students and faculty while also improving Wikipedia’s coverage of notable women from the region. Judy, Sara, and June have coordinated and participated in a Wiki Scholars course with us that is ongoing and shared their experience in that effort. See below for highlights from that course.

Wikidata

Our two Wikidata courses continued through the month of November, one intermediate and one beginner. We have a record number of participants taking these courses. These two courses have only a week left and will wrap up at the beginning of December. So far everyone is off to a great start, asking some excellent questions, participating in sessions, and editing Wikidata. Here are some details:

• Beginner: This course has 18 editors who have also made more than 100 edits. They are also excelling at adding references to statements. This course has a healthy mix of participants with linked data experience and some without as much Wikidata experience. Nevertheless conversations have gravitated toward some of the most specific details of Wikidata — property usage, data consistency, how to learn about using tools, and specific query requests.
• Intermediate: There are 11 editors who have already made more than 100 edits across 100 items. These editors are also adding references to statements. As an intermediate course, several of these course participants have experience with linked data. They also have some ideas for projects that would involve integrating Wikidata into their workflows at their respective institutions. Conversations in this course revolve around these project ideas, answering questions about Wikidata specifics.

As with other Wikidata courses, participants have a diverse set of needs and expectations of Wikidata. Both courses are already exploring several use cases that speak to library and museum needs. We have had conversations about using Wikidata to connect identifiers, propose properties, interact with the Wikidata community, and pull specific data sets from Wikidata through queries.

One conversation revolved around the tool, genetic tree, which reveals taxonomic relationships between items. This had an impact on the course participant to further their understanding of how queries work and how they might model data from their collection.

Wikipedia

We had three Wikipedia Scholars & Scientists courses active this month. First, we were excited to launch a new course, Living Knowledge, focused on improving biology-related articles on Wikipedia. At the end of the month, the course was only a couple weeks in, so they are still learning the basics of editing and selecting topics, but with their diverse specializations, we are looking forward to the improvements this group makes to science content on Wikipedia.

The Women in Red at UMass Lowell Wiki Scholars course hit its stride this month, with participants doing most of their article writing before the holiday break. Here are some of the highlights so far:

• A new article about Georgina Kleege, an American writer and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written important work in disability studies.
• The article about Lowell State College, a historic precursor to UMass Lowell, has more than doubled in size.
• The Betsey Guppy Chamberlain article, about the 19th century textile mill worker and writer, also doubled in length.
• A significant expansion to the article about Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999), a poet, novelist, professor, vocalist, jazz poet, playwright, and social critic.

Finally, the course we offered with the National Science Policy Network wrapped up this month. This was an exciting course in which participants focused on science topics about which the public needs high-quality information in order to understand the world around them (not to mention policy-makers themselves, who use Wikipedia, too). Here are some of the highlights from the course:

• The embryo article is a good example of the sort of big scientific topic that can easily be neglected on Wikipedia. Its scope is broad and it really benefits from the work of someone who comes to it with a broad understanding of the subject and the literature. One of the NSPN Wiki Scientists made major improvements to the page, correcting an overemphasis on human embryos (for which there is a separate article), expanding the article, rewriting the lead, and adding references.
• Water resource policy concerns one of our most fundamental resources and how it can be collected, prepared, used, and disposed of, taking into account human use and the environment. The incredibly important topic has had maintenance tags at the top of the article for several years, indicating it needed a lot of work. After this Wiki Scientists course, it is vastly improved, with new or rewritten/expanded sections, better organization, and more sources. It stands as a good example both of why these courses are so important — the great work subject-matter experts do, and why we need to keep bringing people in to continue the work.
• A new article about Jean Dickey (1945–2018), a pioneering geodesist (someone who works to measure and understand Earth’s shape, orientation, and gravitational field) and particle physicist who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 37 years.
• Another new article on the National Alzheimer’s Project Act, which led to the U.S. National Alzheimer’s Plan to increase spending on research, care, and public engagement regarding the disease.
• Several improvements to agriculture in California, including adding information about the use of water and environmental effects.
• The Nuclear Posture Review concerns the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy. Until this course, it only included coverage of the reviews conducted in 2002 and 2010. But there were two others, in 1994 and 2018. With the addition of these sections, the article helps readers gain a clearer picture of the development of national policy on one of the most serious topics imaginable.
• Directly related is the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty, for which a Wiki Scientist overhauled and expanded the section on monitoring.
• Pathogen, a broad subject covering anything that can produce disease. We included this article in last month’s monthly report, too, but as a Wiki Scientist continued to improve it, this 1,000-views-a-day article deserves mention again.

Visiting Scholars Program

The biosphere is the sum of all ecosystems on Earth. Most of the life on Earth that we tend to think of exist above the surface, but the deep biosphere, the part of the biosphere below the first few meters of the surface, accounts for 15% of biomass on the planet, and about 90% of archaea and bacteria in particular. It extends at least 5 km below the surface, and 10.5 km below the sea surface. Organisms that live there exist at temperatures that can exceed 100 degrees C. The way organisms eat and breathe at these depths are quite different from the way we do on the surface, with metabolisms up to a million times slower. The fascinating, extensive, and accessible article was promoted to Good Article this month, thanks to the hard work of Andrew Newell, Visiting Scholar with the Deep Carbon Observatory.

Northeastern University Visiting Scholar Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight added two biographies of impressive women writers, both of whom got started early in life. Emma Huntington Nason (1845–1921) was a poet, author, and composer from New England who started writing when she was only 12. Mary Bassett Clarke (1831–1908) was a writer from New York who published using the pen name Ida Fairfield starting from the age of 15.

Advancement

Fundraising

November was a slow month for fundraising. No new grants were awarded and no new proposals or concept notes were invited or submitted to funders. Some donations came in during the month from some individual supporters, especially on #GivingTuesday. In particular, we received a $1000 donation from Diana Strassman, a former member and chair of Wiki Education’s Board of Directors, and her husband Jeff.

The majority of our fundraising efforts in November were research and report related. We worked on drafting interim reports for our grants from the 20MM Michelson Foundation and from the Moore Foundation, which are due in December and January, respectively. We also continued to identify and qualify potential funders, including migrating our research and interaction notes to the software platform Asana. This software allows us to more easily see where each potential and existing funder is on a cultivation continuum.

Partnerships

This month, Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson joined faculty at Western Colorado University to promote the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Thanks to Director of Library Services Dustin Fife for bringing us out to campus. During the visit, Jami had the chance to speak with faculty interested in open educational resources (OER) the opportunity to learn about how students can engage with OER, turning it into an open educational practice. We look forward to bringing more Western Colorado faculty into the Student Program in the coming terms!

Jami attended WikiConference North America with several other Wiki Education staff members. She presented alongside faculty from the University of Massachusetts Lowell about the partnership we built this year to embed Wikipedia expertise on the UMass Lowell campus. We’re excited to share this project with other Wikipedians and university faculty, as we hope to run similar Wiki Scholars courses in partnership with other cohorts of campus faculty.

While in Cambridge for WikiCon North America, Jami had the opportunity to join Thais Morata and John Sadowski at the Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University. We presented to instructors about the work John and Thais are undertaking at NIOSH to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of occupational safety and health, including the great work they do as a part of Wiki Education’s Student Program. We enjoyed working with Diana Ceballos to coordinate these presentations and to showcase the excellent work her students have done on Wikipedia.

At the end of the month, Jami and Customer Success Manager Samantha Weald attended the Women’s Forum Global Meeting to run a 3-day session teaching conference attendees about Wikipedia’s gender gap and how they can help curb it. We were invited by Wikipedian Jess Wade, who has been an advocate for adding women’s biographies to Wikipedia over the past few years. We were thrilled to welcome Daria Cybulska of Wikimedia UK, Adelaide Calais and Amélie Cabon of Wikimedia UK, and Natacha Rault of Les sans pagEs to help raise visibility of the work we can do to bring more women to Wikipedia.

Communications

As 2019 comes to a close, we’re beginning to reflect on all the great progress that program participants have made on Wikipedia this year. Namely, several of the instructors we support won teaching awards for their Wikipedia assignments. Read more about that in our blog from this month.

We featured a guest blog by one of the instructors we support: Melony Shemberger, who has also taken one of our Wikipedia training courses, provides a framework for teaching Wikipedia writing assignments in the journalism classroom. Read more!

We also featured a story from one of our Wikipedia training courses for Society of Family Planning members. The participant shares their experience improving Wikipedia pages about family planning in Uganda, where they are from. Read more!

For those who are curious about how our Wikipedia training courses come about, check out our case studies with two partners: the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries and the Society of Family Planning. Both organizations sponsored courses for their members, who produced some great work on Wikipedia.

Blog posts:

• Ugandans writing their own story of family planning (November 1)

• Monthly​ ​Report,​ September 2019 (November 1)

• Incorporating Wikipedia as an experiential learning activity in an editing course (November 5)

• Channeling passion into action: NSPN Wiki Scientists (November 5)

• Instructors receive awards for Wikipedia work in the classroom (November 8)

• Who’s interested in learning to use Wikidata? (November 12)

• Re-imagining global Korea: the art of protest and social change (November 13)

• Learning and sharing at WikiConference North America (November 20)

• Meeting your patients where they are: on Wikipedia (November 21)

• How the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries ensures librarians across the state are “Wikipedia literate” (November 26)
• Turning a composition course into public scholarship (November 27)

External media:

• Channeling passion into action: NSPN Wiki Scientists. Ryan McGrady. Republishing on the National Science Policy Network blog. (November 22)

Technology

In November, we polished up and extended the Dashboard updates to the student user experience that will roll out in late December. In addition to students’ assigned articles and peer reviews, the Dashboard will allow students to register completion of assigned exercises such as the ‘evaluate an article’ task that typically occurs near the beginning of a course.

We also improved how the Dashboard handles the automatic posting of templates to students’ userpages and talk pages, so that when such an edit fails we can still ensure that the template gets posted later.

Our newest pair of Outreachy interns were announced this month as well — with projects that will be co-mentored by two of our interns from the summer! Lalitha Reddy, co-mentored by summer intern Khyati Soneji, will be rewriting the Dashboard’s Campaign page system, laying the groundwork for a better user experience and easier maintenance in the long term. Glory Agatevure, co-mentored by summer intern Ujjwal Agrawal, will carry forward the Dashboard Android app that Ujjwal began earlier this year. This set of internships begins in early December and goes through March.

Finance & Administration

The total expenditures for the month of November were $202K, +$31K over the budget of $171K. The biggest contributor to the difference was timing. Fundraising was over by $2K, all was travel, budgeted for the prior month. General Administration was over by +$15K, of which +$2K were indirect expenses no longer being reallocated, +$8K in meetings and +$6K in travel, both budgeted for prior month, while underspending in location expenses ($2K). Programs were over $14K, underspending in Indirect Costs($2K) and Communications ($2K), while being over in Outside Contract Services +$13K and vacation accruals +$5K due to the implementation of an updated PTO policy.

The Year-to-date expenses are $895K, ($36K) under the budget of $931K. Fundraising is under by ($3K), of which ($2K) is Indirect costs and ($1K) is under in Travel. General and Administration is over by +$45K. +$62K in Indirect costs not re-allocated to Programs and Fundraising, +$6K in Travel, and +$2K in Communications, while underspending ($16K) in Professional Services, (3K) Location Expenses and ($6K) in general expenses. Programs is under ($78K), of which ($60K) relates to Indirect costs, ($10K) in communications, ($28K) Travel while over in Payroll Expenses +$9K, and Outside Services +$13K.

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• High-level analysis of Wiki Education’s work in the area of institutional fundraising
• Finalizing the audit for fiscal year 2018–19
• Supporting the board’s recruitment of new board members

In November, Frank attended WikiConference North America in Boston alongside a number of staff members. The main conference took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center on the MIT campus. Organized by a team of volunteer Wikimedians from all over North America, this year’s conference focused on credibility and reliability in news and media. The four-day event proved to be an excellent opportunity for Wiki Education’s staff to present some results of their own work, to learn about the work of others, to engage in face-to-face conversations with members of the community, and also to meet with local funding prospects and partners.

In October, Frank had initiated a high-level conversation about the future of Wiki Education’s institutional fundraising. This work continued in November with TJ, LiAnna and Frank working on a “fundraising outlook” document. Although we’ve been very successful with creating an additional revenue stream through earned income, institutional fundraising will continue playing a very important role for Wiki Education in the years to come. Given the significance of this part of our revenue model, Frank felt like it was time to perform a high-level analysis that will guide our institutional fundraising work going forward. Over the course of several small group meetings, TJ, LiAnna and Frank discussed Wiki Education’s opportunities and challenges with regard to institutional fundraising, as well as solutions that will improve our fundraising outlook going forward. The results will serve as a basis of discussion with the board in its upcoming in-person meeting in early 2020.

Also in November, Frank talked to Susan Malone from our external auditing firm Hood & Strong and answered all her questions about fiscal year 2018–19 as part of our yearly financial audit process. SFBay Financials, supported by Ozge and Andres, provided extensive documentation as requested by the auditors. We’re currently clearly ahead of last year’s schedule and expect the audit to be finished before the end of the year.

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