The plan not only outlines our strategic priorities and exploratory projects for the next fiscal year, but also examines the previous year’s successes, challenges, and major milestones.

From the development of our new Visualizing Impact Tool, the first software to measure and demonstrate the impact of targeted content campaigns on Wikipedia, to our monthly Speaker Series events, which bring together our worldwide community to engage in critical discussions, we look forward to building upon the initiatives, tools, and programs launched last year. 

We’re also excited to explore new strategies to expand the Wikipedia Student Program, enhance the performance of our technology, and create a strong foundation for advancement as we plan for long-term organizational growth.

Core areas of focus in 2024–2025 will include our Knowledge Equity Initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, as well as two primary strategic priorities:

Combat disinformation and support democracy

During this U.S. national election year, Wiki Education’s commitment to combating mis- and dis-information has never been more crucial. We know that open access to reliable, non-partisan information is a cornerstone of a democratic society, and the content on Wikipedia, the world’s go-to encyclopedia, is as vital as ever. To support democracy, Wiki Education will continue to engage subject matter experts, as well as instructors and their students, to improve information related to civics, democracy, and elections on Wikipedia as part of our ongoing Civics and Democracy Campaign. 

In 2024–2025, we’ll also grow our Communicating Science Initiative with new outreach strategies for both the Scholars & Scientists Program and Wikipedia Student Program, empowering experts and students to improve scientific information, such as medical content, on Wikipedia. This focus will ensure public access to neutral, fact-based scientific information – another critical component of a healthy society. 

Strengthen and expand our partnerships with cultural institutions

In the coming year, we’ll broaden our work with cultural institutions, supporting their staff and communities to add their deep subject knowledge and information about their collections to Wikipedia and Wikidata through our Scholars & Scientists Program. Museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural organizations play a key role in preserving and sharing knowledge, and together, we can enhance the richness and diversity of content on Wikipedia.

The 2024–2025 Annual Plan reflects our commitment to not only improving the quality of information on Wikipedia, but also to supporting a broader culture of knowledge and democracy. 

Both the plan and budget were approved by our Board of Trustees at their June meeting. 

We thank our Board of Trustees, program participants, funders, partners, and global community for your continued support of Wiki Education and our shared goals. Here’s to a transformative year ahead!

For the complete 2024-2025 Annual Plan, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan

Interested in lending your subject expertise to Wikipedia? Explore our upcoming Scholars & Scientists courses.

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the Wikipedia assignment and the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Apply by September 8 for the fall 2024 term!

Wiki Education is currently the only organization worldwide that is able to improve the public’s understanding of key issues in a targeted way at scale. And if you’re reading this blog, it’s likely you’re an essential part of that mission. Thank you for joining us in playing an active part in the knowledge revolution. We’re very happy about the enormous impact our organization has had these past two pandemic years despite the challenging conditions under which we’ve been operating. Our continued success has been made possible by our generous funders, the excellent work of our board, Wiki Education’s healthy relationship with the community of Wikimedia volunteers, the tremendous dedication of our staff, and the thousands of students, instructors, and subject-matter experts enrolled in our programs.

We’re excited about the time ahead of us, as outlined in our new Annual Plan. We’ll continue to foster a greater diversity of knowledge and editors on Wikipedia & Wikidata; scale the impact of our programs; and invent tech solutions that support these missions. Here are our areas of focus for the upcoming fiscal year:

Knowledge Equity

Not only do our programs make a significant difference in students having a deeper learning experience and diversifying Wikipedia’s editor base in the United States and Canada, our program participants will continue to add high-quality content about Knowledge Equity-related topics to Wikipedia. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to welcome Andrés Vera into this position, which oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and institutions with large minority enrollments. Equity is an important strategic priority for the entire organization, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. By creating the new role of Equity Outreach Coordinator, we’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Communicating Science

Beginning with the “Wikipedia Year of Science” initiative in 2016, we have strengthened Wikipedia’s critical role as a vehicle for science communication. Students in our Wikipedia Student Program translate their knowledge in a way that is understandable for an average reader. Their hard work has greatly enhanced the depth and breadth of freely accessible information about scientific topics on the web. And since launching our Scholars & Scientists Program in 2018, we now also empower subject-matter experts to share their specialist knowledge with others through Wikipedia or Wikidata.

Technical Infrastructure

We continue to empower thousands of Wikimedia organizers in different countries around the globe who run their own Wikipedia or Wikidata-related programs. In order to even better serve these volunteers, we regularly improve the stability and scalability of our Programs & Events Dashboard. Last year we added new, much-desired features like the ability to track and visualize the improvements people make to Wikidata. This year, our technology department plans to create a tool that will make the enormous impact of our programmatic work even more visible and easy to grasp. We’re kicking off a project to visualize the impact that Wiki Education program participants have made on specific topic areas on Wikipedia. Our participants, funders, community members, and staff are eager to understand our big-picture impact of our work together. 

Thank you for joining us and for following along. Onward!

To read our Annual Plan in depth, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan.

I’m thrilled to announce Wiki Education’s newest team member, Nanette James. Nanette started this month as our Director of Sales.

A former librarian with extensive experience in sales, Nanette’s background makes her the perfect fit for Wiki Education. Nanette will play a key role in our effort to scale up our Scholars & Scientists Program. She’ll sell Wikipedia and Wikidata courses to universities, academic associations, cultural institutions, corporate sponsors, and individuals by identifying leads, performing online sales activities, and educating prospects about why they should engage in our programs. Nanette will also project revenue on an ongoing basis and ensure that sales goals get met or exceeded.

In her free time, Nanette enjoys listening to music, reading, and spending time with her family.

Please join me in welcoming Nanette to Wiki Education!

Today, we’re proud to report that Wiki Education not only weathered the storm, but emerged stronger and more resilient from the crisis than many others. It’s certainly not an exaggeration to say that our organization has been extremely successful in mastering one of the biggest challenges nonprofits faced in the early 21st century.

Over the last year, staff at Wiki Education worked hard in order to maintain as much of the impact our organization has on Wikimedia projects, program leaders in the Wikimedia universe, and on the many millions of readers it serves. Not only were we successful in supporting an impressively large number of courses in our Student Program, we even grew the number of subject-matter experts Wiki Education brings to Wikipedia and Wikidata through our Scholars & Scientists Program.

As our fiscal year transitions on July 1, this is a good moment to reflect on our successes from the last year and look forward to our goals for the upcoming year. Both of these are reflected in our 2021–22 Annual Plan, approved by our Board at their June meeting and now available on our website.

In the next year, we’ll focus on making content on Wikimedia projects more accurate, representative, and complete.

• Across both of Wiki Education’s programs, we will strive to improve the quality of information available on Wikipedia and Wikidata, particularly in content areas related to science and equity.
• In line with our current strategy, we will also seek to broaden the Wikimedia community by supporting diverse program participants. We will also improve our support resources to reflect the needs of participants we recruit through these initiatives, with an eye toward scalability of our work.
• Our work in the area of Technology will focus on providing better services to the international community of Wikimedia Program leaders. For that purpose, we’ll cooperate with at least two other Wikimedia movement organizations to explore the feasibility of Dashboards-as-a-service. In order to better serve the needs of a growing number of Programs & Events Dashboard users, we will conduct a survey among existing users of our platform and create a road map based on the results.

Details on all of these initiatives and more are available in the Annual Plan. I look forward to working with my colleagues at Wiki Education in enacting our plan, with support from our program participants, funders, and partners.

Wiki Education stepped in to fill this void. As an organization that has spent a decade building a network of academics physically located across the United States, we were uniquely qualified to reach out to experts in nearly every state. And our existing Scholars & Scientists program had previously demonstrated success in teaching experts to add their knowledge to Wikipedia articles. Thanks to the generous sponsorships provided by one of our funders, we set out to use our network to broadly improve Wikipedia’s coverage of state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic through a series of courses that ran between April 2020 and February 2021.

Our key question was: Can we empower subject matter experts across the United States to meaningfully improve the quality of English Wikipedia’s coverage of state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing Wikipedia’s readers information they’re seeking?

A year later, we have our answer. To our knowledge, this initiative was the first effort ever to engage subject-matter experts during a national emergency to systematically improve Wikipedia’s coverage of a topic crucial to the general public.

Today, we’ve published an extensive evaluation report on Meta, the central organizing wiki for the broader Wikimedia community. Reports like these are an important element of Wiki Education’s commitment to transparency, to sharing our learnings, and to acknowledging both our successes and our challenges. We welcome feedback on our evaluation report as either a comment on the talk page of the report or a comment on this blog post.

Hero image: Matt Hecht, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Kathleen comes from BrightFocus Foundation, where she managed a portfolio of foundations and corporations in an effort to cure diseases of mind and sight. Before BrightFocus, she administered major and planned gifts at Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. She is excited to bring her grant-writing, prospect research, and relationship-building expertise with a variety of funders to Wiki Education.

Kathleen will focus on building new relationships to expand Wiki Education’s prospect pipeline and to attract new donors. She will research grant making organizations and corporate sponsors, gain insight into their interests and beliefs, and position our organization to them. Furthermore, she will ensure that the donor experience is positive and constructive; ensure Wiki Education stewards all donor constituencies and key stakeholders; ensure that Wiki Education’s supporters and partners receive timely ongoing communications, acknowledgment, and appropriate donor recognition opportunities.

In all of this, Kathleen aims to build the long-term financial sustainability of Wiki Education Foundation’s operations and programs.

Outside of the office, Kathleen enjoys working on her fiction novel, traveling to new places, hiking with her fiancé, obsessing over her two kitties, and laughing at YouTube videos.

Welcome to Wiki Education, Kathleen!

Victoria Padilla is joining Wiki Education as a part-time executive assistant.Victoria provides executive level support and helps to ensure smooth day-to-day operations. Her responsibilities include providing general administrative support, supporting our Executive Director and board, record-keeping, helping the Advancement Team with payment processing, liaising with external contractors, ordering and shipping supplies and equipment to staff, and organizing activities like board meetings. She holds a Masters degree in Public Administration and a Bachelor’s degree in Health Science from Chico State University.

Evan Monk will be serving as a marketing and communications intern this spring. Evan is a current undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University pursuing degrees in Human and Organizational Development and Psychology. His work includes: identifying communications opportunities and marketing needs, writing and designing marketing materials, creating case studies, writing blog posts, promoting program stories on social media, sending mass emails and newsletters, and updating the web copy about programs. He is specifically involved with telling the story of the Scholars and Scientists program to prospective individuals and institutions.

Please join us in officially welcoming Evan and Victoria to Wiki Education.

The idea

When the Wikimedia Foundation hired me as “Head of Public Outreach” in July 2008, Wikipedia had already gained some steam. During the first seven years of its existence, the online encyclopedia “that everybody can edit” had attracted an extremely dedicated group of volunteers who spent an incredible amount of their free time writing articles, uploading images, and curating content. As a result, Wikipedia’s readership had multiplied year over year and the site was clearly on its way to become a mainstream staple of the internet. Given that an increasing number of people around the globe relied on Wikipedia’s content to be accurate and trustworthy, attracting new contributors became a goal of paramount importance. But how can you “broaden participation” and “encourage qualified authors to contribute”, as my job description then mandated? Would you run an ad campaign asking people to become “encyclopedists”? How could you even incentivize participation if a reputation gain – as one of the enticements knowledgeable people are traditionally after – wasn’t attainable due to the fact that Wikipedia wouldn’t publicly list the authors’ names the same way as other encyclopedias did?

The answer to these questions became more obvious when I noticed an emerging trend in higher education: an increasing number of university instructors had started using Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Instead of writing a traditional term paper, students wrote Wikipedia articles. That way, they engaged in a “real-world assignment”, gained critical thinking skills, learned how to collaborate online, and how to convey facts to a non-expert audience. From an instructors perspective, students were far more motivated and had a much deeper learning experience. All seemed to line up.

The first years

So, in early 2010, we decided to boost the existing trend of “Using Wikipedia as a teaching tool” driven by the grassroots efforts of highly innovative instructors in U.S. higher education. In order to learn from these pioneers’ experiences, we invited some of them to Wikimedia’s office in downtown San Francisco and spent two days on listening to what they had to say. Then, after some preliminary research – including a tour to select colleges in the United States – we hired a small team and tasked them with a feasibility study that lasted 18 months. Our main goal was twofold: in order to support a larger number of instructors, we first needed to build a broad range of support mechanisms so that “Teaching with Wikipedia” would be easy to replicate. Secondly, we had to create awareness of the program and its benefits, so that instructors at a wide range of institutions of higher education would be eager to join the program.

Over the course of 18 months, a small project team of five worked on what became to be one of the most successful outreach projects ever undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation. The project team supported professors at 24 universities who taught 47 classes. More than 800 students contributed the equivalent of 5,800 printed pages of high-quality content to Wikipedia. The students had a much deeper learning experience and they gained critical 21st-century skills. Most importantly, the pilot project successfully demonstrated that the underlying model worked. That’s when we decided to move some of the initial members of the team to permanent positions in order to scale our efforts up.

Between 2011 and 2014, the program grew moderately in numbers of participants. It was clear there was interest among academia to scale the program up beyond the 75-ish courses that were teaching with Wikipedia each term. But the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy suggested it wasn’t the right home for a U.S.-based program, as they were focusing on global efforts. Wikimedia supported a year-long volunteer effort to create a spinoff organization: Wiki Education, the missing link between the world of academia and Wikipedia.

Scaling up

At Wiki Education, we focused our attention on scaling the program. We made several significant changes in the 2014–16 time frame that have brought us to where we are today. First, we created an online course management platform. Next, we started establishing formal partnerships with academic associations. These two elements were absolutely critical for our ability to scale.

The partnerships with academic associations resulted in significant growth in the number of people teaching with Wikipedia, as these institutions helped recruit new instructors through their vast networks of members. At the same time, this new way of building partnerships allowed us to target Wikipedia’s content in specific fields.

In order to provide a rapidly growing number of instructors and students with appropriate support, we shifted from in-person help (through email, phone, and Wikipedia Ambassadors) to our online course management platform. The new system has since been helping instructors with planning their assignments as well as with monitoring and assessing their students’ work. For both instructors and students, the system offers a variety of different online trainings. On our end, the system enables us to have a clear understanding of how our program is performing and where we need to intervene.

The learnings we made over the course of the first two years of Wiki Education enabled us to start the “Wikipedia Year of Science” in 2016, a large-scale campaign involving U.S. and Canadian education institutions in increasing Wikipedia science content quality while improving students’ science communication skills. As a result, we provided more than 300 million Wikipedia readers around the globe with free access to high-quality science information in 2016 alone.

In the Fall of 2016, we partnered with Zach McDowell who surveyed 1,627 students and 97 instructors about the benefits of a Wikipedia writing assignment. The resulting study found that Wikipedia-based assignments enhance students’ digital literacy and critical research skills, foster their ability to write for a public audience, promote collaboration, and motivate them more than traditional assignments. The results of this study enabled us to make an even better point about the benefits of our programmatic work when talking to potential partners and to individual instructors.

In April 2018 we reached a significant milestone: after eight years of Teaching with Wikipedia, students enrolled in our program had added more than 44 million words to Wikipedia, eclipsing the amount of information available in the last print edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

10 years later

As we enter the fall 2020 term, it’s been ten years since our program started, and I couldn’t be prouder of where we are today. We have successfully improved the efficiency of our work to the point where we can run a high-impact program with a relatively small team. Each term anew, participants in our Student Program improve Wikipedia’s content to the benefit of millions of readers around the world. Generations of students have gained critical skills while engaging in real-world assignments. Higher education has embraced the concept of “Teaching with Wikipedia” at a scale that we could not have imagined ten years ago.

The impact we’ve had along the way has been astounding. Keep an eye on our blog over the next few weeks as we feature different ways of looking at the changes the Student Program has brought.

We would be remiss without acknowledging the hard work from former colleagues involved in various aspects of this program over the years, including: At Wikimedia, Rod Dunican, Pete Forsyth, Mishelle Gonzales, Annie Lin, and Ashlen Roth; at Wiki Education, TJ Bliss, Paul Carroll, Sara Crouse, Rob Fernandez, Tanya Garcia, Bill Gong, Ozge Gundogdu, Victoria Hinshaw, Adam Hyland, Renee LeVesque, Zach McDowell, Ryan McGrady, Tom Porter, Wes Reid, Eryk Salvaggio, Kevin Shiroo, Shalor Toncray, Cassidy Villeneuve, Samantha Weald, and Elysia Webb. And, of course, all the volunteers, instructors, students, librarians, and others who have supported the program!