Celebrating Wikipedia’s 20th birthday
Wikipedia asks you to imagine, in the words of Jimmy Wales, “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. Today, the 20th anniversary of the birth of the project, is a good time to stop, reflect, and take stock of the extent … Continued
Improving Wikipedia’s coverage of Indigenous Canadians
Improving Wikipedia’s coverage of historically marginalized populations has long been a driving force behind our work, so we’re proud to highlight the incredible work of two classes from Fall 2020 that sought to advance Wikipedia’s content around Indigenous populations of Canada. Both courses tackled the systemic biases that continue to pervade Canadian institutions as they relate to Indigenous peoples … Continued
A Wikipedian gets assigned to edit Wikipedia in a college class
Adam started editing Wikipedia anonymously in elementary school, making minor copy edits. In 2017, over winter break from high school in Novato, California, he started experimenting more seriously, creating a user account (User:KidAd), improving the writing on a variety of articles, and tackling articles on movies, albums, and politicians. Three years later, he’s racked up … Continued
School data for the world
There are many different ways to contribute to Wikidata. Some of these ways involve manual edits, batch edits, and edits with tools. There are hundreds of Wikidata tools that serve many different purposes. One particularly useful tool is called Cradle. Cradle is a form-based tool users fill out to generate new Wikidata items. Forms are user-generated and are … Continued
Expanding Wikipedia’s coverage of African topics
Despite being the largest project of its kind in human history with a reach that’s global, Wikipedia’s coverage skews heavily toward articles about the Global North. In much of the rest of the world, coverage can be spotty, and that’s especially true for a topic like politics. This is why a class like Martha Wilfahrt’s African … Continued
Shifting the spotlight through Wikipedia
Alicia Robang is a Ph.D. student in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a participant of the 500 Women Wiki Scientists program, she was able to contribute biographies of Filipina scientists and reflect on the power of Wikipedia to tell stories of and for more communities. As a young girl, … Continued
From living building materials to printed organs
Some of the most interesting classes work on topics that leave you with a sense that the future is now. Many of the articles Edmund Palermo’s Biology in Materials Science class worked on leave you with that sensation. Living building materials are building materials that mimic properties of living organisms. These include compounds like self-replicating concrete, self-mending biocement, … Continued
Wikipedia and public-facing scholarship in the classroom
Heather J. Sharkey has been working with undergraduate and graduate students on Wikipedia projects since 2019, with the goal of promoting public-facing scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Becoming a Wikipedian I started to write for Wikipedia less than two years ago, … Continued
10 years of student editing
Over the last several weeks, Wiki Education has published a series of blog posts loosely themed around the 10 year anniversary of our Wikipedia Student Program, where we support higher education instructors who assign their students to write Wikipedia articles as part of the course curriculum. It’s been amazing to watch this program evolve and … Continued
An assignment that changed a life: Kasey Baker
This fall, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Wikipedia Student Program with a series of blog posts telling the story of the program in the United States and Canada. Ten years ago, Kasey Baker was pursuing his master’s degree in public administration at Western Carolina University, when he took a policy analysis course that changed his … Continued