Today is Giving Tuesday, a U.S. holiday to encourage donations to worthy nonprofits. If you’re planning to make financial contributions this year, we hope you’ll consider supporting Wiki Education. Here’s why:
1. We’re dramatically improving the availability and accuracy of information available on Wikipedia. Since 2010, students in our program have added 25 million words to Wikipedia, or the equivalent of 85,000 printed pages of content. That’s 56% of the total words in the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. During the times of the term when our students are most active, they are contributing 10% of all the content being added to underdeveloped, academic content areas on Wikipedia. Your financial support will help us grow these numbers even further, adding more content to Wikipedia.
2. We’re giving students crucial media literacy skills. Especially in light of the rise of fake news websites, teaching students media literacy skills is crucial. Wiki Education’s program teaches students how to tell if a source they find on the internet is reliable or not. Your gift will help us provide media literacy skills to more students.
3. We bring diversity to Wikipedia. You may have heard that Wikipedia is written by a volunteer base that is at least 80% male. And Wikipedia reflects the knowledge of its volunteers. Around 68% of Wiki Education’s program participants are women, and our partnership with the National Women’s Studies Association has helped us improve important content related to gender and sexuality to Wikipedia. Our students have already added more than 1.5 million words in these topic areas to Wikipedia. Your donation will help us bring more women to Wikipedia.
4. We improved science literacy with our highly successful Year of Science initiative. In 2016, we kicked off the single largest initiative ever to improve content on Wikipedia in a specific subject area: the Year of Science. We are projecting that by the end of 2016, more than 6,000 students at 151 universities will have added more than 5 million words of content in the sciences to the English Wikipedia. Already, 140 million people have read the articles our students have improved as part of the Year of Science, and we expect that number to grow dramatically in the final months of the initiative as students in our fall term group of classes start improving articles. The 6,000 students who participated in this initiative this year gained valuable skills in communicating scientific information to a general population. Your donation will help us sustain the Year of Science.
5. We create resources used by other groups improving Wikipedia globally. To be able to achieve our large programmatic impact numbers, we’ve developed a series of guides to editing Wikipedia articles and teaching with Wikipedia as well as our Dashboard online course management software application. All the materials we develop are released under an open license, meaning anyone can adapt, localize, and translate our resources. Our Year of Science initiative already spread to Brazil, and more than 150 programs globally are using an open version of our Dashboard software to track their impact to Wikipedia. Your financial support for Wiki Education also supports the development of resources people all around the world are using to improve Wikipedia content in their languages.
You can donate online at wikiedu.org/donate If you do, we encourage you to let your friends know on social media know by tagging Wiki Education and posting “Join me in supporting the Wiki Education on #GivingTuesday.”
Wiki Education is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization who publishes our financials online to demonstrate our commitment to strong fiscal practices and transparency. We don’t receive a share of the money collected off the banners you see on Wikipedia and we don’t charge for our support, so we are reliant on the gifts of generous contributors like you. Please make your gift today.
