Wiki Education is excited to announce a new pilot: Wikipedia Fellows.
Wikipedia is a resource people use every day to better understand the world. In a time when terms like “alternative facts” and “fake news” have become shorthand for a wide range of political, educational, and epistemological challenges to public knowledge, it’s crucial that we ensure the quality of our most popular source of information.
Academics are passionate about sharing knowledge and understand this exigency, but may be unsure how to participate on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a unique writing environment, and navigating its rules, norms, and processes can be challenging for new users. That’s why Wiki Education exists. We have years of experience supporting students contributing to Wikipedia for a classroom assignment, and we often hear from academics asking for a similar support infrastructure to help them contribute their own expertise.
The Wikipedia Fellows pilot does just that.
Wiki Education is working with three of our partner associations, the American Sociological Association, Midwest Political Science Association, and National Women’s Studies Association, to recruit a small number of their members for the first cohort of this interdisciplinary pilot. From January through April 2018, participants will take advantage of Wiki Education staff expertise and training infrastructure, adapted for this project, to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia. The cohort and Wiki Education staff will have regular group meetings to discuss editing Wikipedia and to collaborate together both as learners and contributors, sharing insights from each of their backgrounds and perspectives. By the end, each person will make a substantial improvement to at least two articles.
For more information about the pilot, including some additional details for potential applicants, see the Wikipedia Fellows page of our website or email wikipediafellows@wikiedu.org. If you’re a member of one of the participating associations and would like to apply to be a Wikipedia Fellow, fill out the application here.
