Each term, Wiki Education lays down yet another layer of foundation to support an idea that took shape more than 15 years ago: Namely, that students (with the right support) can make high quality contributions to Wikipedia and in doing so, leave their mark on the world’s largest open and free online encyclopedia. Fifteen years on, there’s much we can predict, term after term, but with a rapidly changing information landscape, the Wikipedia Student Program keeps us on our toes! Fall 2025 was, in many ways, a typical term, but it brought with it pivotal changes to our program, as we launched new guidance around AI and deployed the AI detection tool Pangram on student edits. Now, a few months removed, we’ve been able to reflect on what we learned from Fall 2025 and will continue to refine our program as we have always done.
Fall 2025 in numbers
In the Student Program, we continually stress quality over quantity, but when taken collectively, the numbers never fail to impress. Here’s what they looked like in Fall 2025:
- 343 courses participated in a Wikipedia assignment
- 6,410 students enrolled on the Dashboard
- Students added 5.03 million words across 6,250 Wikipedia articles
- To support their work, students added 49,500 references to Wikipedia
- Closing critical content gaps, students created 363 new articles
Whether writing about Revolutions in Latin America, Insect Diversity, or Anthropological Theory, our students are making critical updates to Wikipedia in almost every field imaginable.
An assignment for our times
In the face of AI and an increasingly complex information landscape, it might be tempting to view Wikipedia as outdated, a relic of the early internet. To the contrary, Wikipedia is more critical than ever, and our faculty recognize its ongoing value. As one faculty wrote, “I believe in freely available, high-quality information based on clear, concrete standards of evidence. How we know what we know is more important than ever in today’s age of misinformation and disinformation.”
The advent of AI has only added to an information landscape that was already buckling under the weight of mass disinformation campaigns. The Wikipedia assignment is not just another assignment. It offers students keen insight into the social infrastructure of knowledge. As another professor remarked, “There were numerous pedagogical benefits to the Wikipedia assignments in my course. Perhaps most notable was the focus on my students’ critical and productive engagement with the information infrastructure of the internet. Developing various writing, researching, and editing skills related to the community-based platforms of the Wikipedia universe encouraged my students, and me, to develop a greater understanding of the creation, dissemination, and potential for mis-information via other internet-based platforms as well.”
In response to the growing prevalence of AI, we realized that our students needed guidance not simply on how to navigate AI use on Wikipedia but how to think about it more generally. As a result, we launched a new training module in the Fall as well as a more in-depth look at LLMs broadly speaking. As we engage with our faculty, we’re coming to learn that the Wikipedia assignment is not just a tool for helping students to develop digital and media literacy, but it can also play a critical role in developing AI literacy. As one professor described, “Wikipedia is superior to AI generated information in many ways, and by doing this assignment – my student learned this at a very foundational level. They could clearly see that in well-written Wikipedia articles, every fact is associated with at least one source that EXISTS, that is REAL, and VERIFIABLE. Anyone teaching AI literacy – should be teaching Wikipedia!”
Sparking joy
On a day to day basis, we often focus on the technical challenges of editing Wikipedia. Its policies can be confusing, and its interface is often daunting to first time users. Despite its intricacies, students and faculty regularly express how proud they are of their contributions. As one professor noted, “I love teaching with Wikipedia and I am so proud that my students are able to address knowledge gaps about under-represented communities. I also love to see the pride they demonstrate in their work.”
More subtle and easier to miss is that many students truly “enjoy” the Wikipedia assignment. In the words of one student, “I can proudly say that I helped improve a Wikipedia page… I was given pure enjoyment doing the research and the work.” Another professor declared, “Not only did they enjoy the semester but I did too.”
The pride and joy our faculty and students experience is palpable, and only amplifies the pride and joy we feel at Wiki Education in having the honor of shepherding each cohort of students each term. Thank you to our Fall 2025 faculty and students!
To learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org.
Image credit: Solpugid, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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