In just a few days, the United States will turn 250 years old. Communities across the country will gather to celebrate, reflect, and reckon with what these two and a half centuries have meant, and whose stories they have included.
And at Wiki Education, we’ve spent more than a year working to recognize the milestone anniversary in our own way.
In partnership with the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH), we launched the “250 by 2026” initiative with an ambitious but straightforward goal: engage 250 cultural heritage practitioners in improving Wikipedia’s coverage of U.S. history before the nation’s semiquincentennial. We wanted to bring the experts closest to America’s historical record — the archivists, curators, and historians who steward it every day — to the place where most people go to learn about history: Wikipedia.
Thirteen editing courses later, we’ve exceeded our goal, and couldn’t be more proud of the initiative and the contributions of its participants:
- 259 cultural heritage practitioners from 49 states
- 250,000 words added to Wikipedia
- 1,010 Wikipedia articles improved and 44 new Wikipedia articles created
- 433 media files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
- 16.4 million page views
The overarching numbers continue to blow us away, but they only begin to tell the story of the impact these new editors made on public knowledge.
The geography of history
From our very first cohort, it was clear that this program was going to be special. The participants were as geographically diverse as the history they came to document, joining our editing courses from nearly every state in the country.
The impact of this breadth of participation can’t be understated. Historically, Wikipedia’s volunteer editing community has skewed toward urban centers on the coasts, so content about local and regional history in much of the country is often underrepresented.
One of our course participants, Con Trumbull, experienced this firsthand. The archivist was surprised by the gaps he found when exploring Wikipedia’s history of his hometown in Wyoming. Thanks to Trumbull, Wikipedia now offers a biography for Caspar W. Collins, the namesake of Wyoming’s second largest city.
From volunteer-run local historical societies in small towns to major national institutions like the Smithsonian, the organizations represented by our participants opened doors to archives, collections, and local records that hadn’t made it to Wikipedia, until now.
What they found and added
Across our 12 Wikipedia editing courses and our new Wikimedia Commons course, participants brought deep expertise in their regions, content areas, and collections to find gaps that had gone unnoticed, and then set out to fill them. From Alaska to Florida, Texas to Maine, patterns of missing information emerged.
One of the most common gaps they discovered? Notable women of U.S. history whose stories were missing from Wikipedia. Participants repeatedly found that women who helped shape the country had either no Wikipedia article, or only a thin, incomplete text.
Rising to this challenge, the curator at the Henry Ford Estate in Dearborn, Michigan decided to write the new article for Eleanor Clay Ford, a philanthropist, art patron, and the wife of Henry Ford’s only child, Edsel Ford.
Hundreds of miles away in Boston, Massachusetts, an expert at the Paul Revere House created the article for Rachel Walker Revere, an important female figure in the Revolutionary War effort and the wife of the famous “midnight rider” Paul Revere. Another participant added the new article on Elizabeth Ulman Rowe, the first female commissioner and chair of the National Capital Planning Commission. Published
And yet another participant developed the article about Mabel MacFerran Rockwell, the only woman involved in designing and installing the power generating machinery for the Hoover Dam. The new Wikipedia article was nominated for Wikipedia’s “Did You Know” feature, which places an article and a surprising fact from the text on Wikipedia’s homepage. Readership spiked for Rockwell’s biography article when it appeared on the homepage last July, bringing new awareness to an important figure in the history of American women in engineering.
While many of our participants discovered gaps in Wikipedia’s representation of women of U.S. history, others found the histories of entire communities to be missing from the encyclopedia.
One scholar wrote about Logan Barrio in Santa Ana, California, an area with deep historical significance for the city’s Mexican-American community. Another brought the Scrub Neighborhood in Tampa, Florida to Wikipedia, a majority-Black community founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. The neighborhood was razed in the 1950s for a housing development and again displaced by highway construction in the 1970s.
But creating new articles was only part of the story. After writing the new article for historic figure Hopestill Cheswill, the Paul Revere House’s Tegan Kehoe substantially revised the Wikipedia article about his son, Wentworth Cheswill. (Read more about Kehoe’s editing experience here.)
Kehoe corrected the existing narrative for Wentworth, clarifying the mythology that had built up around him. She also contributed to the article on Paul Revere’s midnight ride, addressing figures who have been mistakenly associated with it.
These kinds of corrections — untangling myths from history — are critical for improving public access to high quality information about the country’s history.
Images that bring history to life
The 250,000 words that our 250 by 2026 participants added to Wikipedia speak for themselves. But writing was only part of what the cultural heritage experts brought to their contributions. The images they added to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository for Wikimedia projects, tell their own story.
Course participants uploaded photographs, portraits, documents, and other artifacts from their institutions’ collections, many of which had never been freely accessible online before. From a World War II-era portrait to a newspaper advertisement from the early 1900s, a historic aviation timetable, and a liberty bond leaflet from WWI, participants uploaded images from their archives across the country.
So as the United States celebrates 250 years this week, we’re also celebrating the hundreds of experts who brought their knowledge and collections to Wikipedia, creating an extraordinary gift to mark the country’s milestone birthday — a more inclusive and accurate account of its history for all.
Hero image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by 250 by 2026 course participant ZoyaBoris, CC BY 4.0.
Stay tuned for more stories from our 250 by 2026 initiative! Coming up, we’ll hear from the scholar at the Paul Revere House who wrote the new Wikipedia biography for Rachel Walker Revere.
Interested in learning how to add your expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.
