As we kick off the new fiscal year, we’re pleased to share Wiki Education’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan, a look back at a year shaped by rapid change and a look forward at how we’ll strengthen our programs, technology, and organization in the year to come.
Looking Back: 2025–2026
Fiscal year 2025–2026 was a year of navigating profound shifts in the external environment while continuing to deliver strong results across our priority areas. AI’s growing role in how knowledge is produced, interpreted, and shared made this a pivotal year for our mission.
As more students turned to AI tools to draft and revise their coursework, we saw a real risk of hallucinated or unverifiable content making its way onto Wikipedia from our program participants. In response, we built and refined new systems to scan student contributions for likely AI use, developed new training modules and resources to support both students and instructors, and launched a partnership with Princeton University’s Humans and Machines Lab to study how students use AI in educational settings. (Read more about our approach to AI in this recent blog post.)
The focus of our Scholars & Scientists work this year was our 250 by 2026 initiative in collaboration with the American Association for State and Local History, which brought more than 250 historians and cultural heritage professionals to Wikipedia to strengthen coverage of American history ahead of the nation’s semiquincentennial. We’re absolutely thrilled with the impact of this effort. Our Scholars & Scientists Program also continued to support subject-matter experts in improving Wikipedia on topics ranging from disability and environmental justice to rare diseases and public health.
Looking Ahead: 2026–2027
In the coming fiscal year, we’ll focus on strengthening our impact while continuing to navigate an information ecosystem being reshaped by artificial intelligence. That means maintaining rigorous quality standards to protect Wikipedia’s reliability while also exploring constructive uses of AI, including tools that could help identify inconsistencies between article content and sources.
A flagship initiative for our year will be Documenting America, a new collaboration with the American Association for State and Local History that builds on the success of the 250 by 2026 initiative. The project will engage subject-matter experts to strengthen Wikipedia’s coverage of state history, expand general American history content, increase the number of historical images on Wikimedia Commons, and address gaps in content related to civics and democracy.
In the Wikipedia Student Program, we’ll continue our Knowledge Equity initiative, including expanding outreach to humanities instructors. We’ll also keep working to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women and people of color in STEM, and roll out new programmatic support, including a streamlined assignment option and expanded workshops for faculty new to the project.
On the technology side, we’ll deepen our collaboration with academic researchers studying AI’s effects on Wikipedia content, launch our first Canvas integration for the Dashboard, and continue exploring how AI coding tools can help us build and maintain our technical infrastructure.
The Wiki Education Board of Trustees approved our new annual plan during their June meeting.
We thank our Board, program participants, funders, partners, and global community for their continued support of Wiki Education and our shared goals. Here’s to the year ahead!
For the complete 2026–2027 Annual Plan, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan
