“Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge” is a new book published by the American Library Association that highlights the myriad connections between Wikimedia projects and libraries. Edited by OCLC Research’s Merrilee Proffitt, the book contains 15 chapters highlighting ways librarians and Wikimedia projects have been intertwined since Wikipedia’s founding in 2001. I was honored to contribute … Continued
In 2016, Wiki Education ran an initiative called the Year of Science, dedicated to improving science content on Wikipedia. We nailed our goals for the year-long campaign: nearly 5 million words of science content added to more than 5,700 science articles on Wikipedia by more than 6,300 students. In 2017, we had surpassed the impact of … Continued
Student editors in Wiki Education’s program who contribute to medical topics have a new resource available to them in their online training modules this fall: A how-to video specifically related to contributing medical content to Wikipedia. The video was a joint project between Osmosis, University of California San Francisco Professor Amin Azzam, and Wiki Education. Osmosis is … Continued
I’m happy to announce a new staff member at Wiki Education, Will Kent. Will’s role is unique, as we have two staff members taking leave in the next year. Will has graciously agreed to join the team as a Program Manager, providing interim coverage for the Classroom Program beginning this week, and coverage for the … Continued
Earlier this month, I had the privilege to attend the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Hosted by Wikimedia Sverige, the conference brought together around 80 participants from 43 different countries. We share one common goal: to ensure the Wikimedia projects represent the full diversity of human knowledge. Wiki Education’s work focuses primarily on the English Wikipedia, … Continued
I’m happy to announce that Cassidy Villeneuve has joined our team as Communications Associate. In this role, Cassidy is responsible for general communications tasks across departments, as well as maintaining the Wiki Education blog and social media channels. Cassidy graduated from Scripps College this past May with a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Professionally, she … Continued
History is one of the most popular disciplines for teaching with Wikipedia — but it’s also an area where students sometimes struggle. In history classes, students tend to do research, drawing conclusions from primary sources. But that’s not how history articles on Wikipedia are constructed as original research isn’t allowed on Wikipedia. Instead, student editors … Continued
Highlights Wiki Education staff members and board chair PJ Tabit traveled to Montreal, Canada, for Wikimania 2017, the annual gathering of Wikimedia editors from around the world. Several staff had presentations in the schedule, and we learned a lot from other program leaders and shared our learnings. We wrapped up our Google Summer of Code … Continued
It’s rare to see a student excited to discover an underdeveloped Wikipedia article — but this was the initial reaction of College of DuPage freshman Stephanie Lemm this spring, when she looked up the “Educational entertainment” article. That’s because it was a topic that interested her immensely, and her English professor, Dr. Timothy Henningsen, had assigned Stephanie and … Continued
