ChatGPT, Wikipedia, and student writing assignments

ChatGPT is the internet’s shiny new toy. It’s also a potential shortcut for students to quickly generate essays and other writing assignments — which has many educators rethinking their assignment designs. (For some, that means trying to AI-proof their writing assignments; for others, it may mean teaching students how to use a text-generating AI conscientiously … Continued

New on Programs & Events Dashboard: namespace-specific tracking and statistics

Thanks to our excellent summer Outreachy intern Vaidehi Atpadkar, we’ve launched a major new feature for the global Programs & Events Dashboard: namespace-specific tracking and statistics. Normally, the Dashboard only counts statistics — articles edited and created, amount of content added, and so on — for Mainspace (article) pages. But program organizers sometimes run events … Continued

Randomized controlled experiments hint at Wikipedia’s huge real-world impact

I became a Wikipedian because of a belief that knowledge — and access to knowledge — matters. Wikipedia, more than anything else I could point to, offered a way to bring together and make sense of the sheer, overwhelming accumulation of human knowledge. Library stacks full of more books and journals than anyone could read … Continued

A new server for Authorship Highlighting data

We quietly rolled out a change to Wiki Education Dashboard’s Authorship Highlighting feature last week: it now gets its data from a new server on Wikimedia Cloud, the Wikimedia community’s cloud computing system. This shouldn’t be any different — except that according to our tests, the authorship data should load substantially faster. The Authorship Highlighting … Continued

Bringing the Instructor and Student views of the Dashboard closer together

For a long time now, our instructors have asked if they could see the same features of the Course Dashboard that their students see. We’re very excited to announce a change that brings the instructor and student views much closer together: both instructors and students now have the My Articles and Upcoming Exercises sections on … Continued