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

Welcome to our new Dashboard development intern Ivana

This month, we have a new software development intern working on the Dashboard: Ivana Novakovic-Lekovic. After earning degrees in economics and computer science, Ivana spent nearly two decades working as a professional newspaper journalist and editor in Montenegro. Now she’s working on a career shift, and she’s off to a strong start as a capable … Continued

A roadmap for Programs & Events Dashboard

Programs & Events Dashboard now has a public roadmap. Based largely on the results of the recent 2021 Programs & Events Dashboard user survey, this roadmap sketches out the current plans for improvements to Programs & Events Dashboard. The roadmap will evolve over time, and you can use it to keep track of what features we’re currently … Continued

Setting priorities for Programs & Events Dashboard

I want to offer a very big ‘Thank You’ to everyone who took the time to respond to the first-ever Programs & Events Dashboard user survey. It had 73 responses from a diverse cross-section of Wikimedia program leaders — roughly mirroring the usage patterns of the Dashboard, with less than half from English Wikipedia. In … Continued

A reliable future for Programs & Events Dashboard

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on some major changes to how the Dashboard, Wiki Education’s wiki program management and tracking software, works. Keeping up with the ever-increasing usage of Programs & Events Dashboard — it’s been used by more than 3,800 program leaders to track nearly 9,000 events and more than 120,000 … 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