Academics to improve Wikipedia articles related to midterm elections

This week, Wiki Education kicked off a new project to engage academic experts to improve Wikipedia articles on issues and candidates related to the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve politically relevant topic areas on Wikipedia, we are supporting academic experts to improve these articles over the … Continued

Announcing Jean-Philippe Béland as the Visiting Scholar for Rutgers University

Jean-Philippe (User:Amqui) has been a Wikipedian since 2006. He has improved and created many articles on French-language Wikimedia projects as well as the English Wikipedia, including writing several featured articles for Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. In fact, he has created over 1,900 articles on the French Wikipedia alone. Currently, he is working in the Wikiversity to … Continued

The success of our first Wikipedia Fellows cohort

Our very first Wikipedia Fellows cohort has finished! For the first three months of 2018, we piloted a new program in which nine academic experts completed rigorous training and contributed to more than sixty articles on Wikipedia. We are proud of their work and are excited to have new Wikipedians out in the world! From Race to Masculinity to Margaret Atwood, you … Continued

Visiting Scholars opportunity at North Dakota State University

We have another exciting announcement for Visiting Scholars. We have an opening at North Dakota State University in partnership with almost 100 departments. Founded in 1890 as North Dakota’s land grant university, North Dakota State University (NDSU) is a Carnegie-Classified “Higher Research Activity” university. As a land grant university, there is a strong focus on … Continued

What happens to a student’s motivation when their work has an impact beyond the classroom?

“Pseudotransactionality is the practice of having students pretend to write a letter to an employer, a newspaper article, or even a tweet” to situate their learning in ‘real-life’ contexts, writes Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, an instructor in our program. “It’s a real process, but with an artificial end. Students know this, so they tend not to work … Continued

Announcing a Visiting Scholar opportunity at the University of New Mexico

I’m excited to announce a new opportunity at the University of New Mexico (UNM) for a Wikipedian interested in the following areas: Southwestern, Hispanic or New Mexican culture, health in the high desert, or environmental policy in the Southwest or Latin America. As of today, the English Wikipedia has just short of 5.6 million articles. … Continued

Achieving student learning objectives with a Wikipedia assignment

The Stanford Graduate School of Education published a study in 2016 that found that young people have trouble when it comes to “civic online reasoning.” Researchers defined the phrase in terms of students’ ability to identify credible sources online, to distinguish advertisements from news articles, and to understand where information came from. The study reports that despite … Continued

Take-aways from the Fall 2017 term

In Fall 2017, Wiki Education supported 318 courses and almost 7,000 students. Those students improved more than 7,000 articles and created 635 new ones. In total, they contributed 5 million words to Wikipedia this term. That’s equivalent to almost 9 copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace or about 11.5% of the last print edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. … Continued