A high-impact, real-world project

Take your students beyond the classroom with the Wikipedia Assignment! You’ll bring your subject expertise, we’ll bring ours in Wikipedia, and together we’ll empower your students to fill in content gaps and improve citations on the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Each term, Wiki Education supports hundreds of faculty from all disciplines across the U.S. and Canada as they incorporate the Wikipedia Assignment into their courses by providing customizable assignment plans, including scaffolded student trainings, exercises, and resources, tools that track student work, and our staff support.

Set up your own Wikipedia Assignment

Click the “Apply Now” button below and follow the link “Sign up with Wikipedia” to create your Wikipedia account. Then follow the prompts to take our instructor orientation (all of the details!) and create your course page for your Wikipedia Assignment. To complete your application, submit your course page. You can always make changes to your course page later.

We’re accepting courses for fall 2026! Apply asap to secure our support for your Wikipedia Assignment — courses will now be accepted on a rolling basis as space permits.

Apply Now

How it works

With our scaffolded trainings, tools to track student work, and staff support, faculty guide their students to research course-related topics, then fill in missing information and add high-quality citations to Wikipedia articles.

Through the Wikipedia Assignment, students develop skills in research, source evaluation, writing for a public audience, collaboration, and AI literacy. If permitted by the instructor’s course policies, students can learn to use AI as a research tool to identify content gaps and references, not a text generator. We often hear from faculty that the project sparks powerful classroom conversations about AI and what it means to produce knowledge, not just consume it.

Students will draft their contributions themselves without AI to improve public access to high-quality, verifiable information for millions worldwide.

Wiki Education’s support for Wikipedia assignments is free for instructors and their students, funded by generous donations to Wiki Education.

Our free support extends to instructors teaching at postsecondary institutions accredited in the U.S. and Canada.

FAQ

What’s a Wikipedia Assignment? Students research a topic, develop a bibliography of high-quality secondary sources, and use information from the sources to improve the related Wikipedia articles. Students can also create a new Wikipedia article if it doesn’t exist yet. Who can receive free support to incorporate the assignment? Nonprofit Wiki Education provides a free suite of support and staff guidance to instructors of all disciplines at postsecondary institutions accredited in the U.S. and Canada.  With the Wikipedia Assignment, students build skills in:
  • Research, including source evaluation
  • Fact-based, neutral writing for a public audience
  • AI literacy
  • Collaboration
How does it work? During the application process, instructors share details about their course and their goals for the assignment. Our Assignment Design Wizard then builds an assignment dashboard tailored for their course. The dashboard will include the project timeline, student training modules, subject-specific resources, exercises, discussion prompts, and tools to track student work. Each course is paired with one of our Wikipedia Experts to support the instructor and their students throughout the assignment, and instructors are offered weekly office hours, information sessions, and faculty mentorship. How long does it take? Plan to incorporate your Wikipedia Assignment into at least six weeks of your syllabus — whenever possible, we recommend spreading the assignment over 10-12 weeks. (Medical courses are eligible for exemptions to the 6 week minimum.) Wikipedia Assignments can be completed outside of class, during in-class sessions, whatever you prefer. Do students work individually or in groups? Our dashboard supports individual, pair, and group work. We recommend:
  • Under 40 students = individual work
  • 40-60 students = either individual or group work
  • 60-100 students = group work
The Wikipedia Assignment is not recommended for courses over 100 students. How do I apply? Head to Wiki Education’s dashboard to create your Wikipedia account (click “Sign up with Wikipedia”), then follow the prompts to take the 30-minute asynchronous faculty orientation and answer questions about your course. You’ll then receive your course page, including your assignment timeline. Tweak it if you’d like, then submit your course page to complete your application. You can always make changes later! How should I pick my Wikipedia username? We recommend that instructors and students create non-identifiable usernames when setting up their Wikipedia accounts. Students will see your both your real name and username and you will see your students’ real names and usernames on your course dashboard page. Your name and your students’ names will not be visible to the public, only your Wikipedia usernames. Can I run a Wikipedia Assignment in more than one course during the same term? Yes! Just be sure to submit a different course page (on the dashboard) for each course when you apply. What about AI? Students may not use AI tools to write or edit their text for Wikipedia. We’ve found that even if AI-written text cites real sources, those sources often don’t actually support the fact being claimed. That makes the fact extremely hard to verify, and verifiability is a cornerstone of Wikipedia. We use the detection tool Pangram to flag likely AI use, so students can course correct with guidance from our team. With the Wikipedia Assignment, we’re asking students to use their own critical thinking to build reliably sourced knowledge for everyone. We often hear from faculty that the Wikipedia Assignment is a great way to improve understanding of AI’s limitations and spark conversations about the current information landscape. Read reflections from professors here. Who do I email with questions? Reach out to us at studentprogram@wikiedu.org. We’re here to help!

The faculty experience

As students write Wikipedia articles through our program, they learn how to collaborate with their peers, frame academic research to the public, and convey knowledge to a non-expert audience. Essentially, they do work that really matters!

    • 97% of instructors agree that a Wikipedia assignment improved their students’ digital and media literacy skills.
    • 96% of instructors agree that a Wikipedia assignment helped their students develop a sense of digital citizenship (e.g., a desire to contribute to and ensure the accuracy and accessibility of information).
    • 93% of instructors agree that a Wikipedia assignment improved their students’ research skills
    • 77% of instructors agree that a Wikipedia assignment helped their students to become more socially and culturally aware (e.g., the ability to identify underrepresentation and other content gaps stemming from bias).

Explore faculty reflections on their experiences and peer reviewed literature about teaching with Wikipedia.

Interested?

To hear from us about setting up your own Wikipedia Assignment, please submit the form below. Note: Wiki Education’s free support extends to instructors teaching at postsecondary institutions accredited in the U.S. and Canada.

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Questions?

Contact us at studentprogram@wikiedu.org.

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