A high-impact, real-world assignment
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, enhance representation, and improve citations on the world’s largest encyclopedia.
Each term, Wiki Education supports hundreds of faculty across the U.S. and Canada as they incorporate the Wikipedia assignment into their courses by providing custom syllabi, tailored resources, robust trainings, and staff support.
Get started today
Click “Apply Now” and follow the prompts to create your Wikipedia account, take our self-paced instructor orientation, and create your course page.
How it works
Through our Dashboard’s trainings, tools, and human support, faculty guide their students to research course-related topics, then fill in missing information and add high-quality citations to Wikipedia articles.
Students develop research, writing, and digital literacy skills, all while improving representation and knowledge equity for all – instead of writing for just you, they’ll write for the world.
The Wikipedia Student Program is free for participants, funded by generous donations to Wiki Education.
Connect with faculty participants
Register for an upcoming webinar to hear from faculty who have taught with Wikipedia and ask questions.
Explore faculty experiences
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.
Questions?
Contact Wiki Education’s Andrés Vera at andres@wikiedu.org.
Testimonials
By the end of the quarter, they realize that their work has been affecting people, something that rarely happens with a standard term paper. In their evaluations of the course, students routinely mention the Wikipedia assignment as their favorite part.
My students wrestled with their status as quasi-gatekeepers to particular information. I believe this revelation made their commitment to and belief in free and accessible information even more poignant. We used this project to reconsider power and privilege in the academy and exercised our positionality as a driving force in contributing to the Wikipedia articles.
Students’ Wikipedia pages and presentations also showed me that they achieved everything that a traditional research paper is supposed to do and more—they conducted research, analyzed it, wrote effectively about their topics, but also shared their work in a meaningful way with each other and with the public.
In the past two years, writing for Wikipedia has added intellectual substance and verve to my courses, while giving me and my students a sense of accomplishment as we produce and disseminate knowledge.
To hear from us about the Wikipedia Student Program, please submit the form below. Note: We are only able to work with courses in U.S. or Canadian accredited higher education institutions.
