WIKI EDUCATION FOUNDATION

Wiki Education aims to improve Wikipedia, the world's largest open educational resource, by connecting the editing community with dedicated, interested students and instructors. We engage students and instructors with a serious genre writing assignment that stresses communication, collaboration, research and technical writing. We also train scholars and scientists to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia.

At Wiki Education we experiment, iterate, and gain feedback from stakeholders to improve what we're already good at doing. We also go back to old annual plans and look at what we've piloted and how it has worked out for us. Doing this constantly means we're able to learn from big pushes and projects. Before we started a year-long campaign called the Year of Science in 2016, we as an organization had never attempted a thematic content push, a targeted outreach strategy and a communications blitz all at once. Now, organizationally, we have the experience and knowledge from doing so. We can go on to make new and different mistakes.

We employ more experts on Wikipedia than any organization in the US outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. Our staff is comprised of long-time community members who deeply understand Wikipedia as a community and resource, and many staff have extensive experience in higher education instruction. We have a proven capability to reach out to members of the academic community to fill a demonstrated need for data science or research. We can establish, evaluate, and expand small projects as needed. We are also capable of evaluating and determining where pilot projects don't work--negative results are just as important to us as positive ones.

Since our beginning, we have supported over 58,000 students in over 2,800 college courses successfully edit Wikipedia articles. These students have collectively improved over 75,000 articles and have added over 50 million of words to English Wikipedia. When students edit Wikipedia, they show the world what they know, and they show themselves that they know. They're making a statement. Not just in their contribution, but by contributing. They're looking at what they've learned and they tell the world: “I know this." That's the difference between writing for assignments and writing for an audience. Because of our work, students make the leap from passive learning to an active expression of knowledge. They rephrase and revise their understanding as they work. They put it into their own words, they make it theirs, and pass it on. In the end, they've shared real knowledge with the world. But they've also made that knowledge distinctly their own.