Education/Archive/A–Z

The Wikipedia Education Program brings with it a lot of new terminology. What better way to organize an overview than in A–Z?

Portal

Events and Opportunities

Ambassadors

When we started thinking about how to involve universities in the improvement of Wikipedia articles back in 2009, it became clear that we won't be successful without offering various kinds of support. We decided to create a new role for people who are both eager and qualified to help new contributors to get around the many difficulties of editing Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program started in the summer of 2010, when we recruited the first campus ambassadors and online ambassadors for the English Wikipedia. Today it's a great way for people to become engaged even if they don't have a long history of Wikipedia editing. All you need is an affinity to teaching, the willingness to help others and a friendly attitude. That opens the Wikipedia movement up for people who are eager to help and who had few opportunities for doing so in the past.

Campus Ambassadors: Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support on the university campus. They get a 2-day training to learn all the nuts and bolts of what they have to teach. Our Campus Ambassadors come from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of them are librarians, some are students, and some are teachers. They all share a common goal: to help newcomers with their first steps on Wikipedia.

Online Ambassadors: Whereas the Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support, the Online Ambassadors help students on wiki and on a dedicated IRC channel. Most of our Online Ambassadors are long-term Wikipedians who can answer almost every question related to the technical aspects of editing, Wikipedia culture and processes. Students have told us that the mentoring from Online Ambassadors has been "tremendously helpful" for understanding Wikipedia and for making the first edits.

Regional Ambassadors: When we started the Public Policy Initiative, one of our main goals was to make the program self-sustainable. That's why we created the role of Regional Ambassadors. Whereas Foundation staff members recruited professors and Campus Ambassadors in the beginning, it's now up to the volunteers. The Regional Ambassador role is a leadership role with great opportunities for developing team management, community organizing, and public outreach skills. It also provides participants with significant professional-networking opportunities, especially in the education community and the open-source community.

Bookshelf

Teaching students how to use Wikipedia is hard without instructional materials. Back in 2006 we only had the "Wikipedia Cheatsheet," a one-pager that listed the most common wiki markup tags. That's why we started the Bookshelf Project in 2009. Now, it contains a wide variety of brochures and videos that explain how to start editing. Most popular among teachers are the "Welcome to Wikipedia" and "Evaluating Wikipedia article quality" brochures. By the way: all printed materials have been created with Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application, so they can be translated and adapted by people all over the world.

EduWiki

EduWiki conferences are annual gatherings of Wikimedians, education program leaders, educators, staff, and students to discuss Wikipedia in education and the Wikimedia movement's engagement in academia. Since 2012, there have been 4 EduWiki conferences: 3 in the UK and 1 in Serbia.

Higher Education Summit

Our first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit took place on July 7–9, 2011. More than 120 teachers, librarians, Wikipedia Ambassadors, and Foundation staff members came together in Boston to celebrate the successes of the Public Policy Initiative. For the participants, the three days were a great opportunity to share their skills, best practices and success stories with each other. We received a lot of positive feedback and we hope that this was the first of many Wikipedia Higher Education Summits to be held in different countries around the globe.

India Education Program

In June 2011, we started our India Education Program in Pune, Maharashtra. Pune is a vibrant university city with more than a hundred educational institutes. We quickly learned that the interest from Indian teachers in our program is as big as the interest in the U.S. This pilot implementation unfortunately posed more challenges than we anticipated, so we ended the pilot early and are planning the second pilot based on our learnings.

K-12

We know that university students make great contributors to Wikipedia. Some say, "students are the fuel of Wikipedia." But what about high school students? We've received some inquiries from high school teachers who would like to adopt our model and let their students edit Wikipedia as part of the classroom activities. That's why we will run a small pilot in the spring term 2012 to see whether this idea is worth further exploration.

Public Policy Initiative

A 17-month experimental pilot program that started in the summer of 2010. We decided to run our pilot with a narrow topical focus ("If we can do it with public policy, we will be able to do it with any other topic as well") and limited to U.S. universities. Now, as we are flooded with requests from educators outside of public policy, and we have a model that works effectively, we are transitioning the Public Policy Initiative to the new Wikipedia Education Program. Our goal is to apply our learnings in the U.S. to other disciplines and countries and to expand the use of Wikipedia in higher education globally. We see this as a continuous effort to strengthen and diversify Wikipedia's editing community.

Wikipedia Education Program

The class-based university program as explored in the Public Policy Initiative has been highly successful in turning students into Wikipedia contributors. We have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We are now at a point to make these investments pay off. That's why we are starting a Wikipedia Education Program. The Wikipedia Education Program will support the Foundation's strategic goal to grow and strengthen the Wikipedia editor community.

Women

One of our strategic goals is to encourage more women to start editing Wikipedia. Our activities at universities offer a great opportunity to do so: more than half of the students in the U.S. (as well as in a large number of other countries) are female. And, of course, we are proud that more than 45% of our Campus Ambassadors are women as well.