Spring 2025 instructors: Apply to WikiEdu by December 1, 2024, for priority consideration for spring 2025. See below for details.
Wikipedia is the go-to source for information for much of the world. However, few understand its inner workings, and even fewer still contribute to it, even though it’s an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Wikipedia plays a central role in today’s information landscape. The English Wikipedia has more than 6 million articles, which might seem relatively complete. Impressive though this number may be, Wikipedia is a dynamic enterprise in need of constant updating and expansion. Nowhere is this more true than subjects related to historically marginalized and underrepresented populations, regions, and topic areas. You and your students can play a critical role in ensuring that Wikipedia is up-to-date, reliable, and above all, equitable.
Wiki Education
Wiki Education engages students and academics to improve Wikipedia, enrich student learning, and build a more informed public. In Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program, college and university instructors assign students to write Wikipedia articles, empowering them to share knowledge with the world. Students research course-related topics that are missing or underrepresented, synthesize the available literature, and use our free tools and trainings to add the information to Wikipedia.
Get started teaching with Wikipedia
- learn more at Teach with Wikipedia
- sign up at dashboard.wikiedu.org
- go through the self-led Orientation for New Instructors
- set up your course project for the semester
You’ll learn how you can work with Wiki Education to create meaningful assignments where your students make live edits to Wikipedia in a field relevant to your course. You’ll learn how the program works, and most of all, you’ll learn how you and your students can make a real difference in today’s dizzying information landscape.
Wooster faculty and student contributions to Wikipedia
A number of Wooster faculty have incorporated Wikipedia into their courses with articles written and edited by our own Wooster faculty and students.
In spring of 2022, Wiki Edu’s blog featured Emma Schell, a chemistry major and student in Dr. Katie Holt’s Modern Latin America class who worked on several Wikipedia articles which focus on multi-racial artists and an Indigenous group in Guatemala.
Dr. Holt has authored many articles including:
- The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize
- Kerolin, a Brazilian professional footballer who plays for the North Carolina Courage in the National Women’s Soccer League and for the Brazil national team
- other women players for the Brazilian national soccer team
Dr. Heather Fitz Gibbon’s Contemporary Sociological Theory class addressed women and scholars of color missing from Wikipedia. The articles edited and added include biography pages for Joan Huber, Richard R. Wright Jr., and women presidents or vice presidents of the American Sociological Association Rose Laub Coser, Cecilia L. Ridgeway and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein.
Our Guest Speaker
Andrés Vera, Equity Outreach Coordinator from Wikiedu, was our guest speaker to showcase the impact of editing Wikipedia and how Wikiedu can guide and support faculty with student assignments.
Andrés uses the Wikipedia Student Program’s network of instructor advocates to encourage colleagues who teach courses related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other equity-related disciplines to teach with Wikipedia.
- Watch the recording in Stream of the session