Wikipedia and Academia

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Wikipedia logo with a globe made of puzzle pieces

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 Edu, the logo of the Wiki Education Foundation

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

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. 

image of instructors, student editors and wikipedia users

Information Session

Professor Katie Holt and the Educational Technology team welcome your participation in an information session about teaching with Wikipedia to help students identify and address systemic biases. Come ask College of Wooster faculty and staff about their experiences with Wikipedia and read below about their contributions.

Our Guest Speaker

Andrés Vera, Equity Outreach Coordinator from Wikiedu, will be our guest speaker to showcase the impact of editing Wikipedia and how Wikiedu can guide and support you 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.

headshot of Andres Vera
Andres Vera, Equity Outreach Coordinator from Wikiedu

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:

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.