This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Iara Camargo had one term of teaching experience when a professor in her Ph.D. program at the University of São Paulo forwarded her an open call from the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil. The program was looking for faculty members who were interested in assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. Iara, excited by the prospect, signed up.

“I got very excited about the idea of writing articles with my students on Wikipedia,” she says. “I think most academics have a little prejudice about Wikipedia, saying that some information could be not quite real. But I’ve always used Wikipedia as a starting point to research a subject. The idea is not to use it as a reference, only to have some idea about the subject. Then, when I started to look at it more critically, I found many good articles in my research field… and of course some poor ones.”

Iara asked her students in her Editorial Design course at Faculdades Integradas Rio Branco to improve those poor articles. Her students researched and wrote articles ranging from famous designers like Bea Feitler to concepts like legibility to publishers like Penguin Books. Iara even started an article herself, on book design.

“I like incorporating Wikipedia in my class for these reasons,” she says. “First, to stimulate the students to read and write more. Second, I believe that is good because they are actually publishing something, it is not a paper that they are writing just to me to have an evaluation. Third, they have to be conscious and judicious to write well, because a lot of people might use it in the future.”

In particular, Iara says, her students get more from the Wikipedia assignment than they would from many traditional assignments in the design field. Since design is mostly a visual medium, students do not have the chance to develop as much researching and writing skills, but those are critical skills for their careers. Iara believes the Wikipedia assignment helps students learn these skills while teaching them the fundamentals of the discipline.

“It is great in terms of writing, you have to be impartial and write objectively, which is in some ways scientific writing because you cannot add subjective writing to Wikipedia,” she says. “And I think it is great because they really have to find reliable sources instead of using the argument ‘I’ve heard it is like that’ or ‘I thought it was like that’.”

Iara’s department head Professor Paulo Durão enthusiastically supported her and her students as they worked on the Wikipedia assignments. In fact, the institution’s academic director Professor Alexandre Uehara liked the idea so much that Iara and her Campus Ambassadors, Cauê Henrique Rodrigues, Denise Akemi Matsuda, and Maira Rodrigues, were featured in a video shown in the school cafeteria for one month. Iara and her students also had help from two Portuguese Wikipedians serving as Online Ambassadors, Vitor Mazuco and Gabryelsl. The wikicode was initially scary for Iara, but with the help of the Ambassadors, she learned how to edit Wikipedia and is even excited about using her wikicode skills.

“My favorite part was the challenge of working with it!” Iara says. “It’s a wonderful tool and Wikipedia is not only a website, it is a very important cultural phenomenon. We are in a different time and maybe learning and studying nowadays has to be integrated with this new Internet life we are living.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

(more…)

Working with 4th year Cornell students, I know I can expect a lot from them. In the course Online Communities students learn about how online technologies can serve as means for constructing and maintaining communities (e.g., GitHub, World of Warcraft, Couchsurfing, Reddit, PatientsLikeMe). They also learn about different aspects of online communities: roles and membership, governance, design, norms of behavior, identity, and so on. Of course, they could learn through readings, lectures, and discussions. But a better way to learn about online communities is to become members of one. So I thought – perhaps the best example of a rich and diverse community, with clear goals, norms, roles, members, interaction tools, and actual products, is Wikipedia. I therefore decided in Fall 2012 that a class project would be to write a Wikipedia article, as a vehicle for learning what this online community is all about.

I was concerned about this assignment: having only done minimal edits here and there, I do not know much about Wikipedia’s rules, standards of writing, how decisions are made, and who are the other Wikipedians and what they do. I therefore felt lucky to have received the attention of the Wikipedia Education Program, who assigned our class a Campus Ambassador (Gabriel Mugar) and an Online Ambassador (Piotr Konieczny), who both engaged with me and students offline and online about this class project.

We started with students creating user accounts, playing with sandboxes to get their feet wet with Wikipedia editing, and teaming in three member groups for writing an article together. Then they had to choose a topic for their article. I gave students complete freedom in choosing what article to write, since this exercise was mostly about the process of working on the article, not the content per-se.  Our Campus Ambassador encouraged students to choose topics for which they can find at least 5 reliable sources to start with. I also encouraged students not to choose as topics local businesses and organizations that might not merit an encyclopedic article (although some students ignored this advice).  Many chose interesting topics, such as Incentive-Centered Design, Brick Lane Market, Women’s Oversized Fashion in the United States 1920s-2000s, and Sherlock Holmes: The Musical.

Through a page that was constructed under their user account page, students submitted an article proposal in which they described and justified the topic they had chosen, proposed the content and structure of the article, explained how the topic is situated in the Wikipedia realm (i.e., a relevant WikiProject and other articles linked to/from this article), and listed their sources.  Students in the class gave each other feedback about these proposals on the talk page, providing them with ideas for additional sources, images to use, or content and structural changes.  Then the writing of the articles began. Most of the work was done in their sandoxes, only later moving them to a “real” Wikipedia article page. Students had to be sure that their writing adheres to Wikipedia’s standards, making all claims verifiable by citing proper sources and using the talk page to discuss anything that went into and out of the article.  They were also encouraged to actively connect to other Wikipedians – our Online Ambassador or active Wikipedians in the WikiProject that is related to their article or that are involved in related articles.  For example, one group interacted with another individual on licensing images they were using in their article.  Toward the end of the process, students took the articles out of their sandboxes and turned them into “real” Wikipedia articles. This came with a lot of concern that pages will be immediately deleted.  To our surprise, pages were not “speedy-deleted”, and many students got other Wikipedians to pay attention to their articles and help them with structure, standards, images, etc.

This assignment was graded on the following aspects: (1) high quality content based on substantial sources; (2) correct formatting and structure, images and sideboxes, and links to/from other articles; (3) engaging in discussion with other Wikipedians in the talk page; (4) showing gradual evolution of article through the article’s history; and (5) demonstrating reflective thoughts about the experience and community participation in a later-submitted individual reflection paper.

This experience was definitely a success. Students learned about the community and how it works, interacted with others directly or indirectly, and learned what it means to be a member of the Wikipedia community. They discovered barriers of participation and contribution to articles, and that the commonly used phrase “anyone can write anything on Wikipedia” was incorrect – it takes a lot to write a Wikipedia article. For example, one group was surprised to find a lot of “citation needed” pop up in their article, and they worked hard to fix those arguments.  Students were excited that something they had written for a class assignment turned into meaningful contribution to the most expansive knowledge repository in the world and that Googling their topic brought up the article they have written. Many of the articles are still up, and some have been expanded and edited by other Wikipedians since this exercise was concluded.

Unfortunately, most articles that were written in this 5-week class project are still at a low quality level according to Wikipedia’s standards of article development, and this might be what I work on next time I offer the class – instead of writing an article from scratch or editing a stub-level article, increase the quality of a start-level article to B- or A-level.  I might have to practice this myself before I assign this, and I will definitely rely on help from the Wikipedia community; after all, it is an online community, and this is what this class is all about.

Gilly Leshed is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University.  She teaches courses about the social, technical, and design aspects of information and communication technologies, with topics such as social media, mobile devices, and new ways of collaborating, playing, and connecting with others. 

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Yuri Leite

“I think that the knowledge produced by high-qualified college students should be available to anyone,” Professor Yuri Leite says. That’s why he has encouraged his biology students at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in Vitória, Brazil, to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their course assignments.

The idea came to him one day in 2009, when he was coordinating a graduate level seminar on the Charles Darwin book “The Origin of Species.” Each week, the class discussed a chapter of the book and improved the article on the Portuguese Wikipedia about Darwin’s book as they went along. Before Yuri’s class began work, the article was what’s known as a stub — a short article without much content. By the end of the term, his class had transformed the article, with extensive descriptions of each chapter.

“I think it is a waste of time, energy, knowledge, and often paper to have highly skilled undergraduate or graduate students write term papers that will be read only by the teacher and sometimes a TA, and will eventually end up in the trash can,” Yuri says.

He had always been interested in using the Internet as a teaching tool. As a teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1990s, Yuri found the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web and Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution portals inspirational.

A beautiful view of Vitória city, where Professor Yuri Leite teaches.

He started using Wikipedia in his undergraduate Evolution course since August 2011. The course is mandatory for all biology students, and Yuri has about 30 students enroll each term. He says it will only take a few years to have his students make hundreds of contributions to free, high-quality knowledge available in Portuguese about the topics. He also sees better learning for students with a Wikipedia assignment in comparison to a traditional term paper.

“I believe they learn more, especially regarding proper citation, and what is original research and what is not. Both of these concepts are very important in science,” he says. “Wikipedia does a great job in terms of defining what an encyclopedia is, and how one should write an article citing appropriate sources, and this is a very important skill for students.”

And Yuri says his students feel more responsibility to produce high-quality work because they know their writing will be available to anyone on Wikipedia. He’s excited about the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, and he hopes that more professors will join the program and develop more teaching resources to stimulate the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. In fact, professor Aureo Banhos, one of his former biology students, has joined the program through an open call Wikimedia Foundation made in Brazil for the second school term of 2012 and is excited to collaborate with Yuri.

“I love reading the assignments and feeling like my students made a significant contribution by posting high-quality information on the web,” Yuri says.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

(more…)

In 2005, a high school freshman from Clarksville, Maryland, named Kevin Li discovered Wikipedia. Kevin was amazed that anyone would spend the time to write detailed articles on such a wide range of topics. Today, Kevin is a college senior at Washington University in St. Louis, and he has joined the ranks of those who contribute to Wikipedia.

Kevin got his start with Wikipedia editing through a class project on chronobiology where he worked in a group to improve the article on scientist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. They brought the article all the way to Good Article status, so Kevin was excited to enroll in another class, Professor Joan Strassmann’s Behavioral Ecology course, where he would be solely responsible for an article.

“I was surprised that some of the animals and behaviors we learned about weren’t on Wikipedia,” Kevin says. “The article that I am working on, worker policing, has been in the scientific literature for more than two decades and hadn’t been discussed. It’s fun to bring some of these concepts into the wiki community, since I feel that being a contributor is equally as important as being a consumer of information.”

Worker policing — the subject of Kevin’s article — is common in honey bees.

Since the topic was not yet covered on Wikipedia, Kevin created a page that contained just the title of the article. Volunteer Heather Walls tagged the article for deletion since it had no content. Kevin came by two hours later and was surprised to discover that his page had been deleted by an editor named WilyD.

“I was contacted by the editor who had marked the page and I responded to her comments,” Kevin explains. “The misunderstanding was resolved and she was even nice enough to add a picture on the article.”

WilyD came back once Kevin had expanded it, and was impressed enough by Kevin’s work to nominate the article to appear on Wikipedia’s main page in the Did You Know section. Kevin’s article appeared on the main page on October 17 and received more than 1,500 views.

“The DYK reviewer asked me to work on the leads and to clarify some of the body paragraphs, which I happily did. Afterward, we were good to go!” Kevin says. “Many of the editors have been helpful with constructive criticism. It was really exciting to see the interest that people had for the article when it went up. I’m still working on making the article better. After some more edits, I hope to get it to Good Article status.”

Kevin is glad to see something he is interested in have more coverage on Wikipedia. That’s one of the reasons he prefers Wikipedia assignments to traditional term papers. He says while the research process is similar, he prefers Wikipedia assignments because of the large audience for his work and the collaboration that comes from work with classmates and other editors on Wikipedia articles.

“Working on wiki is like constructing a miniature classroom for yourself, where you can become an expert given the proper effort. It’s also a work station where I can collect my thoughts and organize them into a product that everyone can see,” he says. “Wikipedia is really one of those sites that I still love going to and exploring what’s out there. It feels nice to be a contributor.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

“Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool” is a new brochure. Click on the image to download the brochure from Wikimedia Commons.

University instructors around the world who are interested in incorporating Wikipedia assignments into their course curriculum are now able to access three printed brochures filled with best practices. Drawing from the experiences of hundreds of professors worldwide who have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program, the brochures provide a blueprint for how to incorporate Wikipedia assignments into university curricula.

A new brochure, titled “Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool“, is now available from the Wikimedia Foundation and on Wikimedia Commons. This brochure covers key Wikipedia policies and structures that are important for educators wanting to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment to understand. The brochure also shows best practices on article selection and working with the community, and sample grading rubrics.

The second brochure in the series is a sample syllabus provided for instructors interested in having their students write Wikipedia articles as part of the course curriculum. This brochure has been updated based on recommendations from more instructors who have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program and feedback from the Wikipedia community. The new version provides a week-by-week breakdown of how you can incorporate a “write a Wikipedia article” assignment into your classes. It includes some key milestones that have proven effective at ensuring that students derive the greatest educational benefits from editing Wikipedia.

“The Syllabus: A 12-week assignment to write a Wikipedia article” can be downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, a Case Studies brochure offers examples of assignment types that professors around the world have used, as well as suggestions on how to grade assignments.

All three brochures are available under free licenses from Wikimedia Commons, and source files are available via email so you can translate the brochures into other languages. The Case Studies brochure, which was released earlier this year, has already been translated into several languages.

The brochures are produced as part of the Wikipedia Education Program, where volunteers support professors who are interested in assigning their students to contribute to Wikipedia. Education programs are in operation in 25 countries around the world.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Prolific Wikipedians strongly favor access to more research materials, according to our December 2011 Editor Survey

One of the challenges facing the volunteer editors of Wikipedia is finding reliable sources to use as reference material — in our last editor survey, 39 percent named this as one of the largest problems hindering their contributions. The need was especially pronounced among our most active volunteers, who make hundreds or thousands of edits per month.

To address this issue, the Wikimedia Foundation is collaborating with JSTOR, a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, to provide 100 of the most active Wikipedia editors with free access to the complete archive collections on JSTOR, including more than 1,600 academic journals, primary source documents and other works. The authors who will receive accounts have collectively written more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles to date. Access to JSTOR, which is one of the most popular sources on English Wikipedia, will allow these editors to further fill in the gaps in the sum of all human knowledge.

While some Wikipedia volunteers may already receive access as part of their professional affiliations or through institutions like public libraries, this access is far from universal. This program will empower some of our most active editors to create new content on the huge variety of topics covered by the journal archives on JSTOR. Access during the pilot will be for a year, after which JSTOR and Wikimedia will collaborate on potentially expanding the program.

Wikipedia contributors beyond the pilot group can also take advantage of growing access, as can readers. JSTOR provides free access to Early Journal Content and recently introduced Register & Read, an experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. More information may be found at about.jstor.org/individuals.

While Wikipedians are volunteers, their work on the encyclopedia is most definitely of a scholarly nature. We hope that this pilot will show that amazing things can happen when you provide dedicated volunteers with access to great source material.

Steven Walling, Associate Product Manager (Wikimedia Foundation)
Kristen Garlock, Associate Director, Education & Outreach (JSTOR)

Lakshmi Valsalakumari is an IT professional who wants to expand her horizons. She attended the recent Wikimedia Developers Camp in Bangalore and had this story to tell:

Lakshmi with Santhosh Thottingal, the lead developer of Wikimedia’s font and keyboard tools

I have been an Information Technology professional working with well-known software organizations over the last 15 years. While IT has been keeping me busy, productive and happy, I have also all along harbored an interest in history and the humanities. I have recently decided to pursue these interests full-time, joining a research program at the Centre of Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.

With my recent shift into academics and research, I have been referencing Wikipedia quite a bit in the last two to three months, and I have been amazed at the sheer magnitude of information found on it. While I have been reading the Wikipedia pages extensively, I had never yet considered editing it, not even in English, the language I reference Wikipedia most in, and the one I use most on computers.

Editing and contributing content in Malayalam, my mother tongue, had not really occurred to me either—Malayalam being a language I hardly used on my computers—until I attended the Bangalore Wikimedia Dev Camp.

I have tried typing Malayalam using my regular browser, but I have not been very happy with the effect. This was not the way I liked to see Malayalam written and rendered, so I had not made any further efforts to write Malayalam online. At the camp, I met Santhosh and Manoj—avid Malayalam Wikipedia contributors—and they persuaded me to give it another shot.

The first step was to download the Meera Unicode font for Malayalam, then to change my default browser to one of those that can render Meera well (I tried out Google Chrome; Firefox was even better, I was told), and then to try out typing Malayalam using the regular English keyboard.

I liked what I saw. When I typed the suggested key combinations, even complicated Malayalam letter combinations were being rendered the way I would have written them using pen and paper. I tried more and more combinations—ta, tha, tta, Ta, tma, thra, tya, zha—and was pleased with the effect. This was fun!

Demos of how transliteration keyboards for Malayalam work

Soon, I was creating my first article. I noticed that on the main Wikipedia page, an article on Barcelona mentioned Catalonia as a red link, meaning that no further information was available in the Malayalam Wikipedia on it, whereas there was plenty of information on the same subject in the English Wikipedia. Manoj guided me through the steps as I created my first page in the Malayalam Wikipedia, copied the template information over from the English article and saved the heading, trying to get it right in Malayalam. I viewed my saved efforts, and with a sense of achievement, I went to grab a coffee.

Back online with my coffee, I was surprised to find a message on the article Talk page—someone had already posted a comment on the page I had just saved, chiding me for the lack of content and references. “This will drive away people from Wikipedia,” the post read. “Please ensure I get enough content on the page!”

Man, that was fast! I had no idea people were watching and following Wikipedia edits this closely. Manoj encouraged me to type more, so I returned to my effort. While I was getting comfortable with the typing, I was still grappling for suitable words in Malayalam for the content I was reading in English. Manoj suggested Olam, an online dictionary, and sure enough, I was able to find several of the Malayalam equivalents I was searching for.

And so, I typed on. Again, to my surprise, I found people editing the content and giving helpful suggestions even as I was still typing—one person told me to leave native names as such and not translate those, and another formatted some of the changes. By the end of the day, I had posted a decent amount of info, although there remained much more to be added.

I was happy with my day’s work. I had never imagined that using Malayalam on my computer and editing the Malyalam Wikipedia content would be such a pleasant and enjoyable experience, one that I was actually looking forward to!

Another point I must mention here is the sheer volume of Malayalam content that I have started seeing online, on Wikipedia pages and elsewhere. This must be due to the attention paid to this field of languages, literature and culture online by movements like Wikimedia. In 2005, I remember searching online for a well-known Malayalam lullaby Omanathingalkkidavo by Irayimman Thampi, but could not find anything. I had then resorted to the memories of my immediate relatives to try and pen the forgotten lyrics. Now, when I search for the same, the amount of material that comes up on that lullaby is amazing!

My heart-felt appreciation to Wikipedia and all its online community members who have made all of this possible. I hope to be part of this movement myself and do my bit toward furthering easy availability of multi-lingual content online

Lakshmi Valsalakumari

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is developing technologies that make it possible to speakers of all languages to contribute to Wikipedia in their language as easily and naturally as possible. Lakshmi’s story is an example of how these technologies enable people to develop reference and educational content that makes Wikipedia useful to people in the whole world. These technologies are deployed in Wikipedias in most languages of India, and more languages and projects are being added all the time.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

In August 2011, I offered a course called Wikipedia in Roman History for an undergraduate History course at UNIRIO, Brazil. This was the first experiment in teaching with Wikipedia supported by the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil. Now the program is well established and new courses are added each term, all of them incorporating graded assignments with Wikipedia though a variety of university courses.

This year I thought of something different. I realized that assignments with grades were not the only thing we could do. The university can act as a starting point to present students – or, for that matter, anyone – with a deeper view of what Wikipedia is, what it can do, its restrictions and possibilities for sharing knowledge (I like to call it “wiki-literacy”). This has been done before, by teams of volunteers all over the world, with or without Wikimedia Foundation support. But universities have as one of their three branches of action something we call “extension,” or activities that connect academia with society as a whole (the other branches are, naturally, teaching and research). So, isn’t working with Wikipedia totally fitting with the definition of extension?

Participants in the workshop at UNIRIO.

On October 16, together with Campus Ambassador OTAVIO1981, I offered a 4-hour workshop for students during the UNIRIO Extension Week. Twelve people participated, including students from other universities as well. We introduced the 5 pillars, with discussion on the meaning and use of encyclopedias, reliability, authorship, copyrights and collaborative writing, all through examples taken from Wikipedia sections, navigation, and good and bad articles.

With the presentation of the last two pillars, the students started editing: they created their userpages; they learned how to insert userboxes (this pre-social network device motivates them a lot); and they learned how to send messages through each other’s talk pages. We had previously selected five small articles from the English Wikipedia that were not available in Portuguese, translated the text and distributed them to the students. It was important that the articles were about topics of the lecturer’s knowledge, so additional information could be readily supplied.

The students then learned some basic formatting, such as how to insert internal and external links, references, images and categories. Choosing the best images was an important activity on itself. At the end of the workshop, they all had their shiny new (and correct) articles to show everyone. Furthermore, the workshop counted as additional working hours for their graduating requirements, which is important and motivational for them as well.

Editing workshops are not new. Nowadays, neither is teaching with Wikipedia. This packed format, however, opened some new possibilities. The ultimate goal here was not training new editors, or even improving Wikipedia content. These are consequences, because we must not forget that editing is essentially a voluntary act. These students may never edit again, but they will have become better users, more conscientious about processing and even creating information. This is a pressing necessity for today, and on Wikipedia, wiki-literacy is one of the best possible tools to achieve that.

Juliana Bastos Marques is User:Domusaurea.

(more…)

Students regularly use Wikipedia, and so do teachers. Whether we’re looking for information related to a class project, seeking an illustration for a paper, or reading background material so we can better understand an assigned text, free knowledge shared digitally is now a major component of education. Because Wikipedia is such a ubiquitous and influential source of information for my students, I feel quite annoyed when I find gaps in coverage and participation.

Alverno College students use Wikipedia to share information about Milwaukee public art.

Missing information is what initially motivated me to become an editor. I wanted my students to be able to find information easily about public art, about the monuments and sculptures they walk past everyday on campus, in city parks and in their home towns. After writing a few short articles about sculptures I knew well, I realized that trying to fill the gaps myself would be a long, lonely process. Then I realized that my students could help.

Since 2008, I have used Wikipedia regularly in my courses. Working in collaboration with editors involved with WikiProject Public Art and WikiProject Lights Camera Wiki, my students and I have developed hundreds of Wikipedia articles about public artworks, and we’ve created and contributed more than 50 short videos through Wikimedia Commons to illustrate article content.

My deepening involvement with Wikipedia as a movement put me in touch with another gap: gender. Fortunately, my students also help with that. I’ve now introduced close to 100 students to editing Wikipedia, and all of them are women. (One of my students was even previously featured on this blog!)

My students are not typical Wikipedia editors–and not just because of their gender. Many are working women who have returned to school after starting families and careers. Many are graduates of under-funded public school districts that lag in access to digital technology. Many do not have their own computers and rely instead on smartphones and campus labs. While all are familiar with what Wikipedia is, none of them has prior experience editing it, and few have participated in online communities beyond Facebook.

Getting students started editing Wikipedia is easy, but keeping those students connected to the open knowledge movement as active contributors is more challenging. To participate consistently, students need motivation, opportunity and encouragement. For an initial editing experience, a class project provides the motivation of a focus and deadline, a computer lab offers the opportunity of access and the close-knit community of a classroom provides the structure and encouragement.

Alverno College, where I teach now, contributes a unique support in the form of its innovative ability-based curriculum. At Alverno, students work to develop eight core abilities, including the problem solving skills they need to navigate new technologies and the habits of effective citizenship they need to engage in the “good faith collaboration” that Wikipedia’s norms require. Beyond my classroom at Alverno, students receive support through initiatives like the Wikipedia Education Program, Campus Ambassadors, and the Wikipedia Teahouse.

A few of the women who learned to edit in my classes are barnstar rock stars and I like to think that many more are getting ready to shine. Today, I’m motivated to teach with Wikipedia because I want to learn how to better support women to share their expertise and build community around their intellectual interests. I’m grateful to the organizers of the WikiWomen’s Collaborative for bringing needed attention and resources to the vexing problem of gender inequity among editors. I’m optimistic that this effort will bring me in contact with models to inspire my students to continue editing and fill the gaps. Keeping women active as editors is one important way to create a more welcoming environment within the movement.

Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Alverno College, Milwaukee

Wikipedia doesn’t require to you to sign up for an account. We like giving everything away for free, and even let people edit without creating an account. But if you’d like to register, there are plenty of good reasons to do so.

The current signup page in English

However, it’s been a long time since the registration process for Wikipedia got any love. In fact, it’s pretty clunky, and it may be contributing to the decline in successful registrations in the last few years.

To address this, we’ve started testing changes to the account creation page on English Wikipedia this week. We’ve updated the visual design to be far less cluttered and expose a clearer structure, and reduced the amount of instructional text that appears before the form. As a side benefit, mobile users should find the page easier to use, though our mobile team is working on further enhancements, too.

We’ve also added a simple list of benefits to account creation, such as being able to start new pages, upload photos, and have a presence in the Wikipedia community, but these won’t appear on small screen sizes. In a second iteration, we’ll be adding live validation to the form, so you will know if there are any errors right away.

Our mockup

Please note: the new look is delivered only 50% of the time, as part of an A/B test, so the best thing to do if you want to give us feedback is to comment on the mockup here, or on our documents related to design and data analysis.

Some readers here may remember that back in 2011, a Fellowship project on account creation experimented with ways to encourage people to edit during or immediately after the signup process. However, basic limitations in the core functionality still plagued that project, not to mention anyone trying to create an account.

For this work, we’re focused on simply making the signup page itself be a less frustrating experience, with the secondary goal of gently introducing people to why an account is useful. After the trial, we’ll be permanently incorporating features that help more people register.

Steven Walling, Associate Product Manager
S Page, Software Engineer
Munaf Assaf, User Experience Designer