Dr. Abeer El Hafez teaches Spanish to undergraduate and master’s students at Cairo University, but she understands the importance of making information available to her students on Wikipedia in their native language of Arabic. So she jumped at the chance to participate in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program. Dr. Abeer received support from trained Wikipedia Ambassadors in exchange for having her students edit Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework.

Dr. Abeer talks about her experiences in Arabic.

With 13 students who all added significant information to Wikipedia, Dr. Abeer’s course ranked at the top of pilot participants in terms of contributions. Her students worked on a total of 31 articles on the Arabic Wikipedia, with some students making edits to the corresponding Spanish Wikipedia entries as well. To teach students the subject matter, Dr. Abeer told students to pick a writer from Latin America or Spain who had a high quality article on the Spanish Wikipedia. Students translated the article from the Spanish Wikipedia into Arabic.

In a few cases, when articles weren’t available on the Spanish Wikipedia, students researched and wrote articles from scratch for the Arabic Wikipedia, then updated the Spanish Wikipedia versions of the articles. One such example is the article on Laura Restrepo (in Arabic) (in Spanish), an author and journalist from Colombia. The article on the Spanish Wikipedia was a stub article, so Dr. Abeer’s student researched more information and expanded the article on the Spanish Wikipedia and created the article on the Arabic Wikipedia.

“The students were very motivated to do something practical,” Dr. Abeer said. “They got a chance to enhance the knowledge available to Arabic readers. The Wikipedia assignment is a great way to visualize their text for all of the Arabic world.”

Dr. Abeer says the traditional knowledge production at the university level can be mechanistic for some students, and mixing it up with an assignment like contributing to Wikipedia is a good way of challenging students. She looks forward to using Wikipedia with her undergraduates next term.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

تطوير مقالات ويكيبيديا العربية والإسبانية في أحد صفوف جامعة القاهرة

تدرس الدكتورة عبير عبد الحافظ اللغة الإسبانية لصفوف المرحلة الجامعية الأولى ومرحلة الماجستير في جامعة القاهرة، وهي تدرك أهمية

الدكتورة عبير عبد الحافظ تتكلم عن تجربتها في برنامج ويكيبيديا في التعليم.

جعل المعرفة متاحة لطلابها على ويكيبيديا بلغتهم الأم، اللغة العربية. لذلك قررت الاشتراك في تجربة القاهرة من برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي في مؤسسة ويكيميديا. تلقت الدكتورة عبير الدعم من سفراء ويكيبيديا المدربين بهدف أن يقوم طلابها بتحرير مقالات ويكيبيديا كجزء من واجباتهم الدراسية.

وبوجود ١٣ طالب قاموا بإضافة كم كبير من المعلومات إلى ويكيبيديا، حصل صف الدكتورة عبير على الترتيب الأعلى في البرنامج من قبل كمية المساهمات، حيث أن طلابها عملوا على ٣١ مقالة في ويكيبيديا العربية، بالإضافة إلى أن بعض الطلاب عملوا على مقالات مقابلة في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية أيضا. ومن أجل أن توصل الدكتورة عبير المعلومة بشكل جيد طلبت من طلابها اختيار أحد الكتاب من أمريكا اللاتينية أو إسبانيا والذي قد ألف عنه مقالة جيدة المستوى في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية، وقام الطلاب بترجمة تلك المقالات من الإسبانية إلى العربية.

وفي بعض الحالات التي لم تكن بها المقالات متوفرة باللغة الإسبانية، قام الطلاب بكتابة المقالات باللغة العربية بدءا من الصفر، ومن ثم أضافوا المعلومات إلى مقالات ويكيبيديا الإسبانية. أحد تلك الأمثلة هو مقالة لورا ريستريبو (بالإسبانية)، مؤلفة وصحفية من كولومبيا. كانت المقالة في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية عبارة عن بذرة قصيرة، حيث قام طلاب الدكتورة عبير بالبحث عن المعلومات وتطوير المقالة على ويكيبيديا الإسبانية وأنشأوا مقالة عنها باللغة العربية أيضا.

تقول الدكتورة عبير “إن الطلاب كانوا متحمسين جدا للقيام بشيء عملي، وقد حصلوا على الفرصة لتطوير المعرفة المتاحة للقارئ العربي. إن الواجب الدراسي على ويكيبيديا هو وسيلة رائعة لتحويل نصوصهم إلى مادة قراءة لجميع العالم العربي”

كما تضيف الدكتورة عبير بأن الإنتاج المعرفي التقليدي في المستوى الجامعي من الممكن أن يكون شيء آلي بالنسبة لبعض الطلاب، وبخطلها مع واجب مثل المشاركة في ويكيبيديا هو شيء جيد لتحدي الطلاب. وتتطلع الدكتورة عبير إلى استخدام ويكيبيديا مع طلابها في صفوف المرحلة الجامعية الأولى في الفصل القادم.

Juliana Bastos Marques

A new brochure released by the Wikimedia Foundation on-wiki and in PDF contains case studies of how university instructors around the world have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool. The brochure features 15 professors from 6 different countries, including 9 different assignments professors have used and 5 different ways of grading the assignments.

For example, Professor Juliana Bastos Marques of Brazil shares how she assigns her students to write Wikipedia articles for class. The 13-week assignment encourages students to critically analyze existing Portuguese Wikipedia articles on the course topic, then suggest improvements in a sandbox, with feedback from the professor and Ambassadors, and finally move their articles to the article namespace. More information about Professor Juliana’s assignment is available on the wiki version of the Case Studies brochure.

Dalia Mohamed El Toukhy

In another assignment featured in the brochure, Professor Dalia Mohamed El Toukhy of Egypt explains how she has used translations successfully in her course. Students are learning to be professional translators for French and Arabic, so she has students select high-quality articles from the French Wikipedia that are not available on the Arabic Wikipedia, and the students translate the French into Arabic. In this assignment, Professor Dalia explains, her students get real-world translation examples while improving the quality of the Arabic Wikipedia. See more information about this idea.

Read more ideas of Wikipedia assignments and how to grade them at http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies.

Another aspect of the on-wiki version of the brochure allows any other professor who has done a unique assignment with a Wikimedia project to create his or her own profile on wiki. Using a guided template, professors can include information about what they did with their students and how successful the project was, including rankings of how the assignment met learning objectives. Professors from around the world are encouraged to add yourself to the on-wiki version of the brochure!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

On July 13, 2012, I had the pleasure to present, “Translation and Transnational Scholarship” at Wikimania 2012 at  The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the presentation I spoke about my role as a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador in two of Professor Adel Iskandar’s graduate courses: New Media, Innovation, Community, & Dissidence (Fall 2011) and  Media and Communications in the Arab World (Spring 2012) at Georgetown University through the U.S. Education Program (WP:USEP). Each course had two Wikipedia components: article creation and in-class group edits. I became involved with the USEP  because I was eager to help students visualize news and history that had not been yet been represented as a part popular knowledge.

United States Education Program logo

The U.S. Education Program came to Georgetown in the Fall 2010 term and has since been incorporated into 14 courses university wide.  The program provides assistance to professors who want to integrate Wikipedia article creation and editing as part of a course. The support materials include not only wiki markup handouts and brochures, but also both online and offline points of contact. In the classroom, a Campus Ambassador (me, in this case) gives two tutorials, one that focuses on introducing the students to the culture of Wikipedia and one that focuses more on the technical aspects, such as how to contribute a photo and how to edit existing Wikipedia articles. In addition, the program includes the support of an Online Ambassador, who assists the students with more technical questions.

It was extremely enriching to watch the students become explorers during the course. They had to find and discover legitimate sources to not only support emerging social movements, but technologies as well. Students thus found creative ways of writing about technological phenomena as they unfolded in the Arab world, such as finding Arabic citations about the Rassd News Network (RNN), an Arabic Facebook feed, translating them, and making the topic notable for the Wikipedia community and public at large.

I would argue that the more interesting side of Wikipedia editing occurs on the article talk pages, where knowledge production takes place.  It helps students think critically about who decides what is notable or worth adding to the article’s content. It is not one person producing content, but multiple people collaborating together to decide what and how it should be said (and cited!). It is this collaborative aspect of Wikipedia editing that indirectly creates an incentive for academic research offline: What was the process of creating a Wikipedia article? Why was one source rejected and one not?  These questions help augment the following high impact learning outcomes: media and information literacy, critical thinking and research skills, and writing skills development. These outcomes help deepen student learning and engagement, both in and out of the classroom.

(more…)

Group photo of Cairo end-of-term conference participants on the second day of the conference.

More than forty professors, Ambassadors, students, and supporters of the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program gathered at Ain Shams University in Egypt this week for an end-of-term conference wrapping up the first term of the pilot.

By all accounts, the first term of the Cairo Pilot was a success. Professors encouraged their students to edit Wikipedia in the program, with assistance from Campus Ambassadors at Ain Shams University and Cairo University and Online Ambassadors from around the world who helped students virtually. We started small; seven classes joined, with a handful of students participating in each class. For most students, the assignment was optional, either for no grade or for extra credit, which meant that fewer students actually edited Wikipedia than initially signed up, but the results are stunning even given this caveat. A total of 54 students created user accounts through the pilot, and those students edited an incredible 246 Arabic Wikipedia articles. All told, they added 1.1 million bytes of content to the article namespace on the Arabic Wikipedia, which translates to about 372 printed pages of content.

For the Wikimedia Foundation, the Cairo Pilot served as a showcase and learning experiment that will pave the way for future projects on the Arabic Wikipedia. As a pilot, the program served as a proof of concept for using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in universities in Egypt. We had no idea if students would be excited about the assignment, nor if professors would feel like it was worthwhile in meeting course goals. But over the Cairo Pilot, we learned that the Wikipedia Education Program was a good fit for Egyptian universities, and the enthusiasm displayed by students, professors, and Ambassadors significantly exceeded our expectations.

Participants had the opportunity to share learnings with each other.

Although the project only served as a feasibility study, the information students added already made a difference. Mina Saber, a student in Dr. Hoda Abaza’s French class at Ain Shams University, started the article on the 2012 French Presidential Election on the Arabic Wikipedia. Soon, an experienced Arabic Wikipedian stumbled across the article and added more content, collaborating with Mina to make the article even better. Within the 30 days of the election, the article received more than 2,000 visits, meaning Mina’s work had a direct impact on Arabic speaking people looking for information on the French presidential election. His contributions came as an extracurricular activity, but one he truly enjoyed.

“When we do it for marks, we don’t have as much enthusiasm as when we do it for ourselves,” Mina said. “I prefer Wikipedia articles because it benefits other people, not just me.”

Ain Shams Professor Dalia El-Toukhy organized a group of her postgraduate French translation students to translate articles from French to Arabic as an extracurricular activity. She’s looking forward to continuing the project in the future.

“This was the first time the effort in translation for class was useful to a large number of people,” she said. “It exposes the students’ work to real-life experience.”

Dr. Hany Hosseiny, a mathematics professor at Cairo University, agreed. He asked his students to write articles on the historical origins of math topics, including the evolution of the subject. He’d edited the Arabic Wikipedia in 2006 when he noticed some errors in the coverage of mathematics topics, but he’d fallen away from the habit until he heard about the Cairo Pilot, which he eagerly joined.

“I wanted to give my students the opportunity to see what we do not teach, the history of these topics,” he said. “Doing something like this for themselves is the best way to learn what we don’t teach outside the classroom.”

Students and professors were assisted by Wikipedia Ambassadors, who provided technical support and information about Wikipedia. And at the conference, many students reported they would like to serve as Campus Ambassadors next term, assisting more students as they learn to edit the Arabic Wikipedia.

“I feel that I am serving Egypt,” said Campus Ambassador Doaa Seif. “As an Arab, I would like to see us serving our countries. I’m looking forward to the day when we have an even larger Arabic Wikipedia.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

In his “State of the Wiki” address at the 2011 Wikimania, Jimmy Wales awarded the first ever “Wikipedian of the Year” award to Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, a Wikipedian from Kazakhstan. Included with the honor was travel expenses to bring Rauan to Wikimania 2012 in Washington, D.C., next week, where Rauan is looking forward to sharing his experiences with growing the Kazakh Wikipedia and learning more about others’ outreach programs.

Rauan Kenzhekhanuly

Rauan worked in civil service in Kazakhstan for several years before jumping at an opportunity to do a one-year fellowship at Harvard University in Boston. As part of his fellowship, he took a class in fall 2010 that changed his life: Professor Nicco Mele’s “Media, Politics, and Power in the Digital Age”, part of a pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program. Students in Professor Mele’s class were required to read Andrew Lih’s book “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” and contribute to the English Wikipedia. Rauan was hooked.

“Thanks to Nicco’s class I discovered the Wikipedia world. The influence was so profound that it brought me to a new path in my career,” he says. “While editing the article in English Wikipedia, I checked the Kazakh version as well. However, I was disappointed when I saw that Kazakh Wikipedia doesn’t have sustainable community.”

Rauan set out to change that. He recruited some friends and founded WikiBilim (bilim means “knowledge” in Kazakh), a nonprofit organization devoted to expand the availability of free knowledge on the internet in the Kazakh language. WikiBilim’s first target was the Kazakh Wikipedia, which at that point had just 7,000 articles and only 4 active editors. Rauan and his friends at WikiBilim set a target of 200,000 articles maintained by a sustainable community of 500 active editors.

“At the very beginning we were looking for messages powerful enough to engage more people in our project,” Rauan says. “We decided to change the well-known Wikipedia motto from ‘free access to sum of human knowledge’ to ‘free access to sum of human knowledge in your own language.’ The appeal to language worked out. Today we have more than 130,000 articles and more than 200 active editors.”

WikiBilim has had support from many organizations in Kazakhstan, including the printed Kazakh National Encyclopedia, which donated content to the Kazakh Wikipedia. Success of the project brought attention of Kazakh Government, in November 2011 Prime-Minister of Kazakhstan Mr. Karim Masimov announced his patronage to WikiBilim’s projects. WikiBilim has also received support from the Sovereign Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the Wikimedia Foundation in their efforts to improve the availability of information on the Kazakh Wikipedia. Rauan and the other WikiBilim volunteers have also presented their experiences to a number of other Wikimedians from the region at the Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Almaty in April 2012.

And just as Rauan got his start with Wikipedia in the classroom, WikiBilim is planning to encourage the Kazakh Wikipedia’s use in educational institutions in Kazakhstan. Four student clubs are getting started and 10 Wikipedia Ambassadors run campus-based trainings each week. Rauan sees students as a main consumer of the information they’re creating on the Kazakh Wikipedia, and he hopes to encourage them to join the community of editors and contribute to the 200,000 article goal WikiBilim set last year.

“The main thing of contributing to Wikipedia for me is that we can clearly highlight that each community will be responsible for their own language, education, and culture,” Rauan says. “At the end, Wikipedia will be most important educational project.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Additional reporting by Aaron Muszalski

The Wikipedia Education Program is taking off in Brazil! As we’re entering the final month of the semester, I had the opportunity to visit the different professors of the courses, and work with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Brazilian team to see how we can close the semester well and prepare well for the upcoming semester of classes. I obviously already knew we had a great team on the ground – Oona and Tom – but this time I had the opportunity to meet with even more of the enthusiastic volunteers who are involved.

Take Mariana Jo. She is a campus ambassador in São Paulo who decided, after hearing Kul Wadhwa speak at Campus Party, that she wanted to be more involved with the Wikimedia movement and spreading free knowledge. As the first member of her family to go to a public university (typically they are top universities in Brazil), she has a passion for creating broadly available resources and teaching her peers about the importance of sharing their information. She is starting off her involvement by helping with a Physics course at the University of São Paulo as a student in the department herself, where she trains other students how to contribute their course assignments to Wikipedia.

Or take Professor Pablo Ortellado, also at the University of São Paulo. His students are spending the whole semester working on encyclopedic articles about Brazilian cultural policy, which do not yet exist on the Portuguese Wikipedia. The semester-long class brings in experts in the field to discuss different aspects of cultural policy and provide information for references for the student groups. He is already known across Brazil for his passion for open access, and he is excited to expose his students to these concepts in conjunction with the course topics of cultural policy.

All the courses are just getting into the full swing of editing, so we are excited to watch the continuing contributions of additional knowledge to the Portuguese Wikipedia!

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

A new MediaWiki extension released today on the English Wikipedia will streamline course pages for professors, students, and Ambassadors participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

Course pages are key sources of information about students editing Wikipedia articles for class, including who is teaching, mentoring, and signed up for the course, as well as what articles each student is working on. Previously, professors, students, and Wikipedia Ambassadors compiled this information by hand, and course pages were often missing key information. With the new MediaWiki extension, simply known as “Education Program“, a database-style functionality will control the entire course page setup and editing, leading to greater transparency about the program and its participants.

The Education Program MediaWiki extension:

• Helps identify which users are participating the Wikipedia Education Program
• Keeps the course listings up-to-date, automatically archiving finished classes
• Streamlines campus and online ambassador profiles
• Makes it easier for students to list themselves and their articles on their course page
• Shows instructors what students have been editing
• Enables easier searching for a course by university or term
• Adds several new user access levels with permissions related to the extension
• Adds specialized “Course” and “Institution” namespaces

The code is the handiwork of developer Jeroen De Dauw. Several volunteers from the community kindly helped test the extension, which will be in use on the English Wikipedia beginning in the fall 2012 term. The extension can be added to other language Wikipedias once it has been translated into those languages.

Rob Schnautz, Wikipedia Education Program Online Communications Contractor

Logo of Czech Ambassador Program

Wikipedia has always been dependent on its contributors: highly motivated people with a specific sort of knowledge that they want to share with the readers. Wikipedia never has enough contributors; the more there are, the better Wikipedia gets. We, together with all the people from the Wikipedia Education Program, think that students are one particularly interesting group of potential Wikipedians. The Czech Ambassador Program is just one of many efforts worldwide that aim to grow Wikipedia’s use as a university teaching tool.

All started for the Czech Republic in spring of 2011 when an ambitious program was establishing itself on universities across the United States. We decided we wanted to try a similar thing in the Czech environment. The crucial steps in organizing it were: summoning as many team members as possible (still less then 10, rather about 5 active people), distributing work among them, and creating a communication channel both among them (i.e., an email list) and with the wider community and general public (a Wikipedia homepage, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter fan page).

The first success story came in the winter term 2011–12 with Ambassador activities at the Institute of Environmental Studies, Charles University, in Prague. This has been coordinated by the WikiProject Protected Areas and readers of this blog probably remember how elaborate the cooperation was, putting stress on personal contact with students and high quality of articles.

Jana Lánová giving a lecture on Wikipedia to students at Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno

Sadly, we do not have enough “human resources” to expand this way of working with students, so we decided to go for a different approach in most of our projects. We usually meet the students just once or twice, giving them a short lecture about what Wikipedia is and how one can create an article. Then, we provide the students with links to help pages both on Wikipedia and also on social sites. Also, they can always e-mail to their Ambassador and ask about the things they do not understand. In the future, we would like to put stress on an interactive e-learning program that is being developed by Derek Coetzee.

In the winter term, our students created a total sum of about 100 articles, a majority (57) of them written from the field of baroque sculpture art and baroque architecture, thanks to a project at Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc. Ten more were concentrating on highly specific topics in immunology (a project at Faculty of Science, Charles University) and the last ~30 are the above-mentioned Institute of Environmental Studies.

Right now, a summer term is on the way, bearing a promise of 150–200 articles in total. Crucially, we work in three major cities of the Czech Republic (Prague, Olomouc, Brno) and as we try to involve the local community, ambassadorship has proven to be a promising way of outreach from the capital and engaging people from the other parts of the country. Our projects now range from Physical Chemistry and basic Algebra to Scandinavian Literature, Iconography, Histology/Cytology and Botany. See the recent changes from all our current projects.

Chmee2 talking about how Wikipedia works to students in Prague. The unique atmosphere of Brmlab proved to be a great place to interact with "Wikipedians-to-be"

A great example of our projects is “Histology/Cytology”, carried out at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, and taught by doc. RNDr. Jan Černý, Ph.D. This subject attracts more than 100 students every year. We did not want to make it a tedious duty for students, so we told them: write on Wikipedia only if you like, and if you do your job well, we will give you 5 points extra to the final exam. What followed was an explosion: a lot of students starting asking us about the project, so we were really motivated to prepare the guidelines for the students. We also made two public lectures in Brmlab (a local do-it-yourself scientific club) on how Wikipedia works. The best thing was that some students really began writing article after article, becoming real experienced and well-oriented Wikipedians. The thing that I like the most is that six out of seven students who have filled in a questionnaire so far wrote that they wanted to continue editing Wikipedia after the assignment ends for them. All in all, the Czech Wikipedia is richer by more than seventy articles on Histology and Cell Biology — and this number keeps growing.

Vojtěch Dostál, Wikimedia Czech Republic

Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the fall 2011 term. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign students to contribute to Wikipedia, usually in the form of expanding a stub article, in place of a traditional research paper grade. At the end of the fall 2011 term, we asked students who participated in the U.S. and Canada program to fill out a survey on their experiences. A total of 132 students took the survey, with a little over three-quarters of the respondents from the United States. About 61 percent of the respondents were enrolled in undergraduate courses, while the remainder were enrolled in graduate courses.

Learning outcomes

A series of questions were designed around assessing student learning outcomes. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. Students from the United States and graduate students all reported higher beliefs in the benefits of a Wikipedia assignment. More than half of the respondents felt that doing a Wikipedia assignment improved (1) their ability to identify poor quality Wikipedia articles and (2) their ability to identify bias in documents. In addition, more than half the respondents felt their ability to write a neutral (i.e., balanced point-­of-­view) document improved through a Wikipedia assignment more than through a standard term paper.

These findings indicate that students recognize the media literacy benefits in doing a Wikipedia assignment. As professors have noted, when Wikipedia is not the destination of the student’s research on a topic, but is instead the road, students are forced out of their research comfort zone. Students are required to evaluate the reliability of sources, find journal articles, and write from a neutral point of view to meet Wikipedia’s policy requirements.

Support resources

Student participants use a set of resources when they have questions about editing Wikipedia — online text, Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and professors to name a few. Online text is the most commonly used resource, followed by printed materials. Nearly 93 percent of students who consulted their Campus Ambassador found him or her to be helpful, and 74 percent of students who consulted an Online Ambassador said he or she was helpful.

We’ve found that having that support makes a big difference to students. Students can chat with their Campus Ambassadors in person on campus or on wiki, and they can interact with Online Ambassadors on-wiki and through an IRC chatroom where they can get immediate help for quick questions.

Students had a positive interaction with the Wikipedia community of editors when they interacted with them. Students were asked to pick two adjectives to describe their views of the Wikipedia editing community; top responses included “helpful” (72 percent), “collaborative” (39 percent), and “intelligent” (27 percent).

Motivations

We asked students to identify the key motivations for their contributions to Wikipedia. Important factors students reported were getting a grade, interest in their Wikipedia article topic, and the usefulness of their work (i.e., it wasn’t another throwaway assignment). Graduate students reported a broader variety of motivations, when compared to undergraduates. In particular, more than 60 percent of the graduate students gave a high ranking to the fact that their work contributes to a freely accessible knowledge base.

Final comments and looking ahead

Although converting students into longterm editors is not an explicit goal of the Wikipedia Education Program, as many as 46 percent of our respondents expressed interest in continuing to edit Wikipedia.

When students were asked to share the hardest thing about their Wikipedia editing experience, some common themes emerged. Many students mentioned the challenges of learning how Wikipedia works, and how editing an article was a lot more work than they imagined. Almost universally, they talked about how hard it was to learn wiki syntax. The Visual Editor will help alleviate many of these concerns.

To sum up, here’s what one student had to say when asked about any memorable experiences:

“Overall, a great learning experience. Having to really validate anything you say by backing it with a reputable source is incredibly beneficial and students should be exposed to this, especially if they have not had a research methods course in their undergraduate career.”

Ayush Khanna
Data Analyst, Global Development

Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users, a quantitative analysis shows.

In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as a grade for class, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. In fall 2011, 55 courses participated in the program in the United States, with students editing articles on the English Wikipedia. On average, these students added 1855 bytes of content that stayed on Wikipedia, compared to only 491 for a randomly chosen sample of new users who joined English Wikipedia in September 2011. These numbers establish that students who participate in the Wikipedia Education Program contribute significantly more quality content that stays on Wikipedia than other new users.

Examining the distribution of content that survived on Wikipedia for both of these groups, we found that almost half of the Wikipedia Education Program participants added 1,000 or more bytes that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. In contrast, more than half of the random sample of new editors added no content that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. The targeted recruitment of students, combined with the support provided by the Ambassador Program and instructors, results in a much larger percentage of new editors who contribute quality content to Wikipedia.

To understand the collective impact of the Wikipedia Education Program in fall 2011, we compared the amount of content students added to Wikipedia to the content added by the random sample of new editors. The numbers show that the 920 student editors who participated in the program in fall 2011 added the same amount of content as 2250 typical new editors (editors are defined as users who made at least one edit to an article). In terms of new content, students have twice the impact as typical new editors.

An important consideration for any outreach project is editor retention. Data showed that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer.

The Wikipedia Education Program has now grown to Egypt, Brazil and other regions beyond North America. With an increased global presence, measuring and understanding the contributions of new student editors (and how they differ from other new users that join Wikipedia) has gained importance. Establishing a common metric for measuring the impact of the Wikipedia Education Program on various Wikipedias is another key motivation for a quantitative study.

There’s a lot more work to be done on measuring the program’s impact. So, stay tuned for more information about these metrics.

Methodology for this research can be found at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Education_Program_evaluation#Methods

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

(with input from Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research)