Keywords

12.1 Introduction

By its own definition, Wikipedia is free content, the multilingual online encyclopaedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through an open collaboration model using a wiki-based editing system. It has gained huge popularity among all Internet users, from average readers that want to get acquainted with a topic to subject matter experts, researchers and scientists. According to Alexa, the leading web traffic analysis site, Wikipedia has consistently ranked among the top 15 sites and has been the top not-for-profit site for several years. Wikipedia has several sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, which contains millions of free multimedia files and Wikidata, a knowledge database of structured linked data. These projects are a part of the Wikimedia Movement, a global open knowledge movement spearheaded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Wikipedia and higher education have a long history together, which will be explained in the following section. Academic research demonstrates that Wikipedia is not only an efficient learning environment (Evenstein Sigalov & Nachmias, 2017; Petrucco & Ferranti, 2020) but also an Open Educational Resource (OER). UNESCO defines OERs as “teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released under a copyright license that allows free use, adoption and distribution of the material” (UNESCO, 2002). Wikipedia, with its content under a CC-BY-SA license, fits this description. And with more than 58 million articles across more than 300 language versions, Wikipedia is by far one of the world’s largest OERs, with its younger sister project, Wikidata, ranking high as well. A 2018-study has found that Wikipedia is the most popular OER for students of environmental studies, used by 95% of students (Petiška, 2018).

Ehlers calls for a shift from OER to a second phase in the Open Education movement, Open Educational Practices (OEPs), which he defines as “practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path” (Ehlers, 2011, p. 4). Wikipedia, with its “anyone can edit” philosophy, presents an exceptional opportunity for OEP. Students can edit articles on Wikipedia as a class assignment, thereby empowering them as producers of open knowledge rather than just consumers. This consumer-to-producer shift is at the heart of OEP and forms the centrepiece of Wikipedia Education Programs. As McDowell & Vetter (2022b) note, using Wikipedia pedagogy is OEP. Using the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, they identify how teaching with Wikipedia gives students critical information literacy skills with social justice implications (McDowell & Vetter, 2022b).

The sheer diversity of educational systems, cultures and Wikipedia projects worldwide has created different circumstances for developing Wikipedia in education. In some cases, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects could thrive in academic settings, whereas in others, progress has been limited due to various factors. With four case studies from four different continents, we aim to exemplify the thriving symbiosis between the Wikimedia movement and local education systems. We explore best practices and success stories from around the world and offer insights into possible models for implementing Wikipedia into the higher education curriculum.

12.2 Background

12.2.1 History of the Wikipedia Education Program

Wikipedia, “the most gigantic and successful realization ever known of the original Enlightenment project” (Kaufman, 2021), has been inexorably intertwined with education from its beginnings. Many early contributors to the encyclopaedia were students, and it became one of the most popular reference materials, despite many instructors’ admonishments to not use it (Bayliss, 2013; Head & Eisenberg, 2010). It was only natural, then, that more formal collaborations between Wikipedia and universities began to emerge. We trace three distinct periods of engagement with higher education institutions: (1) an individual volunteer-driven phase, (2) the formalisation of the Wikipedia Education Program and (3) expansion driven by Wikimedia organisations worldwide. We will briefly discuss each phase.

12.2.1.1 Phase 1: Individual-Driven Phase (2001–2010)

Many who contribute content to Wikipedia (“Wikipedians” or “editors”) have connections to education, either as students or instructors. Both Wikipedia and academia share a mutual goal of educating people, so perhaps it is unsurprising that editing Wikipedia appeals to those in academia. In Wikipedia’s early years, content quality was haphazard, sourcing was often nonexistent and rules and guidelines were still being drafted. Much of the work in the early part of this phase was driven by individual contributors rather than any kind of formal class assignment in which students received credit for writing Wikipedia articles. As Wikipedia grew in popularity, however, the community developed stricter rules and guidelines to increase the content quality. These rules had a two-fold effect on Wikipedia’s connections to education: (1) with higher quality, referenced content, more and more students started using Wikipedia as a reference and (2) these rules made it harder for newcomers to start editing (Ramjohn & Davis, 2020). A few professors began to see the possibilities of class assignments with Wikipedia (Beasley-Murray, 2008; Cummings, 2009; Konieczny, 2007; Wadewitz et al., 2010; Wannemacher & Schulenburg, 2010). As university instructors and Wikipedians, they had the unique ability to control the curriculum in their classes, enabling them to assign their students to edit and guide students through the labyrinth of Wikipedia rules and guidelines. Around the world, these instructors began to show the benefits of integrating Wikipedia into the classroom for both Wikipedia content development and student learning. So did educators researching the use of Web 2.0 platforms, Wikis and specifically Wikipedia as a learning platform for improving skills and literacies (Boulos et al., 2006; Parker & Chao, 2007; Voss, 2005).

12.2.1.2 Phase 2: Formalisation of Wikipedia Education Program (2010–2013)

Wikipedia instructors assigning their students to edit Wikipedia became a trend, and Frank Schulenburg, then the Head of Public Outreach for the Wikimedia Foundation, noticed this. Wikipedia’s growth numbers, which had exploded in the mid-2000s but had subsequently started dropping precipitously, were alarming, and the Wikimedia Foundation was seeking ways to increase the number of active editors (Schulenburg, 2015; Ramjohn & Davis, 2020). Schulenburg sought grant funding to create a team of staff tasked with formalising a support structure so that instructors need not be Wikipedians themselves to teach with Wikipedia (Davis, 2018). An initial pilot focussed on United States public policy courses resulted in increased engagement on the part of the students and quality content on Wikipedia (Roth et al., 2013), which led to resource investment in terms of creating a formalised programme. The Wikimedia Foundation created the Wikipedia Education Program and made significant investments in creating an infrastructure that supported class assignments. Examples include technical support, such as creating a Visual Editor and a content translation tool; support communications, such as brochures, handouts and online training modules that could be translated and localised; and community building, which included creating an education track at the global Wikimedia conference, Wikimania, as well as a monthly Wikipedia & Education newsletter.

This formal support led to an explosion of programmes operating around the world. Although this chapter focusses on higher education, the Wikipedia Education Program was a loose collection of local initiatives to engage students in OEP across numerous age groups. Higher education has been among the most successful, with programmes in dozens of countries worldwide. In some countries, the work of teaching with Wikipedia as an OEP was explicitly tied to other open education activities. The programme is flexible enough to be internationalised in a context-appropriate way for each country, institution and instructor.

12.2.1.3 Phase 3: Global Expansion (2013–Present)

The creation of this formal support structure enabled the expansion of the Wikipedia Education Program to various initiatives worldwide. A new group of volunteers emerged to continue supporting global programme leaders. Now known as the Wikipedia & Education User Group, this collaborative group offers mentorship and opportunities to share learnings among programme leaders worldwide. An open-source technical platform, known as the Programs & Events Dashboard,Footnote 1 was developed by Wiki Education and is a key piece of digital infrastructure used by many programmes globally. The Wikimedia Foundation’s education team shifted its attention to projects like “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”, which are more focussed on using Wikipedia in educational settings. Today, individual instances of the Wikipedia Education Program are present in dozens of countries (Evenstein Sigalov & Nachmias, 2017; Outreach Wiki, n.d.). Some are run by Wikimedia affiliate organisations (chapters, thematic organisations and user groups), which continue to focus on content creation in collaboration with local institutions and instructors. Some are run through colleges or universities, some have paid staff and some are led by volunteers only. In some countries, there might be just one or two courses teaching with Wikipedia each year. In others, there may be hundreds of courses. The common thread in all these programmes and initiatives is that students are adding openly licensed content to the world’s largest OER, Wikipedia and, in doing so, they are engaging in OEP.

12.3 The Study

Wikipedia in higher education has been expanding extensively in its 21 years of existence. While there is extensive academic research on using Wikipedia as an educational platform that induces learning, existing research is mostly focussed on one country, region, or initiative. Our goal is to offer a more global overview, examining what can be learned from an international perspective about incorporating Wikipedia into higher education. By examining a selection of case studies from four diverse locations, this chapter explores how Wikipedia has been used, as well as commonalities in use, including challenges, benefits and lessons learned, in the hope, that this would benefit future adopters of the format.

To achieve this goal, our research questions are:

  1. (1)

    How has Wikipedia been incorporated into higher education in different countries around the world?

  2. (2)

    What are some of the common challenges that derive from these cases?

  3. (3)

    What are some of the common benefits of using Wikipedia in higher education?

  4. (4)

    What are some lessons learned from the joint experiences around the world that would benefit future adopters of the format?

12.4 Methodology

In order to answer these research questions, we investigated Wikipedia’s value for learning from a global perspective via multiple country case studies. This methodology required an in-depth examination that draws on multiple sources for information (Creswell, 1998), and thus a mix-method approach was adopted.

12.4.1 Participants

In choosing countries to be representatives of global efforts in this research, a special effort was made to choose countries where Wikipedia has been incorporated into higher education for at least a decade. Emphasis was also placed on choosing countries representing geographic and linguistic diversity. Four countries were identified as having an established record of implementing Wikipedia into higher education that was also diverse enough to be examined: Serbia, Israel, US/Canada and Brazil.

12.4.2 Data Collection and Analysis

For each country, data has been gathered from 3 main sources: (1) Online documentation and metrics: internal Wikipedia pages that curate information about courses incorporating Wikipedia assignments as part of their assessment model, which is known to the different language Wikipedia Communities and/or supported by them; data from a now-disabled Education Program MediaWiki Extension and data from the Dashboard course management software; (2) Interviews: semi-structured interviews with staff members of Wikimedia affiliates and related organisations, as well as volunteers who have supported Wikipedia in higher education in different countries; (3) Personal experience and academic research of this chapter’s authors regarding incorporating Wikipedia into the academic curriculum. The case studies were then coded and analysed to identify common challenges, benefits and lessons learned.

12.5 Results

12.5.1 The Case Studies

12.5.1.1 Case Study #1: Serbia

Wikimedia Serbia is one of the oldest Wikimedia chapters—it was founded in December 2005 as the fifth Wikimedia chapter overall. Efforts by volunteers and Wikipedians in Serbia in the education sector began several months prior when Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, visited Belgrade, where he held a lecture at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. That visit spurred a line of thinking that implied potential in cooperating with academic institutions. Two opportunities to officially connect with academic institutions presented themselves near the end of 2005. Firstly, Đorđe Stakić, the founder of Wikimedia Serbia’s Education Program, held an open lecture about Wikipedia at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade. Also, several volunteers held a lecture about Wikipedia to students of a private university. The idea that was being hatched at the time was for students to write their term papers as articles on Wikipedia instead of on paper, as had been the well-established practice (Stakić, Tasic et al., 2021a, b). That collaboration did not prove to be fruitful, but, in 2006, Wikimedia Serbia was contacted by a professor from the Faculty of Physical Chemistry, and after two workshops with students, articles finally started appearing on Wikipedia. Additionally, the professional connections of Stakić made it possible to start the project at the Faculty of Philology as well, which also proved seminal (Stakić, 2009).

These initial successes created models and templates for most future collaborations. Throughout the years, more partnerships appeared, where word of mouth and previous accomplishments were key factors for making new connections. The diversity of collaborations meant that students of various backgrounds were being reached and content was being created, with knowledge equity always in mind. At first, the partnerships included only universities, but in 2011 the first collaborations with a high school started (Stakić, 2014). One of the major milestones in the development of the Education Program happened in 2012, when the academic board of Wikimedia Serbia was formed, which was tasked with the development of the programme. This body was quite active in setting up new collaborations, conducting workshops and evaluating produced articles. Additionally, the Serbian Wikipedia community created a policy revolving around contributions by students, giving them special significance (Stakić, 2014).

In 2014, Wikimedia Serbia organised an international EduWiki conference, a meeting focussing on education within the Wikimedia world. Also, Wiki Ambassadors were introduced as a means to ensure programme sustainability. Finally, in 2014, Wikimedia Serbia received its first state-sanctioned accreditation for conducting seminars on professional development for elementary and high school teachers, with the topic of Wikipedia in education (Ratković et al., 2019, 2020). Another milestone was the creation of the Education Program Manager (EPM) position in early 2015. That paid position was created to alleviate the workload from volunteers and make all efforts in this programme more professional. Even though the EPM now deals with establishing and maintaining partnerships, most projects still rely on volunteer activities, for running workshops, communicating with students and evaluating work.

Wiki Librarian was launched as a separate project in 2015 and still continues in 2022. It focusses its activities on the library network of Serbia and fosters content creation and curation on several Wikimedia projects. It includes university students in many of its activities (Stakić et al., 2021a, b). In the summer of 2016, another project was launched: Edu Wiki Camp. The idea was to gather senior high school students and freshmen university students in a remote location and, through an array of presentations, workshops and discussions, enable those students to become more knowledgeable about Wikimedia and its Education Program, with the hope that some of the participants would become Wiki Ambassadors.

Over the years, Serbia’s Education Program has seen stability and robustness in its operations. Strategically, it has always been among the highest priorities within Wikimedia Serbia, which is demonstrated by the fact that the first staff member for specific programmes was hired to that end. The number of institutions that Wikimedia Serbia partnered with over the years, as well as several participants, can be seen in Fig. 12.1. Wikipedia and Wikimedia Serbia have also been recognised as important participants in developing Serbia’s OER infrastructure (“Current State of Open Educational Resources in the ‘Belt and Road’ Countries”, 2020, p. 180).

Fig. 12.1
A double bar graph represents the participation in the education program versus school year. The bars of the number of participants, and number of institutions plot the highest value in the school year 2018 over 2019.

Participation in the Education Program in Serbia per year

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Among the various activities that Wikimedia Serbia promotes in the field of education, one merits a special focus: Wikipedia in Schools is the flagship project and includes collaborating with schools at all levels of education. While having limited success with elementary school students and some better results with high school students, the project’s full potential has only been achieved in universities and colleges. There are many ways a single project can take shape. The main learning objective for any collaboration is for students to learn basic editing skills, both in technical and encyclopaedic terms. The following considerations are always discussed with a coordinator (professor or teaching assistant) before the project commences since these usually determine the amount of investment of Wikimedia Serbia resources (Stakić, 2015):

  • Wikimedia projects: While most activities are done on Wikipedia, there have been projects that focus on Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. This depends on the academic course itself, coordinators’ affinity, students’ competencies etc.

  • Language editions: While most projects are conducted in the Serbian language Wikimedia projects, some might be conducted in other languages, especially when working in a philological context. In these cases, Wikimedia Serbia offers very limited support.

  • Type of activity: Most projects are focussed on writing articles or significantly improving them, but various other tasks could be performed as assignments: fixing typos and other errors in existing articles, uploading media files, using media files in articles, editing Wikidata entries, adding references to unreferenced text sections and evaluating other students’ work. Additionally, regardless of the activity type, the minimum number of activities needs to be set, e.g. several articles or number of kilobytes of text added.

  • Temporality: Since most university courses are one semester-long, coordinators need to fit the project within the curriculum and determine the timeline, reserving plenty of time for all the necessary activities.

  • Grouping: In most projects, students work individually, but sometimes groups of two or more students are tasked with creating a larger set of contributions.

  • Grading: Coordinators often give points for completed assignments, with a gradient of possible points in relation to the quantity and quality of the work done. At times, the points are given as extra credit, and sometimes the coordinators forgo the points and offer this activity only to interested students, and, in those cases, fewer students write better articles. Grades usually help with student motivation for completing the task, so they are frequently employed.

The activities for a new project usually commence with a meeting between a representative of Wikimedia Serbia (usually the EPM, but sometimes another staff member, a Wiki Ambassador or a Board member) and a coordinator, where the parameters of the cooperation are determined, as outlined above. A timeline is prepared, and introductory and practical workshops are set up. Those workshops are usually in-person, and, depending on the number of students, there can be a varying number of them. More recently, online workshops have become a more practical way of training students. These workshops contain a theoretical part, explaining the inner workings and policies of Wikipedia and a practical demonstration of article creation. Afterwards, the students are given several weeks to several months to complete their assignments and then the evaluation phase concludes the activities.

Many projects, especially those deemed successful, are repeated, either in a different course led by the same coordinator or in the same course in a different school year. Once a collaboration is proven successful, each iteration becomes easier to manage by both sides, and, in some cases, it becomes self-sustainable, meaning minimal support from Wikimedia Serbia is needed. Naturally, some collaborations fail or do not meet expectations for various reasons, including not giving students enough time for assignments, giving students too much work, coordinators’ disinterest or lack of time and unclear communication. Wiki Ambassadors greatly improved the quality of the overall programme and lowered the pressure on key volunteers and, subsequently, the EPM. Wiki Ambassadors are experienced students (usually 3rd or 4th year) tasked with fostering activities and helping fellow students within their locale (but also increasingly for other locales). With such a title, they would be singled out and thus experience further motivation to work diligently with peers and coordinators, if possible.

The attitudes of the Serbian Wikipedia community towards the activities of the Education Program have varied throughout the years. While these activities initially did not get much attention, when they started scaling up, there were some protests, with most of the criticism pointing towards article quality. These comments resulted in changing perceptions within the wider Serbian Wikimedia community, one of the consequences being a much greater focus on quality by Wikimedia Serbia: this meant improvements in the content of the workshops and continued support during the assignment period, but also in the final evaluations. The introduction of the Visual Editor helped with quality assurance since students started paying more attention to content rather than the technical aspect of editing, wiki syntax being confusing to most new editors. Additionally, assignments that offer an option of translating articles from other languages (mostly English Wikipedia) fare better than articles that need to be created from scratch. Research has confirmed that students prefer writing articles on Wikipedia rather than regular term papers (Stakić et al., 2021a, b).

Content created over the years has been great and now makes a significant portion of the overall contributions towards Serbian Wikipedia. The number of megabytes of text created through Wikimedia Serbia’s Education Program since the beginning is given in Fig. 12.2.

Fig. 12.2
A double bar graph represents the number of created articles, and bytes added versus school year. The highest values are plotted by both the bars in the school year 2015 over 2016.

Number of articles created and bytes added in Serbia per year

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12.5.1.2 Case Study #2: Israel

Introduction and scope

Incorporating Wikipedia into higher education in Israel started in 2006, and, for the first 7 years, the main model has been “Alternative Assessment”, expanding existing articles or writing new ones in Wikipedia as an academic assignment that provides credit. This model is still the most common in Israel (and worldwide). In 2013, a new model was introduced, in which writing Wikipedia articles is the “Main Assessment” within an academic for-credit course dedicated to Wikipedia and its sister projects. Each model is briefly reviewed below while describing its main uses and lessons learned. Data was gathered from (1) WikiProject Wikidemic Papers—a Hebrew Wikipedia internal project that curates information about academic courses incorporating Wikipedia assignments; (2) two interviews with the Academic Relations Manager at Wikimedia Israel, and three interviews with Hebrew Wikipedia volunteers supporting academic courses and (3) research conducted by one of this chapter’s authors. While focussing on documented examples known to the Hebrew Wikipedia community, the data presented does not cover all activities in Israel. Other activities out of this chapter’s scope include incorporating Wikipedia into K-12 education in Israel, including in Arabic-speaking communities, and the inter-relations between activities in Israel and other countries.

Alternative Assessment Model: contributing to Wikipedia as an academic assignment

Integrating Wikipedia into the academic curriculum in Israel began in 2006, with two courses where students expanded Wikipedia articles. Every year more institutions joined, and to date, all universities experimented with the alternative assessment model. Some tried and discontinued, while other projects flourished into long-term collaborations, with some milestones mentioned hereafter. In 2010, a unique collaboration between Ben-Gurion University’s Africa Center and Wikimedia Israel expanded beyond academia when students travelled to Cameroon, equipped with laptops with Offline Wikipedia, to be left in villages as learning resources. In 2011, Haifa University started using Wikipedia assignments at the Faculty of Humanities, with both students and faculty undergoing Wikipedia training. As of the last update of September 2018, 30 courses took part in the projects, with 336 articles written. Additional notable achievements include: (1) a majority of women editors, a critical metric considering Wikipedia’s gender gap (Ford & Wajcman, 2017; Hargittai & Shaw, 2015; Konieczny & Klein, 2018; Wagner et al., 2015); (2) involving Arabic-speaking students in contributing to Wikipedia and (3) a Wikipedia “help-desk” offered by the university’s library.

With the growing demand, a natural professionalisation process began at Wikimedia Israel (WMIL). A 2013 strategic decision focussed WMIL activities on educational outreach, leading to free online courseware on editing and encyclopaedic writing. In 2016 an Academic Relations Manager was hired to address increased requests for collaboration. WikiCampus, an initiative at IDC Herzliya University, launched in 2016–2017, included 13 courses with Wikipedia assignments, but the project’s scope was later reduced for various reasons. Other activities in a variety of academic institutions followed all across Israel. Figure 12.3 showcases the number of courses that participated annually.

Fig. 12.3
A stacked bar graph represents the number of courses, W M, I L led, and volunteers led versus year. The bars W M, I L led and, volunteers led plot the highest value in the year 2017, and 2016, respectively.

Courses per year (2016–2020)

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Figure 12.4 demonstrates the number of expanded articles and new articles annually.

Fig. 12.4
A bar graph represents the expanded and new articles versus year. The expanded articles plot the highest value in the year 2018. New articles plot the highest value in the year 2016.

Expanded and new articles per year (2016–2020)

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A direct correlation between the number of courses and the number of articles expanded is not always possible. This is affected by variables such as type of assignment, students per course, and support received. Articles’ quality is out of the scope of this discussion.

From the interviews conducted stemmed four main insights on implementing the alternative assessment model:

  • A Wikipedia assignment is not suitable for every course nor every faculty member: courses suitable for implementing Wikipedia assignments include, for example, those in which students’ grades are already assessed via a written assignment and those focussed on developing writing skills and digital and academic literacies.

  • There is no “one solution fits all”: implementation has to be tailored for every case: format and scope must be adapted to the course’s objectives, students’ skills, faculty members and other staff support, the scope of the assignment and how it will be assessed. Some key points to consider include the number of students, level of literacy and whether work is done individually or in groups.

  • Implementing a Wikipedia assignment requires preparation and time investments from all stakeholders: the process is more successful when faculty members are interested and pledge to transfer the context and importance to their students. Students need to get used to a new platform, so it is advisable to set small, tangible milestones with points of assistance along the way and incorporate a practical workshop session.

  • When it works, it is fabulous: when done right, results include an active, interactive and meaningful learning process; knowledge retention; improved skills and literacies; a positive learning experience and a positive social impact.

Main Assessment Model : a for-credit course that focusses on Wikipedia and Wikidata

Since 2013, the School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU) has been offering a for-credit, elective course focussing on Wikipedia (Evenstein Sigalov & Nachmias). The 13-week, semester-long course teaches how to contribute medical-related content to Wikipedia and its sister projects. The course used to be a live synchronous course, but during COVID-19, it was transformed into a hybrid online format, offering both synchronous and asynchronous sessions.

The course had 5 main goals: (1) Create medical-related content in Wikipedia, thus contributing to OERs; (2) Help students improve academic skills, critical thinking, digital and data literacy, collaborative skills, medical communications skills and lifelong learning competencies; (3) Addresses knowledge gaps and gender gap, focussing on knowledge equity; (4) Create an engaging and positive learning process, focussing on active learning; (5) Make the course model adaptable and scalable for reuse in other disciplines, institutions and countries.

Since the launch, 330 students with varying backgrounds and mother tongues participated in the course, resulting in 428 new medical articles, or 13% of all medical content in Hebrew Wikipedia—viewed over 7 million times. More than 1,220 articles were edited, and students also contributed to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Since 2015, at least 50% of the articles have focussed on Women’s Health, a category that did not exist before the course. Half of the students were female in most cohorts, which helped reduce Wikipedia’s gender gap. Overall, students reported a unique and positive learning experience, gaining and improving skills with lasting impact beyond the course (Evenstein Sigalov & Nachmias, 2017; Mendes et al., 2021).

In 2015, a second course, focussing on informed consumption of information and collaborative knowledge creation in Wikipedia, was offered to all TAU undergraduates. The 101 students who graduated from the course’s 3 iterations wrote 260 new articles, with over 5 million page views and 3,120 articles expanded. Half of the articles were about notable women in history, and a special focus was made on shrinking the gender gap and other knowledge gaps in Wikipedia. A 2019 research project about the second course focussed on examining the outcomes, assessment model and students’ perception of their learning experience. Here too, students reported a positive learning experience, and it was shown that the assessment model, especially peer-review, could predict course success. The article was accepted to be presented at the AERA conference in 2020 (Evenstein Sigalov & Cohen, 2020).

A third improved 2018 campus-wide course was the first in the world to feature Wikidata, and it has won the Data Literacy community award at the 2021 Wikidata Conference. Academic research about its efficacy and evolution during COVID-19 is currently being conducted. The core course model of all 3 courses has inspired similar courses, such as the one developed in Armenia’s Medical School in Yerevan.

Final insights

Significant experience has been accumulated in 15 years of implementing Wikipedia assignments into the Israeli academic curriculum, a practice that is continuously and consistently spreading. More faculty members use Wikipedia as a learning platform to help improve students’ skills and generate social impact. However, much must be done before Wikipedia becomes a pedagogical tool every faculty member uses. Some academic institutions still treat Wikipedia with the suspicion that stems from a lack of familiarity (Bayliss, 2013). There is still a need to continue experimenting, expand academic research on Wikipedia in higher education and empirically examine various cooperation models to inform faculty and policymakers. An important aspect of Wikipedia assignments is their positive social impact. TAU is now incorporating mandatory courses emphasising social involvement, and Wikipedia is well-aligned with such a premise. Collaborating with the Open Education community might also help promote such work. Libraries, and academic libraries, in particular, are natural allies and can spread the word to more faculty members, as has been the experience in Israel and worldwide. An important trend yet to arrive in Israel is that of academic institutions hiring a “Wikimedian-in-Residence”, serving the institution, collaborating with other institutions, and promoting initiatives targeting students, faculty and the general public. So what else is there to do? Continue experimenting; design for success (Hegarty, 2015); fail; iterate; try again; innovate, explore and share insights with the international community. And most importantly, delve with students into a joint, fascinating journey, at the end of which everyone wins.

12.5.1.3 Case Study #3: The United States and Canada

The formal programme in the United States began in Fall of 2010 with a small pilot of 14 courses. All focussed on one subject area: US public policy. Canada, whose higher education system is very similar to that of the United States, joined the programme shortly after. Today, more than 650 courses include Wikipedia assignments each year throughout the United States and Canada, supported by a non-profit Wiki Education. A discussion of the scale of the programme, its learning objectives and how Wikipedia’s knowledge equity is addressed in the programme follows below.

The programme by numbers

After the small pilot focussed on US public policy, hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation, showed promise for both increasing the quality of Wikipedia content and engaging students in a service-learning project, the programme began to grow. By the second academic year of the programme, more than 100 courses were participating. These numbers stayed fairly constant for three years, partly because the Wikimedia Foundation had identified that the programme showed promise, but it was no longer part of its strategic focus. During the 2013–14 academic year, the programme became an independent non-profit organisation called Wiki Education. Several staff from the original programme joined the new organisation, ensuring continuity in support. The programme flourished, bolstered by an organisation devoted exclusively to growing the connections between Wikipedia and academia.

Through partnerships with academic associations in the United States like the American Sociological Association, the American Chemical Society and the National Women’s Studies Association, as well as a dozen more, Wiki Education reached instructors teaching in those disciplines, causing the number of courses to grow. This active outreach to academic communities was key in creating demand for teaching with Wikipedia support. Investments into technical resources like the Dashboard course management platform, built by Wiki Education and a series of online training modules and other support resources, enabled the dramatic growth. These automated tools help Wiki Education’s staff manage and monitor thousands of students editing at once. Figure 12.5 demonstrates the total number of new classes and returning classes per year.

Fig. 12.5
A stacked bar graph represents the number of new classes, and returning classes versus year. The returning classes plot the highest and lowest values in the year 2020-21, and 2010-11, respectively.

Number of new classes and returning classes per year in the US and Canada

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Ensuring students have a positive learning experience and that Wikipedia simultaneously gets high-quality content has sometimes proven challenging. Wiki Education constantly monitors and refines its support materials to address issues as they arise. Overwhelmingly, students have a positive experience and the content added to Wikipedia is of high quality. By the 2019–20 academic year, more than 800 courses had integrated Wikipedia assignments into their curriculum each year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of new courses joining the programme decreased, leading to a drop in the overall number of courses supported, but still, more than 700 courses participated that year. One unique aspect of the programme is the sheer scale at which it operates: with somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 students editing Wikipedia each year as part of the programme, Wiki Education is responsible for 19% of all the new active editors to English Wikipedia (Davis, 2020). Below are some statistics summarising the key activities and impact of the United States and Canada since 2010:

  • More than 5,100 courses have included Wikipedia assignments;

  • More than 103,000 students have edited Wikipedia as a class assignment;

  • Students have added more than 85 million words to Wikipedia, nearly twice as many as the last print edition of Encyclopædia Britannica;

  • Students have improved more than 115,000 Wikipedia articles and

  • Each term, student work is viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Learning objectives

Editing Wikipedia is OEP: Students write openly licensed educational material used by millions of people worldwide. But editing Wikipedia also meets other learning objectives for students. In the fall of 2016, Wiki Education commissioned researcher Zach McDowell to investigate the student learning outcomes from Wikipedia projects. The paper resulting from his research demonstrates clear positive outcomes for critical thinking, source evaluation and research, public writing and literature review skills (Vetter et al., 2019). This data is matched by more recent results from Wiki Education’s internal surveys of instructors (Blumenthal, 2021). These learning objectives can be adapted by instructors to meet their course goals. Wiki Education’s Dashboard softwareFootnote 2 includes an assignment design wizard that guides faculty through creating a course page that details the assignment. Based on the selections the instructor makes in this wizard (e.g. should students work independently or in groups), the resulting course page is customised to meet each instructor’s needs. Additional discussion prompts about Wikipedia and the construction of knowledge and authority, for example, can be added to the course page if this is relevant to the instructor’s learning objectives.

Focus on knowledge equity

In 2017, the Wikimedia movement adopted a new strategic direction that included the concept of “knowledge equity”, which stated: “As a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge”.Footnote 3 Scholars have noted that because Wikipedia policies followed the structures of knowledge production typical of the Global North, or “Western logocentrism”, as McDowell & Vetter put it (McDowell & Vetter, 2022a), inequities exist in how information about historically marginalised topics is portrayed (Ramjohn, 2022). Adopting knowledge equity as a strategic direction reified work Wiki Education was already doing to increase the diversity of content and contributors on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s gender gap, in both content and contributors, has received considerable media attention (Harrison, 2019). According to the 2021 Community Insights Report from the Wikimedia Foundation,Footnote 4 only 22% of contributors in Northern America identify as women. Less well-known is the gap related to race and ethnicity. According to the same study, 89% of US editors identify as white. And while only 4.8% of the global population lives in Northern America, the study found that 18% of Wikipedia editors are from this region (Wikimedia Foundation, 2021). This data means the typical Northern American Wikipedian is a white male; a gap in coverage naturally follows this contributor gap. Only 19% of biographies on the English Wikipedia are of women, and while this is celebrated because it used to be 15% in 2014, it is still cause for concern.

Wiki Education is one of several groups ensuring that progress is being made. In contrast to the 22% of women contributors in the existing editing community, 67% of Wiki Education’s programme participants identify as women, and an additional 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity. And while 89% of existing editors identify as white, only 55% of Wiki Education’s programme participants do (Davis, 2021). These diverse contributors add significant diversity to Wikipedia’s coverage. Through Wiki Education’s programme, students have added thousands of biographies of historically marginalised people, added new articles about important but previously ignored topics and added perspectives missing from older articles. Through this OEP, Wiki Education is helping improve knowledge equity in content and contributors of the English Wikipedia.

12.5.1.4 Case Study #4: Brazil

This section presents the origin and evolution of Wikimedia education projects carried out in Brazilian universities from 2011 to 2020. In Brazil, the Wikimedia education literature has mostly focussed on case documentation, centring on motivations, methodologies and impact (Azevedo, 2013; Ferla et al., 2020; Marques & Louvem, 2013; Varella & Bonaldo, 2020). This section is different. It provides a national programme overview with aggregated descriptive information and discusses findings in relation to the highly unequal education environment in Brazil, including, in particular, regional inequalities.

The data systematisation in this section is unprecedented and compiles information from three databasesFootnote 5: the portal “Wikipédia na Universidade”,Footnote 6 the Education Program Extension tool and the Outreach Dashboard. The portal was the first attempt to list education programmes in Brazil and was mostly used from 2011 to 2014. It was officially deprecated in 2020 and is maintained only for historical reasons. The Education Extension was the main technology used by educators to coordinate their wiki programmes and get aggregated data for their impact from 2014 to 2018. A negative aspect of both “Wikipédia na Universidade” and the Education Program Extension is that they almost exclusively compute contributions to Wikipedia. That is, they leave out sister projects in the Wikimedia ecosystem. The Programs & Events Dashboard is the current technology for coordinating and controlling education programmes on Wikimedia, which is widely used by Brazilian educators. Data from Brazil is compiled in the “Brazil Wikimedia Education Program”Footnote 7and computed from programmes completed before December 31, 2020. It is worth noting that education programme tracking is not mandatory and is dependent on the educators’ decision to track their work, so it is likely that programmes are underreported.

The earliest Wikimedia education programme in Brazil was launched in February 2011, according to the portal “Wikipédia na Universidade”. It was led by Maria José Vicentini Jorente from the São Paulo State University Department of Science Information, and 51 students and 5 education ambassadors participated. Education ambassadors were experienced Wikimedians who voluntarily tutored students involved in education programmes. Tutoring resources listed on the course page included a training module originally created in English in January 2011 and then translated into Portuguese. The first documented Wikipedia edit from an education programme in Brazil was in the article “Comunicação ciberespacial” (Cyberspace communication), on August 24, 2011.Footnote 8

From 2011 to 2020, 210 Wikimedia education programmes were organised in Brazilian universities, as can be seen below in Fig. 12.6. The number of programmes has remained relatively similar from 2012 to 2019, on average, 18.5 programmes per year. There was a peak in 2020, with 57 programmes being completed. This peak is likely related to outreach activities led by the Brazilian Wikimedia affiliate, which hired a part-time education programme officer in 2020 and ran monthly meetings with a network of educators,Footnote 9 and to growing interest in digital teaching methods in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fig. 12.6
A bar graph represents the number of education programs versus the years from 2011 to 2020. The bar peaks in 2020.

Number of education programmes per year in Brazil

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Education programmes were organised in 35 universities from 2011 to 2020, and it is important to note that they occurred almost exclusively in top-tier universities in the country’s wealthiest regions. Brazil is divided into five regions: the Southeast and the South are the wealthiest. The North, Central-West and Northeast are the poorest. In total, 185 programmes were organised in the South and Southeast regions, whereas no programme was recorded in the North region and only one in the Central-West region. Leading institutions included the University of São Paulo (USP), systematically reported as the best university in Latin America, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the Faculdade Cásper Líbero (FCL) and the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), which, respectively, accounted for 63, 37, 27 and 10 of the total programmes. A noteworthy exception is the Northeast region, with 24 programmes, mostly due to education programmes run at the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC) in Ilhéus. The activity peak in 2020 was not associated with greater institutional or regional diversity. Eighty-seven university professors ran Wikimedia education programmes in Brazil from 2011 to 2020. Seventeen professors organised 108 education programmes in this period, thus indicating a high level of activity concentration in particular cases. Leading Wikimedia educators in Brazil include Valério Melo, Juliana Bastos Marques and Fabio Azevedo, respectively, from UESC, UNIRIO and UFRGS.

Wikimedia education programmes in Brazil have gone through shifts in terms of cohort size and programme duration. The median cohort size from 2012 to 2019 was 18. This was 6 in 2020, as shown in Fig. 12.7. From 2011 to 2019, most education programmes were at least 100 days long. In 2020, 75% of programmes ran for less than 100 days, as seen in Fig. 12.8. A large and long programme normally involved Wikimedia volunteer support, technical savviness for editing control and high Wikimedia awareness, as presented by Moraes and collaborators (Moraes et al., 2016). Changes in cohort size and programme duration are possibly related to a renewed understanding of Wikimedia assignments in the Brazilian classroom, moving from a class-wide, semester-long model to a typical small-group, short-but-intensive programme. This new typical programme could be more prone to institutional and regional diversification, as class-wide programmes are likely harder and more costly to set up and coordinate.

Fig. 12.7
A bar graph represents the number of editors versus year. The bar is at its peak in 2017.

Number of editors per programme per year in Brazil

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Fig. 12.8
A bar graph represents the time period of education programs in number of days versus year. The bar is at its peak in 2018.

Duration of education programme in days in Brazil

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From 2011 to 2019, education programmes in Brazil were almost exclusively on Wikipedia in Portuguese. In 2020, there was increased Wikimedia-project diversity, with programmes being led on Wikidata, Wikiversidade (Wikiversity) and Wikilivros (WikiBooks). There has been no significant variation in content views across the years: on average, pages edited in the context of Wikimedia education programmes in Brazil have been viewed by 56.6 million people per year, demonstrating the social impact of this programme. It is important to note that this data only accounts for views during the period in which programmes were running, not for those being updated after their completion, so the lasting social impact is even greater.

To summarise, Wikimedia education programmes in Brazil have mostly been run in wealthier regions, particularly by highly committed professors in high-ranked universities. The typical model from 2011 to 2019 was a long and large programme. In 2020, there was a shift to small and intensive programmes, eventually easier to set up and potentially more prone to be replicated in more diverse contexts.

12.5.2 Common Challenges

There have been challenges in sustaining educational practices in the Wikimedia ecosystem across the four cases. While some challenges are similar, such as the need for good support for student editors, especially as the level of interaction is reduced when activities move online, case analysis indicates that each country has also dealt with unique challenges relating to its context and language. In Israel, for example, the Hebrew Wikipedia community is a relatively small one (as expected from the small number of Hebrew speakers globally). While Wikimedia Israel does prioritise education outreach and has dedicated staff to support this work, there still seem to be limited financial resources to support this type of work. This might contribute to disengagement, as it requires planning, time allocation and creativity since there is no replicable formula for all contexts. Moreover, while online resources are available to support educators today, that has not always been the case, and, by comparison, there is significantly less material in Hebrew than in English. Conversely, the English Wikipedia community is large and is a more challenging place for newcomers to thrive in.

Increasing the number of Wikimedia education initiatives has been a common challenge for Serbia, Brazil and Israel. In Serbia and Israel, it has been important to scale up successfully, increasing the quality and number of programmes. In Brazil, the challenge has been to increase the number of programmes without accentuating the gap between universities in wealthier and poorer regions. Establishing a strong community around Wikimedia and education has been a recurrent challenge in all countries. There is little opportunity for partnerships when the Open Education or OER community is small (Serbia) or almost non-existing (Israel). There has been a feeling of isolation among educators in Brazil, as the number of professors engaging with Wikimedia is small, and little interaction among them has normally occurred. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted Wikimedia education programmes in North America, Serbia and Israel. In the United States and Canada, the pandemic has led to plateauing of what had been steady growth in participation. In Israel, it has led to extreme workloads, a need to simplify demands from students and a reluctance from new educators to engage in trying to implement Wikipedia assignments into their curriculum during the pandemic.

12.5.3 Common Benefits

Analysing the results from the four countries participating in this research revealed relatively similar benefits of Wikimedia education initiatives. A major benefit is the significant amount of content added to Wikipedia through programmes, especially as activities on Wikipedia may be focussed on closing content gaps (knowledge gaps, gender gaps, etc.). Even one elective coursework may have a huge social impact, as seen in Israel. Moreover, as all topics need work, improving content on Wikipedia is meaningful in all disciplines.

Another set of benefits relates to the 21st-century skills students gain when they engage in Wikimedia assignments. They improve their academic and digital literacies (i.e., understanding sourcing and citing, developing critical thinking, especially for distinguishing reliable content and misinformation). Students also improve their collaborative skills, particularly in online communities. As they work on improving content related to their field, they improve not only their understanding of the topic but also their ability to communicate it clearly to a broader audience, thus improving their communications skills. Finally, engaging with Wikimedia projects is an opportunity to raise students’ awareness of various issues, including copyright, knowledge gaps and bias and, generally, to make sure they become more informed as digital citizens.

Wikimedia education initiatives in higher education are also an opportunity for tackling knowledge equity, which, as mentioned above, was adopted as part of the Wikimedia Movement’s strategic direction in 2017. Adopting knowledge equity as a strategic goal was central in creating a shared, global focus in activities conducted by various Wikimedia affiliates and other Wikimedia Movement stakeholders. As noted in this chapter, this work already existed in some countries before adopting the strategic direction, yet in a more sporadic manner. The shared strategic focus helped intensify the global and accumulated social impact. Different education initiatives have focussed on knowledge gaps, especially around gender (i.e., writing on notable women and working with female students). A relevant illustration is what has happened in Israel, where education programmes have not only worked on improving content in Hebrew but also in Arabic and other languages.

12.5.4 Common Lessons Learned

General guidelines, or lessons learned, may be distilled from the analysis of Wikimedia education initiatives in the four countries participating in the research. Though these guidelines may not serve all contexts, they provide a high-level understanding of what constitutes successful initiatives. The first key element is to have a support system for each initiative. This may include either volunteer support, or staff support for more established affiliates and organisations, as in the case of Wiki Education in the United States and Canada. The support system comprises supporting both educators as they design and implement Wikipedia into their courses and students during and after the course. The support may translate into providing online resources, offering training to faculty and students, giving technical support and answering real-time questions. It seems that welcoming educators and students in an organised, functioning setting reduces the workload needed for planning, coordinating, controlling and tutoring.

Moreover, it seems impossible to scale up Wikimedia in education without online resources, including documentation, tracking platforms (like the Dashboard) and growing a community around it. Outreach campaigns, for instance, through academic associations, local conferences and the development of a network for educators and a network of Wikipedia volunteers to support initiatives, seem key. Furthermore, positive interactions with the Wikimedia community are paramount, and they are easier to stimulate in a structured environment when expectations, roles and responsibilities are clearer. In all cases, developing a community of practice around Wikimedia and education is seen as important for scaling up programmes. The sense of belonging that this kind of community fosters is relevant for the initial engagement of instructors, mentoring and retention. A Wikimedia education community is also relevant for sharing first-hand experiences and reporting on successes and lessons in running programmes.

Finally, it is important to stress that Wikimedia programmes are not suitable for all educational contexts, and it is important to verify that there is a high alignment between the learning objectives of the course and faculty. Our findings show there have been educational initiatives in a wide range of topics and disciplines, Wikimedia projects (not exclusively Wikipedia), and possible models of engagement (from small assignments to full academic courses) to achieve a wide range of learning objectives. Additionally, as contexts for education programmes differ, there have also been multiple approaches to scaling efforts: in Serbia, the bottom-up approach for universities has worked better than the top-down approach; in other cases, there have been successful activities with both bottom-up and top-down approaches. Finally, it appears that Wikimedia education programmes have also been an opportunity for broader partnerships and collaborations. This is especially true with cultural institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, which have provided support and resources for students and instructors. For students, the connection to partners has strengthened the understanding that editing Wikimedia has a social impact and has further encouraged their engagement.

12.6 Conclusion

We set out to discuss the implementation of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects into the higher education curriculum as a form of Open Education Practices that promote the creation of OERs. We also intended to give a global perspective of engaging with Wikipedia by providing the context and trajectory of Wikimedia education programmes in four countries: Serbia, Israel, the US/Canada and Brazil. In the four cases we presented, Wikimedia education programmes have steadily increased over time, over at least a decade. Typically, pioneering educators have incorporated wiki projects into their classroom activities, especially as part of their assignments, and, as a community of practice emerged and a support structure was organised, education programmes have scaled up. While we demonstrated that there might be local-related, context-dependent or language-related challenges, we also showed that many challenges are similar in all contexts, so learning from existing programmes is key. Moreover, we demonstrated that there are shared benefits to collaborating with Wikimedia projects as a teaching and learning platform. Benefits seem to be similar across different languages, contexts, disciplines and models of engagement and usually include improved skills and literacies, in addition to thematic knowledge relating to coursework.

We have also shown that contributing to Wikipedia fosters active learning, a sense of responsibility towards knowledge and better awareness as digital citizens of critical topics of our time, from misinformation and fake news, to bias, knowledge gaps and knowledge equity. As the Wikimedia environment evolves, more opportunities for instructor engagement with collaborative projects arise. A recent Wikimedia project, Wikidata, is a free and open knowledge base in which students can develop new sets of skills, most notably around data literacy, while participating in data curation and extraction. As the cultural sector engages more actively with Wikimedia, particularly libraries, archives and museums, possibilities for partnerships might emerge. We hope that the global perspective offered here inspires more educators, faculty members and decision-makers in diverse educational institutions and settings to engage with Wikimedia projects in the classroom, experiment with the students, and do work that has a positive social impact and encourages free access to information for all.