Wikipedia:Education program/About

In the Wikipedia Education Program, educators assign their students to edit Wikipedia (or its sister sites) as an assignment. Volunteer editors support educators in designing an assignment that will be a good fit for Wikipedia, and they help student editors learn the ropes and understand how to contribute.

The goal of the Wikipedia Education Program is to engage students and professors across disciplines in improving Wikipedia while learning about their subject area, how information is created, and how to research and write educational articles for an encyclopedia. The Wikipedia Education Program brings Wikipedia into the classroom instead of keeping it out. Over the past few years, thousands of students have added thousands of pages of content to Wikipedia through the program.

Research
During the summer of 2012, we completed a project to determine what factors make courses more successful. We had worked with more than 150 classes at that point, and we wanted to find out patterns among our most successful courses so we could tailor our future professor selection around courses that would be the most successful. See this research page for more information.

How it works
Why do educators bring Wikipedia into the classroom when a lot of people in academia still question its reliability? After all, it is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Anyone. The fact is, whether educators want students to use Wikipedia or not, students are using it at some level. If students are using this extremely accessible online resource, let's teach them how to use it appropriately.

Why educators participate
While writing research papers in the context of existing content, students basically evaluate a literature review by finding gaps where they can expand and improve an article's depth. With an engaged online community that monitors edits and sources, students begin to pay more attention to sources and their reliability. An encyclopedia, by nature, demands representation of all points of view, so students learn how to write with neutrality.