Today is Giving Tuesday, a U.S. holiday to encourage donations to worthy nonprofits. If you’re planning to make financial contributions this year, we hope you’ll consider supporting Wiki Education. Here’s why:
1. We’re dramatically improving the availability and accuracy of information available on Wikipedia. Since 2010, students in our program have added more than 35 million words to Wikipedia, or the equivalent of 120,600 printed pages of content. That’s 80% of the total words in the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. We’ve supported more than 1,000 instructors and more than 35,000 students so far, and have been successfully scaling up our programs each year. Your financial support will help us to expand our impact even further.
2. We’re contributing to public literacy by disseminating academic scholarship on an open-access platform. We believe in accessible knowledge. The academic institutions with which we work have access to vast informational resources that are often restricted behind paywalls. Through our programs, students contribute this scholarship to Wikipedia while also developing a sense of digital citizenship. Your donation will support greater equality of access to information.
3. We bring diversity of content and of editors to Wikipedia. Around 80% of Wikipedia editors are men. And much of the information on Wikipedia about women and marginalized groups is underdeveloped, or simply doesn’t exist at all. We’re trying to address these content gaps. Around 60% of student editors in Wiki Education supported programs are women. And we engage all disciplines in closing content gaps in topics of race, gender, and sexuality. Our partnership with the National Women’s Studies Association has also had a tremendous impact so far, with over 2.5 million words added to Wikipedia. We have a finger on the pulse of larger conversations around diversity on Wikipedia and work hard to better round-out this amazing resource. Your donation will help us bring more diversity to Wikipedia.
4. We’re giving students crucial skills for their academic and professional lives. A Wikipedia assignment provides students with media literacy skills, and helps to combat fake news. It develops students’ critical research skills, fosters their ability to write for a public audience, promotes collaboration, and motivates them more than traditional assignments. Wiki Education also mentors interns in an open-source software project, creating opportunities for young coders to improve a project with worldwide impact. Your donation will help us provide a number of important skills to more students.
5. We create resources for others around the world to also do this work. We’ve developed a series of guides to editing Wikipedia articles and teaching with Wikipedia, as well as our Dashboard online course management software application. All the materials we develop are released under an open license, meaning anyone can adapt, localize, and translate our resources. More than 100 Wikimedia programs globally use an open version of our Dashboard software to track their impact on Wikipedia. Your financial contribution would support the continuing development of these resources we share globally.
You can donate online at wikiedu.org/donate. If you do, we encourage you to let your friends know on social media know by posting “Join me in supporting @WikiEducation on #GivingTuesday. https://wikiedu.org/donate”