{"id":1759,"date":"2026-10-09T15:54:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T15:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/?p=1759"},"modified":"2026-10-09T15:57:42","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T15:57:42","slug":"wiki-loves-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/wiki-loves-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Wiki Loves Learning – How the Wikimedian in Residence team can support your teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

What if your students could apply their research and subject expertise to a real audience, while developing digital, information and communication skills along the way?<\/em><\/p>\n

Ewan McAndrew, Anna Judelsone and Maya Field make up the University’s Wikimedian in Residence Team. Ewan is Wikimedian in Residence<\/a>, Anna is a PhD student and Assistant Wikimedian<\/a>, and Maya is the Digital Heritage and Open Knowledge intern<\/a> supporting digital outputs for Edinburgh Medical School’s 300th anniversary and Nursing Studies 70th anniversary.<\/p>\n

Together, they work with colleagues across the University to design Wikipedia-based assignments, deliver training workshops, develop student projects and connect teaching with the wider Wikimedia community. Here, they explain more about their work and how it can contribute to the public good.<\/p>\n

What is Wikipedia?<\/h2>\n

Wikipedia<\/a> is a free online encyclopaedia available in more than 348 active language editions, with more than seven million articles in English alone. Compiled by volunteers around the world, it is the largest reference work on the internet and the world’s largest open educational resource.<\/p>\n

Now 25 years old, Wikipedia has become an important part of everyday life and has democratised access to information globally. It now also powers virtually all the major AI answer services, most of which are beginning to acknowledge, and pay for, fast high-volume access to this freely available, ever-updating resource. While Wikipedia’s knowledge is free, its staff, servers and infrastructure are not.<\/p>\n

Not everything is online, and AI carries real gaps, flaws and biases just as Wikipedia is always going to be a work in progress towards achieving the “sum of all human knowledge<\/em>“. Maintaining a healthy, ethical and reliable information ecosystem therefore depends on people continuing to contribute to, and critically engage with, open knowledge.<\/p>\n

What is the Wikimedian in Residence service?<\/h2>\n

The Wikimedian in Residence service<\/a> is a free resource for University staff and students who want to learn how to benefit from, and contribute to, Wikipedia and its sister projects. We’re here as a tool in the staff\/student armoury in order to facilitate working with Wikipedia as a form of learning technology to be actively, and critically, engaged with rather than passively consumed or abstained from.<\/p>\n

In partnership with the charitable organisation Wikimedia UK<\/a>, the role is based in Information Services<\/a>. The team delivers digital skills workshops, supports teaching, assignment design and assessment, facilitates volunteer editing events, and advises on integrating open knowledge into research, learning and public engagement.<\/p>\n

The team has collaborated with courses and student societies across the University, and across the city of Edinburgh itself, for more than a decade, helping students develop and evidence graduate competencies including: academic referencing; writing for different audiences; literature review and synthesising research; digital skills; data skills; information and A.I. literacy; online citizenship; neutral point of view vs. bias; collaborative working; copyright literacy; and identifying reliable sources.<\/p>\n

Participants in curriculum projects and community edit-a-thons have improved thousands of Wikipedia articles during this time. In doing so, they have helped make reliable, fact-checked knowledge freely accessible to millions of readers worldwide. Our students learn about how information is created, curated and disseminated online and help upstream<\/em> knowledge online and communicate their scholarship openly as empowered and informed ‘knowledge activists’.<\/p>\n

Institutionally, this work supports the growing need to develop best practice in AI and information literacy, and also demonstrates the University’s commitment to sharing knowledge openly beyond the ‘ivory tower’, for the benefit of Scotland, the UK and the wider world.<\/p>\n

How can Wikipedia support your teaching?<\/h2>\n

The Wikimedia team works with course organisers to design and incorporate Wikipedia editing into teaching and assessment with twenty-one exemplars of UK assignments already detailed in our Case Studies Booklet (2025)<\/a> that we would love to add to and showcase work in other disciplines.<\/p>\n

The team never recommends citing Wikipedia in academic work. Wikipedia is an ever-updating tertiary resource that relies on reliable published secondary sources; these are the sources students should cite, where suitably verified.<\/p>\n

However, writing and editing Wikipedia can be a genuinely powerful teaching and learning activity. Students are asked to step into the role of subject expert and then turn around and explain what they know to a non-specialist public audience, in their own words, without jargon. This is pedagogically valuable in a specific way: to communicate a topic clearly and accurately to a lay reader, you have to understand it deeply enough to articulate it simply, making careful decisions about what matters, what to leave out, and how to explain it in terms anyone can follow. As educators have long observed, preparing to teach a subject is one of the most effective ways to consolidate learning. Wikipedia editing is, in that sense, a form of applied subject mastery.<\/p>\n

Students also practise making decisions about evidence, structure and language, receive feedback in a low-stakes collaborative environment, and work towards an objective consensus on how a topic should be responsibly communicated. All while producing something for a real audience rather than simply writing for a tutor or assignment marker.<\/p>\n

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“We didn’t realise this was history.” – <\/em>Student feedback on Dr. Huw Halstead’s Dark Tourism MSc history module.<\/p>\n

Students frequently arrive expecting a conventional assignment and discover something much more engaging, work that connects their academic expertise with the world beyond the classroom and shows them that their, history degree, for instance, is of relevance to the broader public.<\/p>\n

“Actually, knowing about history allows you to participate in these much broader things \u2013 things that are of broader interest to people, like Wikipedia. It’s something where actual historians would be really useful, but it’s not primarily used by historians; it’s used by people in their daily lives for all kinds of reasons.”- <\/em>Dr. Huw Halstead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What makes Wikipedia assignments unusual is the level of enthusiasm they consistently generate. Many students have used Wikipedia all their lives without ever thinking of contributing to it or even knowing where to begin. The realisation that their subject knowledge actually qualifies them to make it better and that they can do so right now is, for many, a genuine turning point and an exciting one at that. The result is something concrete and public: an article they can share with friends and family, include in a portfolio, and point to as a lasting, visible output of their studies.<\/p>\n

For many students, the motivation goes further still. Wikipedia has well-documented gaps in its coverage of women, non-Western perspectives, under-represented communities and topics from everyday life. (Mirroring also many of the problems of topic coverage outside<\/em> of Wikipedia). Students, therefore, who choose to address those gaps are not simply practising research and communication skills; they are contributing to a more equitable knowledge commons. That sense of purpose, of identifying something missing and doing something about it in a subject they care about, is a powerful source of intrinsic motivation, and it consistently shows in the quality of the work they produce.<\/p>\n

Our aim is to make this kind of innovation easier for busy academic colleagues. We provide a free central resource to facilitate innovative practice, share reusable materials and connect colleagues with one another, so that no one has to reinvent the wheel and each year’s course design can build on what has gone before.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia assignments can be adapted to suit different disciplines and learning outcomes. With ten years of course-design experience to draw on, the team can also provide reusable resources, including short video explainers and PDFs that can be embedded directly into VLEs.<\/p>\n

Students can:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n