{"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":"2026-10-23T18:22:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T18:22:31","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":"\n

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\n\n\n

Ewan McAndrew, Anna Judelson 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\n\n

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\"Headshot<\/a>
Anna Judelson, PhD student and Assistant Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, CC-BY-SA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Maya Field, Digital Heritage and Open Knowledge intern, image shared by Maya, CC-BY-SA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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\"Ewan<\/a>
Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, CC-BY-SA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Together, we 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, we explain more about our work and how it can contribute to the public good.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Wikipedia?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Wikipedia<\/a> is a free online encyclopaedia available in more than 348 active language editions<\/a>, 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\n\n

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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 A.I. answer services, most of which are beginning<\/em> to acknowledge, and pay for,<\/a> 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\n\n\n

Not everything is online, and A.I. has real gaps, flaws and biases, just as Wikipedia will always be a work in progress towards the \u2018sum of all human knowledge. Maintaining a healthy, ethical and reliable information ecosystem therefore depends on people continuing to contribute to, and critically engage with, open knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the Wikimedian in Residence service?<\/h2>\n\n\n\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\u2019re here to help staff and students work with Wikipedia as a learning technology: something to engage with actively and critically, rather than consume passively or avoid<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"People<\/a>
(Samhuinn Wikipedia edit-a-thon at University of Edinburgh editathon, Mihaela Bodlovic, CC-BY-SA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\n

How can Wikipedia support your teaching?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one student commented, \u201cReally love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Glaire Anderson, History of Art lecturer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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We work with course organisers to build Wikipedia editing into teaching and assessment. Our Case Studies Booklet (2025)<\/a> details twenty-one UK examples, and we\u2019d love to add examples from other disciplines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\u201cAnyone can put Wikipedia in the palms of their hands, including you.\u201c<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\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\n\n\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. 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\n\n\n

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\"Reproductive<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Reproductive Biology BSc students learning from Academic Support Librarians and collaborating as a group to achieve a lasting and impactful output of their studies in a two-week Wikipedia assignment.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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

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\"Two<\/a>
Rosie Taylor and Isobel Cordrey from the student support group, Wellcomm Kings, at our LGBTQ History month event, CC-BY-SA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\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\n\n\n

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“We didn’t realise this was history.” <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Student feedback on Dr Huw Halstead’s Dark Tourism MSc history module.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\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><\/p>\n\n\n\n

– <\/em>Dr Huw Halstead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\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. For many, realising their subject knowledge qualifies them to improve Wikipedia, and that they can start now, is a turning point. 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\n\n

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Students and staff creating new Wikipedia pages about Scottish suffragettes CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For many students, the motivation goes further still. Wikipedia has well-documented gaps in its coverage of women, non-Western perspectives, underrepresented communities and topics from everyday life. These gaps mirror wider gaps in coverage beyond 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\n\n\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\n\n\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 Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"People<\/a>
Diversithon editors at work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Students can:<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n