Fall 2025 in numbers

In the Student Program, we continually stress quality over quantity, but when taken collectively, the numbers never fail to impress. Here’s what they looked like in Fall 2025: 

• 343 courses participated in a Wikipedia assignment
• 6,410 students enrolled on the Dashboard
• Students added 5.03 million words across 6,250 Wikipedia articles
• To support their work, students added 49,500 references to Wikipedia
• Closing critical content gaps, students created 363 new articles

Whether writing about Revolutions in Latin America, Insect Diversity, or Anthropological Theory, our students are making critical updates to Wikipedia in almost every field imaginable.    

An assignment for our times

In the face of AI and an increasingly complex information landscape, it might be tempting to view Wikipedia as outdated, a relic of the early internet. To the contrary, Wikipedia is more critical than ever, and our faculty recognize its ongoing value. As one faculty wrote, “I believe in freely available, high-quality information based on clear, concrete standards of evidence. How we know what we know is more important than ever in today’s age of misinformation and disinformation.” 

The advent of AI has only added to an information landscape that was already buckling under the weight of mass disinformation campaigns. The Wikipedia assignment is not just another assignment. It offers students keen insight into the social infrastructure of knowledge. As another professor remarked, “There were numerous pedagogical benefits to the Wikipedia assignments in my course. Perhaps most notable was the focus on my students’ critical and productive engagement with the information infrastructure of the internet. Developing various writing, researching, and editing skills related to the community-based platforms of the Wikipedia universe encouraged my students, and me, to develop a greater understanding of the creation, dissemination, and potential for mis-information via other internet-based platforms as well.”

In response to the growing prevalence of AI, we realized that our students needed guidance not simply on how to navigate AI use on Wikipedia but how to think about it more generally. As a result, we launched a new training module in the Fall as well as a more in-depth look at LLMs broadly speaking. As we engage with our faculty, we’re coming to learn that the Wikipedia assignment is not just a tool for helping students to develop digital and media literacy, but it can also play a critical role in developing AI literacy. As one professor described, “Wikipedia is superior to AI generated information in many ways, and by doing this assignment – my student learned this at a very foundational level. They could clearly see that in well-written Wikipedia articles, every fact is associated with at least one source that EXISTS, that is REAL, and VERIFIABLE. Anyone teaching AI literacy – should be teaching Wikipedia!”

Sparking joy

On a day to day basis, we often focus on the technical challenges of editing Wikipedia. Its policies can be  confusing, and its interface is often daunting to first time users. Despite its intricacies, students and faculty regularly express how proud they are of their contributions. As one professor noted, “I love teaching with Wikipedia and I am so proud that my students are able to address knowledge gaps about under-represented communities. I also love to see the pride they demonstrate in their work.” 

More subtle and easier to miss is that many students truly “enjoy” the Wikipedia assignment. In the words of one student, “I can proudly say that I helped improve a Wikipedia page… I was given pure enjoyment doing the research and the work.” Another professor declared, “Not only did they enjoy the semester but I did too.” 

The pride and joy our faculty and students experience is palpable, and only amplifies the pride and joy we feel at Wiki Education in having the honor of shepherding each cohort of students each term. Thank you to our Fall 2025 faculty and students!

To learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Solpugid, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And that’s exactly what Chang accomplished when she set out to create the Wikipedia article on techno-orientalism, a cultural theory that critiques the depiction of Asia and Asian culture as hyper-technologized within literature and media. Like many of the students who work on Wikipedia assignments, Chang used the assignment as an opportunity to explore her passions, Asian cinema and science fiction. She shared that she was “really surprised to find that this theory didn’t have a page of its own. Instead it was a brief mention nested within the cyberpunk page.”

This motivation for improving knowledge content gaps was shared by the other three post-secondary student panelists that joined Chang last month for Wiki Education’s Speaker Series virtual webinar, “Inside the Wikipedia Assignment: Student Perspectives.” While the students represented different institutions, academic disciplines, and areas of the country, they quickly discovered the commonalities in their editing experiences.

Jordan Brown, a senior studying gender studies and sociology at UCLA, had a similar surprise when they searched for their topic, Casa Xochiquetzal, on Wikipedia: “I was like, okay, this has to have a Wikipedia page because I just read a full 40-page chapter on this and I was really surprised to see that it wasn’t.”

In a similar vein, first year student at the University of New Hampshire Skylar Cook took the opportunity to improve an underdeveloped article on the Oʻahu ʻelepaio, a bird endemic to Hawaii. Before Cook’s contributions, the Oʻahu ʻelepaio article only offered a couple of unsourced paragraphs. 

A critical takeaway from these moments of surprise was succinctly put by Diego Fleury, first year graduate student studying physiology at North Carolina State University: “It was just a reminder that with the world always changing and evolving, there’s always space for new ideas and new topics to be discussed.” 

Sharing their work

As Wikipedia is a publicly-accessible resource, our panelists all noted their excitement to share their work with people dear to them. 

Beyond readership, Fleury explained how the inspiration for creating the article on Estrobolome was in part due to his mom’s interest in microbiology: “I actually came up [with the topic] in a brainstorming session with my mom.” (Read more about Fleury’s experience here.)

Knowing that their Wikipedia contribution would be shared with family and friends, it served as motivation to hone their critical thinking and writing skills in order to create accurate and accessible information. 

“You want to make sure it’s super accurate, it makes sense, and it’s accessible so it’s a great way for me to digest what I am reading and then be able to convey that and then share it with my friends and family,” said Chang.

Appreciation for the Wikipedia community

Debunking the long standing misconception of Wikipedia’s unreliability, Fleury explained his experience learning about the knowledge creation process on Wikipedia: 

“You’d be surprised with how strict and how much scrutiny Wikipedia articles go through because you hear all the time ‘Oh Wikipedia, anybody can edit it, anybody can change it and you can just say whatever,’ which… Yes, technically anybody can change it, but there’s a very stringent process by which articles are basically looked over by tons and tons of people.”

Along a similar thread, Cook expressed her gratitude for Wikipedia’s knowledge creation ecosystem and the volunteers that keep it running behind the scenes. 

“What I took away from this was an appreciation for the volunteers and the people that edit Wikipedia, because all this work is really important, and to see how so many people have edited Wikipedia before us, and we never really even think about it, and how much work they put in, and how much of an impact they always make,” said Cook. “That’s just a really important thing that I want to take with me, so that in my future, I can always look to make an impact as well.”

Join our next Speaker Series webinar tomorrow, March 10!

Trying Something New: Faculty reflect on first time teaching with Wikipedia
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern
Registration

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Interested in learning how to add your expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

The committee will advise and support Wiki Education’s efforts to enhance Wikipedia’s coverage of historically underrepresented subjects through Wikipedia assignments, building on the outreach, communications, and publications work of the previous committees. 

For Jasmine Yarish at the University of the District of Columbia, the committee role offers a chance to collaborate and connect with peers who share a commitment to public-facing scholarship.

“As a scholar grounded in interdisciplinarity as well as digital, historical, and cultural literacy, I wanted to join this committee to build solidarity across like-minded scholars who want to do the work to scale the walls of the academy and reach out to the public with accessible and responsible information,” said Yarish.

Yarish is particularly energized by the way Wikipedia challenges traditional academic roles.

“I am excited by the challenge of learning a new skillset that falls outside of the typical dichotomy of being either a knowledge consumer or knowledge producer,” explained Yarish. “Wikipedia provides a template and methodology for knowledge facilitation, where expertise and novel enthusiasm come together in an open access platform dedicated to ethical information gathering and collective learning. I like to think of it as a space that incubates innovation.”

Like Yarish, committee member Francisco Laso of Western Washington University brings a classroom perspective shaped by centering voices often missing from traditional narratives.

“I wanted to join Wiki Education’s Humanities and Social Justice Committee because my course with the Wikipedia assignment centers authors and perspectives from the Global South that most of my students have never encountered,” said Laso. “This exposure can be genuinely transformative — students regularly tell me that engaging with these voices is shaping what they want to do after graduation.”

Laso sees his role on the committee as a way to extend that impact beyond his own students.

“Wikipedia holds a special place for me — it’s one of the most democratic spaces on the internet — and having students contribute to it has proven to be among the most intellectually rigorous and personally meaningful assignments I’ve ever taught,” said Laso. “What excites me about this committee role is working ‘behind the scenes’ to help other educators build similar experiences in their own classrooms, so that the impact scales far beyond my own courses.”

Laso, Yarish, and their fellow committee members will engage in Wiki Education’s outreach and recruitment activities, conference participation, and publication projects throughout the year. We are grateful to all seven members for their service and leadership.

2026 Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee members:

Christina Carney

Dr. Christina Carney is an Associate Professor of Black (Queer) Sexuality Studies at the University of Missouri (Columbia) and has taught with Wiki Education since 2018. She is the author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego (2025). Her research interests include Black Feminism, Sex Work and Sex Economies, Urban Studies and the African Diaspora. While Carney’s first book examined how the sexual policing of Black women sex workers was foundational to the city of San Diego’s development as a center of tourism and the military, her current project takes a more global and transhistorical approach by examining how heritage tourism in Brazil engenders new sex economies and forms of relationality in the African Diaspora. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation) and the US Fulbright Scholars Program. Carney also serves on the editorial board for African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Kate Dimitrova 

Since 2019, Dr. Kate Dimitrova has been teaching classes on Medieval Art, the European Renaissance, and Medieval Islamic Art at the University of San Diego; before that she served as Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Alfred University in New York. She also worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and then the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her publications include a co-edited book with Margaret Goehring, Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages (Brepols, 2014) and a forthcoming Festschrift in honor of Alison Stones. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in Brussels and a Kress Fellowship at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. In 2022, Dr. Dimitrova launched the Wikipedia assignment working alongside her first-year students for an introductory survey course, “The Year 1500: A Global History of Art & Architecture” that explores the complex global connections and relationships that intertwined Europe with Asia, Africa, and the Americas during this so-called “Age of Exploration.” In addition, she has participated in the Wiki Education Scholars Program and has presented at several conferences to encourage other faculty members to embrace the Wikipedia assignment that transforms students to become both content creators and facilitators in knowledge sharing – activities that are meaningful far beyond the walls of the classroom.

Alvin Khiêm Bùi

Dr. Alvin Khiêm Bùi is Assistant Professor of History of Asian Peoples in Diaspora at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He was a Visiting Research Fellow for the US-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon’s Global Studies Institute. He is a proud product of public education and uses that education in public service, having earned his doctoral degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in modern Southeast Asian and East Asian history. During his time at UW, he served as Project Coordinator for the Washington State Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, mapping neighborhoods covered by racist deed provisions and restrictive covenants. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from UCLA in History and Asian American Studies, after which he lived and worked in Vietnam in education and venture capital. He has published on Saigonese motorbike YouTubers and their diasporic Vietnamese audiences in Asiascape: Digital Asia. 

Francisco J. Laso

Dr. Francisco Laso is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Western Washington University. His research and teaching sit at the intersection of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), political ecology, and community-engaged scholarship, with long-term collaborations in Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands focused on land use, agriculture, and environmental justice. Across his work, Francisco examines how environmental knowledge is produced, represented, and made accessible—and whose perspectives are amplified or overlooked in that process. His research, informed by fieldwork supported by international conservation organizations including the World Wildlife Fund, brings together qualitative and spatial approaches to make underrepresented environmental perspectives legible within dominant public and academic knowledge spaces. In the classroom, he designs public-facing, transnational learning experiences that connect students across regions and epistemic traditions, including courses such as Extractivism and Its Alternatives in Latin America, which incorporate Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnerships with students in Ecuador and culminate in Wikipedia contributions requiring careful attention to sourcing, neutrality, and representation. He is also the founder of the Mapping Accessibility Project (MAP), which engages students in collaborative GIS work to document accessibility barriers and improve access to spatial information.

Allison Marsh

Dr. Allison Marsh is a public historian of technology with research interests on women in electrical engineering. During the spring of 2025 while on sabbatical, Allison enrolled in the 250 by 2026 Wiki Education course to help cultural heritage organizations build their Wikipedia presence in advance of the nation’s semiquincentennial.  As part of the course, she drafted her first Wikipedia article, a biography of engineering rockstar Mabel MacFerran Rockwell.  Her experience converted her to a Wikipedia evangelist.  She incorporated writing Wikipedia articles in her fall courses and again in the spring. So far her students have created 39 new articles on notable women in South Carolina and added 54k words. Allison suspects the Wikipedia assignment will become a staple in all future courses. She is giving her first public talk on “Teaching with Wikipedia” on 3 February 2026 at the Loblolly Society. Allison is an Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and the Co-Director of the Ann Johnson Institute for STS at the University of South Carolina. 

Alicia Rita Rueda-Acedo

Dr. Alicia Rita Rueda-Acedo is an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature, Translation, and Interpreting at The University of Texas at Arlington, where she founded and directs the Spanish Community Translation and Interpreting Program. Her work centers on connecting academic study with community engagement, and she has received multiple teaching awards, including the 2023 Example of Excelencia in Education. She is the author of Miradas transatlánticas: el periodismo literario de Elena Poniatowska y Rosa Montero (2012) and Miradas y aperturas: el artículo de opinión en el periodismo literario de Poniatowska, Mastretta y Luiselli (2024), and the co-author of Independencias, Revoluciones y Revelaciones: doscientos años de literatura mexicana (2010) and Fostering Inclusion Across Countries Through Community Translation and Interpreting (2026). She has published numerous book chapters and articles on 20th- and 21st-century Transatlantic literature from Mexico and Spain, addressing topics such as literary journalism and women authors in leading journals in the field. Dr. Rueda-Acedo integrates community translation, experiential learning, interprofessional education, and service-learning into her teaching by partnering with non-profit organizations to provide language access for underserved communities. Since 2025, she has also integrated Wikipedia assignments into her courses, leading translations of articles on rare diseases and U.S. immigration law into Spanish, as well as articles on Hispanic women writers into English.

Jasmine Noelle Yarish

Jasmine Noelle Yarish (Dr. JNY) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). As a political theorist and archival methodologist, she teaches core courses for the political science B.A. as well as civics and ethics courses for the interdisciplinary general education (IGED) program and the U.S. history sequence integrating digital literacy skills from LinkedIn to Wikipedia. Before joining UDC in the fall of 2020, she held visiting assistant professorships at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Augustana College. A first-generation scholar raised in the Appalachian hills of central Pennsylvania, she specializes in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, spatiality, material culture, and democratic theory. Since completing a Ph.D. with certificates in Black Studies and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her scholarship extends the idea of abolition democracy theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois to include political and intellectual contributions made by black women in and around the city of Philadelphia during the era of Reconstruction in the mid to late nineteenth century. With multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, as well as supporting archival efforts for public history projects in the City of Philadelphia, namely the Ben Fletcher mural and I.W.W. Local 8 historical marker, Dr. JNY’s scholarship is placed prominently in the growing literature on the “Third Reconstruction,” racial capitalism, and abolition democracy.

As he considered topics for his Wikipedia assignment at North Carolina State University last term, Fleury Mendible’s mother joined the brainstorming session, bringing her own interest in microbiology and recent reading on the gut microbiome to the conversation.

“I took the inspiration from my mom for the topic,” explained Fleury Mendible. “Her father was a geneticist, and I can definitely see his fervor for science seeping through her. This article felt like my own way of channeling that learning and curiosity into something that can help others learn about a topic. Crafting this article helped me feel closer to both of them, even through my own work.”

But Fleury Mendible hasn’t always studied the life sciences — he completed his bachelor’s degree in political science before beginning his graduate studies in physiology this year. To push himself to fully engage with the materials and to test his understanding, he decided to take on the additional challenge of developing a brand new article.

“I chose to create an article because this was one of my first experiences with microbiology in general, so I thought that putting lots of work and research into crafting something of my own would be a great way to learn how to apply the concepts we were discussing in class,” said Fleury Mendible. “It did end up helping those concepts to stick and sharpen my understanding.”

For Fleury Mendible, the real challenge wasn’t just searching for high-quality, peer-reviewed sources appropriate for Wikipedia, but also ensuring his understanding was shaped by the research rather than starting with his preliminary understanding of the topic.

“It can be tricky to find articles that fit [the] criteria without trying to conform the details of the papers to preconceived notions about any given topic,” he noted. “In a chicken-before-the-egg scenario, I did not want to find articles that fit what I thought I knew about the estrobolome; rather, I wanted to take what I knew and have it evolve through reading about it in the literature.”

Using this approach, he built the article from as neutral a point of view as he could. That focus, along with the other Wikipedia guidelines and standards he learned throughout the project, gave him a deeper appreciation for how the online encyclopedia functions and grows.

“From the neutral tone and solid sources required to the scrutiny of thousands of reviewers, this forum is one where people can learn about the ever-changing world we live in,” said Fleury Mendible. “The learning modules [in the assignment] encouraged being okay with scrutiny and changes in articles, and to me, that is the core of what Wikipedia is. We can learn, grow, and change while maintaining a learning environment fit for anyone. The fact that it is free and held up by people who contribute simply for the community is amazing too!”

Reflecting on the project, Fleury Mendible underscored how the Wikipedia assignment stands apart from other coursework in both scope and stakes.

“This was unlike anything I have done in a classroom setting before,” said Fleury Mendible. “From the moment I read about the assignment, it felt like an opportunity to make something my own while contributing to the knowledge of the world. I really enjoyed the freedom granted to us as students.”

Although his academic path will keep him busy (he plans to attend medical school next!), Fleury Mendible didn’t hesitate when asked whether he’ll continue editing Wikipedia.

“Of course! I am proud of my work and would love to stay involved with it,” he said. “I look forward to seeing what the community will contribute and how this article will evolve over time.”

Our support for STEM classes like Diego Fleury Mendible’s is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

But the hoverfly Microdon mutabilis is a different kind of parasite. Adult flies linger close to ant colonies, and their larvae feed on their eggs and larvae. Rather than being a parasite in the typical form, they are social parasites — in essence, very bad houseguests who exploit the social bonds of an ant colony. 

When Saty Paynter-Tavares had to pick a Wikipedia article to improve as part of her Insect Diversity and Evolution course, Wikipedia’s short article on Microdon mutabilis seemed like an obvious choice.

Paynter-Tavares is a senior and entomology major at Cornell University. In the semester before she did the Wikipedia assignment, she worked on a curation project working on flies in the genus Microdon and found their biology and life history to be fascinating.

Female Microdon mutabilis flies use chemicals produced by the ants to locate a suitable nest for laying their eggs. Their small, slug-like larvae fly under the radar while wreaking havoc on ant eggs and larvae since their hosts apparently can’t recognize them as invaders.

Reflecting on her goals for the project, Paynter-Tavares said, “I really wanted to highlight the life history and biology of Microdon mutabilis — its host specificity and myrmecophilous lifestyle is one of the quintessential features of this species and is what makes it so interesting. There are a lot of avenues for further research associated with these traits alone.”

Anyone who’s ever been a student is familiar with the challenge of getting big projects completed on time. This can be doubly challenging on Wikipedia, where in addition to the desire to find one more source, you’re surrounded by Wikipedia itself with its innumerable rabbit holes. With that in mind, Wiki Education designed the Wikipedia assignment to mitigate this problem. 

As Paynter-Tavares put it, “We were fortunate to have a timeline and activities provided to us, so it was easy to stay on track by completing smaller tasks throughout the semester. I first assessed the original article to see what was already available, then I conducted research and jotted down notes from peer reviewed sources I consulted in a separate document. By having all the information laid out for me in bullet points, it was a lot easier for me to synthesize the information and flesh out the article.”

As they contribute to Wikipedia, students expand the body of information that’s out there for people to use as a starting point for further work. In the case of this hoverfly, there’s a lot that’s still unknown, and students like Paynter-Tavares help to highlight the research still needed.  “I wanted to add to the repertoire of easily accessible knowledge to highlight the potential for further systematics and conservational studies for this species,” said Paynter-Tavares.

Microdon mutabilis can only be distinguished from Microdon myrmicae, a closely-related species, by the anatomy of the pupa. Until 2002 they were both thought to be part of a single species. The article said this before Paynter-Tavares started improving it, but it did so in a manner that was neither particularly informative nor accessible: “See references for determination.”

Here again, Paynter-Tavares had something important to contribute. “I already have a strong background in the biological sciences, but this article was helpful for communicating my knowledge in a way that is accessible to those who might not have a strong science background.”

In writing for more general audiences, she also built skills that might be useful in her future. “I see myself being most fulfilled in a career involving evolutionary biology and scientific outreach, and would love to work at a zoo, museum, or research station.”

Finally, doing this kind of work engages students in what they’re writing while giving them agency.

Reflecting on her experience, Paynter-Tavares said, “I really enjoyed this assignment compared to a traditional assignment. It was a lot easier for me to be engaged because it was largely self-driven on a topic that I found interesting.” 

Not only was she able to find an interesting topic relevant to her major in entomology, but she also appreciated the research and writing process, all building up to her article contributions.

“I enjoyed compiling all the information that I learned into one cohesive document,” Paynter-Tavares explained. “It was really satisfying to see my article come to fruition after the countless hours of researching and drafting.”

Our support for STEM classes like Saty Paynter-Tavares’ is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

What began as a bold experiment has since become a cornerstone of the modern information ecosystem, shaping how billions of people learn, teach, and make decisions every day. Last month, Wiki Education marked the free encyclopedia’s milestone birthday with a special Speaker Series webinar grounded by one foundational question:

What has Wikipedia taught us about knowledge over the past quarter century — and what comes next?

The anniversary discussion gathered scholars Phoebe Ayers (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Carwil Bjork-James (Vanderbilt University), Ryan McGrady (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Steven Mintz (University of Texas at Austin), who brought a combined 60+ years of Wikipedia experience to reflect on Wikipedia’s growth, evolution, and future.

“Early on, [Wikipedia] felt much more like an experiment,” said Ayers, who has edited Wikipedia for more than two decades. “Today, when you’re contributing, you know that Wikipedia is an institution. It matters, and people are going to read this thing. The sense that we have a responsibility to get it right was true then, and it’s still true today.”

At the heart of Wikipedia’s success? A collective commitment to standards, sourcing, and the idea that knowledge improves through collective vetting over time, noted McGrady.

“Wikipedia’s legitimacy comes from a combination of its process and the intentions of its volunteers who are there to support the process,” said McGrady. “Over time, as the standards have evolved and become quite strict…the role of expertise shifted on Wikipedia from just ‘write what you know’ to becoming an expert in the selection and summary of the best possible sources.”

Like Ayers and McGrady, Bjork-James is a long-time Wikipedia editor, bringing his expertise as an anthropologist to his efforts to fill knowledge gaps and add underrepresented perspectives to Wikipedia articles. He has also taught with the Wikipedia assignment for the past ten years, and emphasized the joy of empowering his students to contribute to the encyclopedia, shifting them from knowledge consumers to producers.

“Teaching with Wikipedia gives people the opportunity to switch from being readers to creators on Wikipedia,” said Bjork-James. “That shift to authorship is a really powerful moment.”

The four panelists discussed Wikipedia’s ongoing challenges, including systemic gaps in coverage, misinformation, and the limitations of its secondary source policy when considering topics and groups underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.

While recognizing these challenges, Mintz continued to praise Wikipedia’s commitment to collaboration and transparency, an alternative to long-held assumptions about where expertise resides and how authority is earned.

“What you all have proven with Wikipedia is that intelligence is distributed,” said the history professor, speaking to his fellow panelists and other editors in attendance. “It is not confined to a small number of faculty offices, it’s widespread. Wikipedia is what the internet was supposed to be — not commodified knowledge for sale, but bringing the world together to pool all of our knowledge. It is more reliable because of procedure rather than prestige.”

Join our next Speaker Series webinar tomorrow, February 11!

Inside the Wikipedia Assignment: Student Perspectives

Wednesday, February 11, 2026
10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern

Registration

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Interested in learning how to add your expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

A few months ago, the online encyclopedia offered just two brief paragraphs about the marine botanist and phycologist. Today, the text looks strikingly different, thanks to the 8,548 words and 72 new references Le contributed as part of her Wikipedia assignment.

“When I first began researching Diane S. Littler, I hadn’t realized how foundational her work was to marine biology,” said Le. “As I learned more, I saw that her research shaped much of modern marine science. That made it important to me to gather as much information as possible so her Wikipedia article could reflect her true impact and help others recognize her contributions.”

Le, who learned to edit Wikipedia as part of her coursework during her final semester at Georgia Gwinnett College, emphasized how the experience deepened skills she’ll now carry into her future career — where accuracy and careful documentation are essential, she explained.

“I strengthened my ability to research thoroughly, verify sources, and connect information from multiple references to build a bigger picture,” noted Le. “I also learned how persistence pays off when sources are limited, and how one lead can open the door to many others.”

For scientists like Littler, whose careers may predate widespread media coverage, it can be difficult to find detailed information from verifiable sources, Le explained.

“The hardest part was when my research led to very few sources or dead ends,” said Le. “It took persistence to track down reliable information, and adding photos was especially challenging. Even so, those difficulties made the final product feel more meaningful once everything came together.” 

And when Le considered the broader impact her work could have beyond the structure of the article itself, the project became even more rewarding.

“Wikipedia has significant gaps in its coverage of women in STEM in its biographies,” said Le. “As a woman in STEM, expanding Littler’s biography felt especially meaningful. It wasn’t just about listing her accomplishments — it was about giving her the recognition she deserves and helping close the gap in representation. Contributing to her page felt like a small but important step toward making science history more inclusive.” 

The student editor hopes readers now have a clearer understanding of the full scope of Littler’s role in advancing marine biology, noting her own amazement at the scientist’s extensive body of published research and involvement in global projects across the field. 

And while her Wikipedia assignment may have ended, the editing work isn’t over yet for the recent college graduate — Le is already planning for her next Wikipedia contribution.

Christina Le’s work is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, which supports improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women in STEM. Learn more

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

We are choosing to share our perspective through this blog post because we hope it will help inform discussions of GenAI-created content on Wikipedia. In an open environment like the Wikimedia movement, it’s important to share what you’ve learned. In this case, we believe our learnings can help Wikipedia editors who are trying to protect the integrity of content on the encyclopedia, Wikipedians who may be interested in using generative AI tools themselves, other program leaders globally who are trying to onboard new contributors who may be interested in using these tools, and the Wikimedia Foundation, whose product and technology team builds software to help support the development of high-quality content on Wikipedia.

Our fundamental conclusion about generative AI is: Wikipedia editors should never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT into Wikipedia articles.

Let me explain more.

AI detection and investigation

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we’ve been paying close attention to GenAI-created content, and how it relates to Wikipedia. We’ve spot-checked work of new editors from our programs, primarily focusing on citations to ensure they were real and not hallucinated. We experimented with tools ourselves, we led video sessions about GenAI for our program participants, and we closely tracked on-wiki policy discussions around GenAI. Currently, English Wikipedia prohibits the use of generative AI to create images or in talk page discussions, and recently adopted a guideline against using large language models to generate new articles.

As our Wiki Experts Brianda Felix and Ian Ramjohn worked with program participants throughout the first half of 2025, they found more and more text bearing the hallmarks of generative AI in article content, like bolded words or bulleted lists in odd places. But the use of generative AI wasn’t necessarily problematic, as long as the content was accurate. Wikipedia’s open editing process encourages stylistic revisions to factual text to better fit Wikipedia’s style.

But was the text factually accurate? This fundamental question led our Chief Technology Officer, Sage Ross, to investigate different generative AI detectors. He landed on a tool called Pangram, which we have found to be highly accurate for Wikipedia text. Sage generated a list of all the new articles created through our work since 2022, and ran them all through Pangram. A total of 178 out of the 3,078 articles came back as flagged for AI — none before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, with increasing percentages term over term since then. About half of our staff spent a month during summer 2025 painstakingly reviewing the text from these 178 articles.

Based on the discourse around AI hallucinations, we were expecting these articles to contain citations to sources that didn’t exist, but this wasn’t true: only 7% of the articles had fake sources. The rest had information cited to real, relevant sources.

Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

This finding led us to invest significant staff time into cleaning up these articles — far more than these editors had likely spent creating them. Wiki Education’s core mission is to improve Wikipedia, and when we discover our program has unknowingly contributed to misinformation on Wikipedia, we are committed to cleaning it up. In the clean-up process, Wiki Education staff moved more recent work back to sandboxes, we stub-ified articles that passed notability but mostly failed verification, and we PRODed some articles that from our judgment weren’t salvageable. All these are ways of addressing Wikipedia articles with flaws in their content. (While there are many grumblings about Wikipedia’s deletion processes, we found several of the articles we PRODed due to their fully hallucinated GenAI content were then de-PRODed by other editors, showing the diversity of opinion about generative AI among the Wikipedia community.

Revising our guidance

Given what we found through our investigation into the work from prior terms, and given the increasing usage of generative AI, we wanted to proactively address generative AI usage within our programs. Thanks to in-kind support from our friends at Pangram, we began running our participants’ Wikipedia edits, including in their sandboxes, through Pangram nearly in real time. This is possible because of the Dashboard course management platform Sage built, which tracks edits and generates tickets for our Wiki Experts based on on-wiki edits.

We created a brand-new training module on Using generative AI tools with Wikipedia. This training emphasizes where participants could use generative AI tools in their work, and where they should not. The core message of these trainings is, do not copy and paste anything from a GenAI chatbot into Wikipedia.

We crafted a variety of automated emails to participants who Pangram detected were adding text created by generative AI chatbots. Sage also recorded some videos, since many young people are accustomed to learning via video rather than reading text. We also provided opportunities for engagement and conversation with program participants.

Our findings from the second half of 2025

In total, we had 1,406 AI edit alerts in the second half of 2025, although only 314 of these (or 22%) were in the article namespace on Wikipedia (meaning edits to live articles). In most cases, Pangram detected participants using GenAI in their sandboxes during early exercises, when we ask them to do things like choose an article, evaluate an article, create a bibliography, and outline their contribution.

Pangram struggled with false positives in a few sandbox scenarios:

• Bibliographies, which are often a combination of human-written prose (describing a source and its relevance) and non-prose text (the citation for a source, in some standard format)
• Outlines with a high portion of non-prose content (such as bullet lists, section headers, text fragments, and so on)

We also had a handful of cases where sandboxes were flagged for AI after a participant copied an AI-written section from an existing article to use as a starting point to edit or to expand. (This isn’t a flaw of Pangram, but a reminder of how much AI-generated content editors outside our programs are adding to Wikipedia!)

In broad strokes, we found that Pangram is great at analyzing plain prose — the kind of sentences and paragraphs you’ll find in the body of a Wikipedia article — but sometimes it gets tripped up by formatting, markup, and non-prose text. Early on, we disabled alert emails for participants’ bibliography and outline exercises, and throughout the end of 2025, we refined the Dashboard’s preprocessing steps to extract the prose portions of revisions and convert them to plain text before sending them to Pangram.

Many participants also reported “just using Grammarly to copy edit.” In our experience, however, the smallest fixes done with Grammarly never trigger Pangram’s detection, but if you use its more advanced content creation features, the resulting text registers as being AI generated.

But overwhelmingly, we were pleased with Pangram’s results. Our early interventions with participants who were flagged as using generative AI for exercises that would not enter mainspace seemed to head off their future use of generative AI. We supported 6,357 new editors in fall 2025, and only 217 of them (or 3%) had multiple AI alerts. Only 5% of the participants we supported had mainspace AI alerts. That means thousands of participants successfully edited Wikipedia without using generative AI to draft their content.

For those who did add GenAI-drafted text, we ensured that the content was reverted. In fact, participants sometimes self-reverted once they received our email letting them know Pangram had detected their contributions as being AI created. Instructors also jumped in to revert, as did some Wikipedians who found the content on their own. Our ticketing system also alerted our Wiki Expert staff, who reverted the text as soon as they could.

While some instructors in our Wikipedia Student Program had concerns about AI detection, we had a lot of success focusing the conversation on the concept of verifiability. If the instructor as subject matter expert could attest the information was accurate, and they could find the specific facts in the sources they were cited to, we permitted text to come back to Wikipedia. However, the process of attempting to verify student-created work (which in many cases the students swore they’d written themselves) led many instructors to realize what we had found in our own assessment: In their current states, GenAI-powered chatbots cannot write factually accurate text for Wikipedia that is verifiable.

We believe our Pangram-based detection interventions led to fewer participants adding GenAI-created content to Wikipedia. Following the trend lines, we anticipated about 25% of participants to add GenAI content to Wikipedia articles; instead, it was only 5%, and our staff were able to revert all problematic content.

I’m deeply appreciative of everyone who made this success possible this term: Participants who followed our recommendations, Pangram who gave us access to their detection service, Wiki Education staff who did the heavy lift of working with all of the positive detections, and the Wikipedia community, some of whom got to the problematic work from our program participants before we did.

How can generative AI help?

So far, I’ve focused on the problems with generative AI-created content. But that’s not all these tools can do, and we did find some ways they were useful. Our training module encourages editors — if their institution’s policies permit it — to consider using generative AI tools for:

• Identifying gaps in articles
• Finding access to sources
• Finding relevant sources

To evaluate the success of these use scenarios, we worked directly with 7 of the classes we supported in fall 2025 in our Wikipedia Student Program. We asked students to anonymously fill out a survey every time they used generative AI tools in their Wikipedia work. We asked what tool they used, what prompt they used, how they used the output, and whether they found it helpful. While some students filled the survey out multiple times, others filled it out once. We had 102 responses reporting usage at various stages in the project. Overwhelmingly, 87% of the responses who reported using generative AI said it was helpful for them in the task. The most popular tool by far was ChatGPT, with Grammarly as a distant second, and the others in the single-digits of usage.

Students reported AI tools very helpful in:

• Identifying articles to work on that were relevant to the course they were taking
• Highlighting gaps within existing articles, including missing sections or more recent information that was missing
• Finding reliable sources that they hadn’t already located
• Pointing to which database a certain journal article could be found
• When prompted with the text they had drafted and the checklist of requirements, evaluating the draft against those requirements
• Identifying categories they could add to the article they’d edited
• Correcting grammar and spelling mistakes

Critically, no participants reported using AI tools to draft text for their assignments. One student reported: “I pasted all of my writing from my sandbox and said ‘Put this in a casual, less academic tone’ … I figured I’d try this but it didn’t sound like what I normally write and I didn’t feel that it captured what I was trying to get across so I scrapped it.”

While this was an informal research project, we received enough positive feedback from it to believe using ChatGPT and other tools can be helpful in the research stage if editors then critically evaluate the output they get, instead of blindly accepting it. Even participants who found AI helpful reported that they didn’t use everything it gave them, as some was irrelevant. Undoubtedly, it’s crucial to maintain the human thinking component throughout the process.

What does this all mean for Wiki Education?

My conclusion is that, at least as of now, generative AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT should never be used to generate text for Wikipedia; too much of it will simply be unverifiable. Our staff would spend far more time attempting to verify facts in AI-generated articles than if we’d simply done the research and writing ourselves.

That being said, AI tools can be helpful in the research process, especially to help identify content gaps or sources, when used in conjunction with a human brain that carefully evaluates the information. Editors should never simply take a chatbot’s suggestion; instead, if they want to use a chatbot, they should use it as a brainstorm partner to help them think through their plans for an article.

To date, Wiki Education’s interventions as our program participants edit Wikipedia show promise for keeping unverifiable, GenAI-drafted content off Wikipedia. Based on our experiences in the fall term, we have high confidence in Pangram as a detector of AI content, at least in Wikipedia articles. We will continue our current strategy in 2026 (with more small adjustments to make the system as reliable as we can).

More generally, we found participants had less AI literacy than popular discourse might suggest. Because of this, we created a supplemental large language models training that we’ve offered as an optional module for all participants. Many participants indicated that they found our guidance regarding AI to be welcome and helpful as they attempt to navigate the new complexities created by AI tools.

We are also looking forward to more research on our work. A team of researchers — Francesco Salvi and Manoel Horta Ribeiro at Princeton University, Robert Cummings at the University of Mississippi, and Wiki Education’s Sage Ross — have been looking into Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program editors’ use of generative AI over time. Preliminary results have backed up our anecdotal understanding, while also revealing nuances of how text produced by our students over time has changed with the introduction of GenAI chatbots. They also confirmed our belief in Pangram: After running student edits from 2015 up until the launch of ChatGPT through Pangram, without any date information involved, the team found Pangram correctly identified that it was all 100% human written. This research will continue into the spring, as the team explores ways of unpacking the effects of AI on different aspects of article quality.

And, of course, generative AI is a rapidly changing field. Just because these were our findings in 2025 doesn’t mean they will hold true throughout 2026. Wiki Education remains committed to monitoring, evaluating, iterating, and adapting as needed. Fundamentally, we are committed to ensuring we add high quality content to Wikipedia through our programs. And when we miss the mark, we are committed to cleaning up any damage.

What does this all mean for Wikipedia?

While I’ve focused this post on what Wiki Education has learned from working with our program participants, the lessons are extendable to others who are editing Wikipedia. Already, 10% of adults worldwide are using ChatGPT, and drafting text is one of the top use cases. As generative AI usage proliferates, its usage by well-meaning people to draft content for Wikipedia will as well. It’s unlikely that longtime, daily Wikipedia editors would add content copied and pasted from a GenAI chatbot without verifying all the information is in the sources it cites. But many casual Wikipedia contributors or new editors may unknowingly add bad content to Wikipedia when using a chatbot. After all, it provides what looks like accurate facts, cited to what are often real, relevant, reliable sources. Most edits we ended up reverting seemed acceptable with a cursory review; it was only after we attempted to verify the information that we understood the problems.

Because this unverifiable content often seems okay at first pass, it’s critical for Wikipedia editors to be equipped with tools like Pangram to more accurately detect when they should take a closer look at edits. Automating review of text for generative AI usage — as Wikipedians have done for copyright violation text for years — would help protect the integrity of Wikipedia content. In Wiki Education’s experience, Pangram is a tool that could provide accurate assessments of text for editors, and we would love to see a larger scale version of the tool we built to evaluate edits from our programs to be deployed across all edits on Wikipedia. Currently, editors can add a warning banner that highlights that the text might be LLM generated, but this is based solely on the assessment of the person adding the banner. Our experience suggests that judging by tone alone isn’t enough; instead, tools like Pangram can flag highly problematic information that should be reverted immediately but that might sound okay.

We’ve also found success in the training modules and support we’ve created for our program participants. Providing clear guidance — and the reason why that guidance exists — has been key in helping us head off poor usage of generative AI text. We encourage Wikipedians to consider revising guidance to new contributors in the welcome messages to emphasize the pitfalls of adding GenAI-drafted text. Software aimed at new contributors created by the Wikimedia Foundation should center starting with a list of sources and drawing information from them, using human intellect, instead of generative AI, to summarize information. Providing guidance upfront can help well-meaning contributors steer clear of bad GenAI-created text.

Wikipedia recently celebrated its 25th birthday. For it to survive into the future, it will need to adapt as technology around it changes. Wikipedia would be nothing without its corps of volunteer editors. The consensus-based decision-making model of Wikipedia means change doesn’t come quickly, but we hope this deep-dive will help spark a conversation about changes that are needed to protect Wikipedia into the future.

“Growing up in the city of Los Angeles from a family of immigrant grandparents, as well as an immigrant mother, I understood what Osvaldo’s journey was like, and the challenges that came with living in a city like he did,” said Martinez. “Contributing to his story and what he went through was honestly an honor for me, and the reason why it felt so meaningful.”

Through extensive research and careful attention to source quality, Martinez worked to expand the information about Gutierrez’s early life and career. 

The hardest part? Finding new sources for the article that met Wikipedia’s reliability standards, a challenge familiar to everyone working to fill gaps in the encyclopedia’s coverage of historically underrepresented topic areas and figures.

While Martinez considered his Wikipedia assignment more difficult than a traditional assignment due to the depth of research required, he ultimately appreciated the process.

“Researching Osvaldo and his life was fun because of how much I had to look for anything [I could use as a credible source],” said Martinez. “It was like I was a detective finding information, and being able to find details was very rewarding.”

Martinez, who plans to major in criminal justice, also drew connections between his career aspirations and the critical skills he developed throughout his Wikipedia assignment. 

“This assignment required a lot of digging deep into the internet, as well as writing properly,” said Martinez. “This could especially be useful in a career like law enforcement or investigations because those jobs require a lot of writing and research [for] reports.” 

Beyond research and writing skills, the project creates a deeper appreciation for Wikipedia’s role in shaping public understanding of figures like Gutierrez, explained Martinez as he noted the broad reach of the platform. 

And now, thanks to his thoughtful approach and thorough research, the challenges, perseverance, and accomplishments of a STEM professional are more visible to readers everywhere.

Oskar’s work on Wikipedia is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which supports creating and improving biographies of diverse people in STEM on Wikipedia.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.