US & Canada program reaches 100M words added
The education program in the United States and Canada, known as the Wikipedia Student Program, is run by the Wiki Education Foundation ("Wiki Education"), an independent nonprofit organization based in California. The program, which has been running since 2010, just celebrated a huge milestone: Student editors in the program have now added more than 100 million words to English Wikipedia!
100 million words is a hard amount to fathom. It means:
- 343,000 printed pages of text
- 687 reams of paper (which would weigh more than 3,500 pounds/1,600 kgs!)
- That's enough words to print 179 copies of War and Peace
- And it would encompass 73 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, or more than double the amount of information contained in the last print edition.
All told, this milestone has been achieved by supporting:
- 6,200 different courses at American and Canadian higher education institutions
- 2,560 unique instructors
- 120,000 student editors as they made their first edits to Wikipedia
- Additions to 135,000 articles on English Wikipedia
In addition to the massive amount of content added to the English Wikipedia, Wiki Education's Wikipedia Student Program has also had other positive impacts to Wikipedia.
- 19% of all of English Wikipedia's new active editors come from the program.
- Unlike the existing editing community in the region, which is 78% male and 89% white, Wiki Education's student editors are 70% women or non-binary, and 45% people of color, diversifying the contributor base.
- Research shows articles edited by our students get more page views and more edits than a control group, demonstrating the power of our approach to target key subject areas.
- Research also shows our program leads to spikes in additions of scholarly references to Wikipedia.
- And Wiki Education's custom-built Dashboard software is used by hundreds of other program leaders for different languages, amplifying the impact of education programs across Wikimedia projects.
But we aren't stopping at 100 million words added! Wiki Education is currently gearing up for another term, the northern hemisphere Fall 2023 term, where we expect to support another 350 courses with more than 6,000 student editors, as they add even more content to Wikipedia. Follow along as we onboard courses from a diverse range of disciplines.