Purpose of the report

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. number of total participants	16,780	We met our overall goal of 16,185.
2. number of newly registered users	15,085	We nearly met our overall goal of 15,655.
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects	19,772	We nearly met our overall goal of 20,475.
4. quantity: words added to the article namespace	13,431,661	We exceeded our goal of 11,950,000.
5. quality: number of articles increasing by at least 10 points on the ORES scale	4,476	We nearly met our goal of 4,700.

Telling your program stories - all programs

For Wiki Education, 2019 was our first full calendar year enacting our new strategy, and it was a year of great success. As we executed the work to support the three pillars of our strategy, Equity, Quality, and Reach, we increased our overall impact to the English Wikipedia and Wikidata through our programs and the global Wikimedia community through our support of the Programs & Events Dashboard.

In 2019, Wiki Education was responsible for 3.1% of all active editors on English Wikipedia, based on our count of monthly editors from our programs divided by the numbers at stats.wikimedia.org. Based on Wikimedia Foundation statistics, we were responsible for 19.8% of all new active editors on English Wikipedia. The sheer scale we're operating at on English Wikipedia demonstrates the outsized impact we had on Wikipedia in 2019.

Highlights from 2019 included:

Maintaining the massive impact of our Student Program on English Wikipedia content and new editors.
Creating an earned income revenue stream with our Scholars & Scientists Program, a first in the Wikimedia universe.
Launching a new series of Wikidata courses.
Supporting more and more global Wikimedia program leaders with our Programs & Events Dashboard.

Student Program

In our Wikipedia Student Program, we supported more than 16,000 student editors as they wrote Wikipedia articles as a class assignment. In order to focus our attention on growing our new Scholars & Scientists Program in 2019, we set our goals to maintain our 2018 impact, and we succeeded in maintaining our outsize impact to the English Wikipedia.

Quantitative targets

Measure of success	Goal (2019)	Total	% completed	Notes
Total Participants	16,000	16,565	104%	We exceeded this goal.
Newly Registered	15,500	14,999	97%	We're noticing a trend of more and more student editors taking multiple courses within our program, so we very slightly missed this goal.
Content Pages Improved	19,200	14,986	78%	Student editors worked on fewer articles than expected but added more content to those articles. Overall, this is a good thing.
Quantity	11,200,000	12,843,562	115%	We exceeded this goal.
Quality Articles	4,500	4,259	95%	We fell just short of this goal.

What we did

In 2019, we supported more than 16,000 editors as they took on Wikipedia assignments in their higher education classes within the United States and Canada. These students participated in 831 courses across 382 universities, taught by 625 professors. The scalable solution Wiki Education has built for this program means we were able to maintain this impact with only three full-time staff devoted to the program: One Program Manager who works with faculty, and two Wikipedia Experts who answer student editors' questions, review their work on wiki, and help students navigate the process of contributing to Wikipedia.

In 2019, the majority of our courses (58%, on track with our baseline of 57% in 2018) were taught by returning instructors, a key marker of success for us. Even with our success in retaining instructors, the variability of academia (sabbaticals, changing teaching schedules, faculty leaving academia, etc.) means we need an ongoing pipeline of fresh new instructors. The visibility work we've done in the past and our extensive word-of-mouth network meant that 70% of new instructors who taught with Wikipedia for the first time in 2019 came to our program organically, meaning we'd had no previous contact with them before they created a course page. The other 30% come from our targeted outreach, to equity-related groups like the National Women's Studies Association and to science associations in support of our ongoing Communicating Science initiative.

Once we bring the instructors to our Dashboard platform to create a course page, we of course also need to support them. We've developed numerous internal processes to keep track of all of these courses, using technology with the Dashboard to detect common situations that warrant a closer look. The Wikipedia Expert assigned to each class gets email notifications based on various student behaviors — nominating an article for DYK, editing an article under discretionary sanctions, having an article nominated for deletion, etc. This is a notice for the Wikipedia Expert to go see if they need to take action. They also respond to individual requests for help from student editors and instructors.

At the end of the term, we do a long "course closing" process, where we look into what the students in the course did on Wikipedia more systematically. Wikipedia Experts assess the quality of the overall class into one of four categories: "Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Hurts Wikipedia". For courses that get a "Hurts Wikipedia" rating, we discuss whether we believe the instructor can remedy the source of the problem. If they can, we speak directly with the instructor to go over what they would need to do differently to work with us in the future. If we think it's not fixable (e.g., the instructor insists that students add original research), then we ask them to do a different assignment outside of Wikipedia. This process enables us to support a large number of courses and new student editors in a scalable way.

What worked well

As expected, student editors in our Student Program produced great content for Wikipedia. Here are some examples:

An ecology student from Washington University in St. Louis expanded a very short article on the fruit fly species Drosophila subobscura to Good Article status.
A Rice University student completely reworte the article on Education in Mali.
A student from California Institute of Technology in an organic geochemistry class created the article on Crenarchaeol, a lipid that can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years.
A University of British Columbia student in a history class wrote a new article about Shareefa Hamid Ali, an Indian woman who campaigned for the rights of women and children. She lobbied for legislation to restrict child marriages, and was one of 15 women to attend the first UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1947.
An evolution student from the University of Central Arkansas was responsible for a new article on landscape genetics, a field of scientific study. This new article gets more than 100 views a day.
An environmental sciences student at the Georgia Institute of Technology re-wrote the article on the geological concept Vergence.
A law student at Stanford Law School rewrote the article on Buried Bodies Case, explaining the legal doctrine and ethical questions for the legal profession that arose from the case.

In addition to the excellent work student editors produced on Wikipedia, we tried a small social media pilot in fall 2019, where we sent emails to our instructors encouraging them to share the impact their students had on Wikipedia during the fall term. The results were great! Many instructors included links or screenshots of their Dashboard pages when they shared their impact.

Tweets

@janniaragon^[1]
In Fall 2019, my students added to Wikipedia in a @WikiEducation assignment. Check out the amazing work they did. link

@islamoyankee^[2]
I just got the stats from my @thenewschool Intro. to Islam class @WikiEducation project: 350K views on the pages my 17 students edited. That's amazing. Thanks @stephenniem for the idea.

@DanicaSavonick^[3]
A huge thanks to the @WikiEducation team who helped my @suny_cortland Digital Divides students make a ton of edits to Wikipedia! Students' reflections convey how much they learned about the politics of knowledge through this editing assignment.

@d_giovannelli^[4]
My students in #MarineMicrobialDiversity @UninaIT edited @Wikipedia articles as part of the course. 19 master students involved, 5 articles edited, 256 new citations and 133,115 characters added. Average completeness went from 38.6 to 67.8%. I'm very proud of them! #Teaching

What didn't work well

We mentioned in our first progress report that we'd decided to delay the start of the Wikidata Student Program after an unsuccessful grant application. We had a second learning when we tried to create a Slack channel where instructors could engage with each other to build community, which several have requested in the past. While 99 instructors joined, virtually no discussion happened. The handful of times instructors asked a question, Wiki Education staff answered it. A post-term survey showed an overwhelming majority of instructors did not find it useful, so we are discontinuing it for 2020.

Connecting it to our strategy

Equity

Our Student Program is a really great opportunity to bring new voices and new perspectives to Wikipedia. Our demographics have remained steady over the last few years:

58% of student editors identify as women, and 2% identify as nonbinary, increasing Wikipedia's gender diversity.
40% identify as a race other than white; we believe this also increases the English Wikipedia's racial diversity, but without editor data to compare it to we cannot make an assessment.
42% of our student editors speak more than one language, bringing new cultures and perspectives to English Wikipedia.

These student editors also write in diverse content areas. In 2019, student editors improved hundreds of biographies of women or other underrepresented people on Wikipedia. They tackled underdeveloped content areas like African politics. One class collaboratively improved the article on American Indian boarding schools in Wisconsin. Another class improved topics related to American Sign Language. The sheer volume of courses we work with enables us to improve knowledge equity across a diverse range of topics.

In 2019, Wiki Education hired Dr. Alexandria Lockett, Assistant Professor of English and long-time participant in Wiki Education's Student Program, as a consultant to assess our tools and resources as they relate to our current strategic goal of equity. Dr. Lockett has devoted her career to exploring issues of equity as they relate to pedagogy, higher education, and open educational initiatives. As such, she is well-positioned to ensure that Wiki Education's materials and resources meet our stated goals surrounding equity. Dr. Lockett conducted a deep analysis of Wiki Education's training materials, Dashboard timeline, and assignment design wizard, suggesting ways we could improve it in relation to knowledge equity. She recommended asking specifically about knowledge equity as a learning outcome in our instructor survey, which we did in fall 2019, causing us to identify that this is a key learning objective for faculty (see chart at left). She encouraged us to ask about instructor demographics, which led us to learn that nearly 65% of our faculty identify as women, around 15% higher than academia at large.

We will spend time in 2020 addressing Dr. Lockett's recommendations around knowledge equity, particularly:

Helping instructors to incorporate issues of knowledge equity into all aspects of their Wikipedia assignment, e.g., getting students and instructors to think about their relatively privileged positions vis-à-vis knowledge and how they can share that information in the most accessible and equitable way possible.
Helping instructors and student editors to think about sourcing in a way that improves knowledge and content equity, e.g., encouraging students to find sources that are not only reliable, but that come from a more diverse group of authors.
Helping students to find articles to work on that directly address Wikipedia's equity gaps, e.g. encouraging students to choose articles that cover traditionally underrepresented and marginalized populations and topics.
Ensuring that we make equity a central part of all aspects of the Wikipedia assignment. The Wikipedia assignment is currently structured as a scaffolded project, and we want to make sure that each step in the project includes equity work where possible. This means that students will think about equity when they are just beginning to learn how to critically evaluate Wikipedia articles, to choosing the articles they'll ultimately contribute to, to providing their peers with feedback, to their final live contribution.

Quality

We've maintained our excellent quality of work throughout the Student Program. This can be seen by the number of articles that improved by more than 10 points on the ORES scale in our overall Student Program metric. While ORES doesn't directly measure quality, we're using it as a proxy to demonstrate that a computer can detect that the information students add to Wikipedia looks like a real encyclopedia article. Our own assessment of quality of work by our Wikipedia Experts backs this up.

As part of the Quality element within our Strategy, one objective identified relates to our partnership work. We maintain active partnerships with around a dozen academic associations in the U.S.; these associations encourage faculty in their discipline to join our Student Program. Partnerships have been an important element in programmatic growth for us over the years, as instructors look to them for leadership and pedagogical recommendations.

Reach

While most students don't work on high-traffic articles, a handful do (for example, one student improved a section in the article on Troy, which receives nearly 1 million views each year). Mostly, however, the sheer size of the corps of articles students work on as part of their coursework for this program means students reach hundreds of millions of viewers with their work.