Wikipedia & Education User Group/2022 Annual Report

In the first half of 2022, the Wikipedia & Education User Group focused on our ongoing Open Meetings and expanded our mentorship program. The second half of the year was focused on planning the forthcoming EduWiki Conference 2023, which will take place in May in Belgrade, Serbia. Three board members and a special advisor also worked on a book chapter about the Wikipedia Education Program, which was accepted for publication. We also attended several Wikimedia conferences during 2022.

Governance

Our board was stable throughout the year:

LiAnna Davis, chair
Susanna Mkrtchyan, vice-chair
Ziko van Dijk, secretary
Filip Maljkovic, treasurer
João Alexandre Peschanski, membership admin

In late 2022, we welcomed Bukola James as a special advisor, joining existing special advisor Shani Evenstein Sigalov.

Our board met 9 times in 2022 to discuss our activities and move projects forward. We also met an additional 4 times once our conference grant was approved, with those meetings focused on conference planning.

Membership

Our user group has experienced a significant increase in its membership. It now has 378 members and has had the support of 20 affiliates.

There has been a significant increase in female participation among our members. Our membership gender breakdown in 2022 was 59,8% male, 38,1% female and 1,8% preferred not to identify. In 2020, we had the male and female membership rate was respectively 68,7% and 28,5%.

Activities

Open Meetings: Showcasing member activity

All our open meetings are recorded and posted to our YouTube channel. In 2022, the User Group hosted three public, open meetings:

In March 2022 (video on YouTube), we welcomed two guests: Nebojša Ratković from Wikimedia Serbia and Anthony B. Diaz from Wiki Advocates Philippines, who both discussed their respective programs as well as their mentorship pairing last year.
In June 2022, (video on YouTube), we welcomed two guest speakers, Jackeline Bucio from UNAM & Wikimedia México and Klara Sielicka-Baryłka from Wikimedia Poland.
In November 2021, (video on YouTube), we held our general assembly for our membership. We also welcomed one guest speaker, Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh, who spoke about his work with Wikidata as a part of the Wikidata 10th birthday celebration.

Calls for meetings were actively disseminated on social media – especially the Wikipedia & Education Facebook page – and the education mailing list. Our members, particularly our board, have been some of the most active participants in these movement channels, which aim at becoming a hub for inquiries on Wikimedia and education for affiliates, educators, volunteers and the general public.

These open meetings gave board members a chance to present what they've been up to among the members who attended the meeting, enabled potential new members to be welcomed into our community, and gave a chance for different members to present their work.

Mentorship Program

Mentorship remains a key goal of our user group. In 2021, we kicked off a pilot of a mentorship program with 17 participants. In early 2022, we evaluated this pilot based on survey results from participants and determined that it was worth continuing to do. Feedback from participants suggested a bit more structure would be helpful. In response, we put together a guide for mentors, which we distributed to participants in our 2022 program. We also sent regular reminder emails to all mentors and mentees with discussion prompts to encourage conversations. In our expanded mentorship program in 2022, we had 36 participants, more than doubling the number of participants in our pilot program. We look forward to continuing this work in 2023.

EduWiki Conference 2023 planning

Logo for the EduWiki conference in Belgrade 2023

We determined 2023 was a good opportunity to bring the education community together in person again, and so we applied for a conference grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. This involved running a new community engagement survey and adapting some of our plans and budget from the canceled conference originally planned for 2020. We are grateful to our colleagues at Wikimedia Serbia who are hosting the conference and have been excellent collaborators with us on the project.

After our grant was approved near the end of 2022, we engaged in significant planning. We put together and distributed a call for program and scholarship committee members, and received more than 75 applications. We selected committees for each based on those applicants. We also, with Wikimedia Serbia’s help, put together an application form to attend or receive a scholarship for the conference, and put out the first call before the end of 2022. We also created a logo and made a few additional organizational decisions around the conference. All of this information is on Meta at EduWiki Conference 2023. We look forward to meeting our community in Belgrade in 2023!

Book chapter

Three board members — Filip, João, and LiAnna — along with our special advisor Shani Evenstein Sigalov, co-authored a book chapter on the global Wikipedia Education Program. The chapter was accepted for publication in the forthcoming book Open Educational Resources in Higher Education: A Global Perspective, published by Springer in early 2023. The chapter, titled “The Wikipedia Education Program as Open Educational Practice: Global Stories”, offers case studies of the work of the four co-authors’ education programs, a summary of the history of the education program, and identification of common threads between programs.

The book chapter is accessible for subscribers of The Wikipedia Library.

Wikimedia Summit participation

LiAnna attended the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin as a representative of the user group in September. All participants engaged in three days of discussion around movement strategy. In particular, LiAnna and João, who was there representing Wiki Movimento Brasil, hosted an education meet-up, where there was significant discussion about an education hub. Conversations about the hub idea continued as well in the months after the event.

Conference Participation

Wikimedia Summit: LiAnna, João
Wikimania: LiAnna, Filip, João
WikiConference North America: LiAnna
WikiCon Brasil: João