Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wiki Education Annual Plan Grant/Yearly Report (2023)

Yearly Learning Report (Year 2 - 2023)

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 30 January 2024

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Yearly Learning Report (for multi-year fund recipients) , reporting year: 2023

Application Yearly Report (2022)

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General information

This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving multi-year Wikimedia Community Funds to report on their yearly results.

Name of Organization: Wiki Education Foundation
Title of Proposal: Wiki Education Annual Plan Grant

Part 1 Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

We continued to run our two programs: the Wikipedia Student Program and the Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program.

In the Wikipedia Student Program, we worked to recruit new faculty to teach with Wikipedia, especially those who teach at diverse schools and those who teach in diverse content areas. We focused particular attention on recruiting participants from Historically Black Colleges & Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. We also spent substantial time supporting the students who edited Wikipedia as a class assignment through our program in 2023.

In the Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program, we ran a series of courses where we taught participants how to edit both Wikipedia and Wikidata. Wikipedia courses that were particularly successful included one sponsored by the Kress Foundation on art history and several sponsored by the American Physical Society, covering both physics topics and diverse people in physics.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

In past years, we’ve focused recruitment for new faculty in the Student Program on email campaigns. We’d tried webinars in the past, but we’d found faculty struggled with Zoom. However, in a post-pandemic world, higher education faculty are now very familiar with Zoom, and we’ve switched our communications approach. Instead of directly encouraging people to create course pages, we’ve encouraged them to register for a Zoom-based teaching with Wikipedia workshop. We find this is an easier ask – more people are willing to register for a workshop than commit to teaching with Wikipedia right away. Once we get them into the workshop, we can then convince them to teach with Wikipedia, answer their questions, and otherwise set them up for success.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

The scale at which Wiki Education operates and the impact we have are substantially larger than any other organization. We’ve always believed that it is important to continue growing our impact, especially to address key equity gaps on English Wikipedia. We are proud of our success in this area in 2023, and believe we continue to be innovative because we are able to successfully introduce new editors to the English Wikipedia who add good content, at scale.

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

We do substantial engagement with prospective program participants, including subject matter experts who can participate in our Scholars & Scientists courses and higher education instructors who could teach in the Student Program. We run email campaigns, we run social media advertising, we participate in academic conferences, we develop partnerships, and we run webinars, among other engagement opportunities. Once these communities have participated in our programs, we run surveys to collect their feedback, including questions about how we should engage other prospective participants.

To engage with the Wikimedia community, we also participate in the Wikipedia & Education User Group and regional conferences. We presented about our work at the EduWiki Conference, GLAM Wiki Conference, Wikimania, and WikiConference North America. We also contributed to the Education newsletter.

Finally, we run a regular Speaker Series, a Zoom based opportunity for us to host relevant speakers on topics related to our work, such at Wikidata and cultural institutions, Wikipedia and generative AI, and diversity on Wikipedia.

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

https://wikiedu.org/blog/

https://wikiedu.org/speaker-series/ https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/wikipedia_scholars__scientists_2023/programs https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/wikidata_scholars__scientists_2023/programs https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/spring_2023/overview https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/summer_2023/overview https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/fall_2023/overview

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...
A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups	Strongly agree
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community	Agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups	Strongly agree
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives	Strongly agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors	Not applicable
F. Encourage the retention of organizers	Strongly agree
G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement.	Agree

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

We encourage those interested in more qualitative descriptions of our impact in this area to pursue the “equity” tag on our blog: https://wikiedu.org/blog/category/equity/

English Wikipedia is a challenging community to bring newcomers into, and especially newcomers from underrepresented groups. The support structure Wiki Education provides – from our training modules to our staff support – enables us to successfully onboard diverse new contributors at scale. This support structure continued to hold strong in 2023.

Part 2: Your main learning

8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

For the first learning question, about effective recruitment mechanisms, we’ve found relationship building to be key. We find our same recruitment methods that work for any institution also work for diverse institutions (find a champion on that campus and work with them, create visibility opportunities for our work, and the old standby, just cold email people). For some diverse institutions, explaining Wikipedia’s equity gaps was a key way of marketing our work, and served to motivate instructors to participate.

For the second question, we created new technical solutions for the Programs & Events Dashboard, including an extensive project to provide detailed Wikidata statistics for programs, one of the most commonly requested features. Prior to 2023, we had collected statistics by reading edit summaries; in 2023, we reconfigured the way we counted to instead analyze diffs. Based on anecdotal responses to two sessions we ran on the Dashboard during Wikimedia events (EduWiki Conference and WikiConference North America), program leaders find the tool incredibly useful. This is also backed up by data, where we set new high water marks for the number of program organizers (1,612) and events created (2,908). In an effort to continue meeting the needs of movement organizers, we also kicked off an Outreachy internship in late 2023 to create more video based support resources for the Programs & Events Dashboard; we expect these to be completed in 2024.

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

Yes: After years of pretty reliable trend lines in impact to Wikipedia per student, we experienced a significant drop in the 2021–22 academic year. It also coincided with a drop in returning instructors. This was particularly noticeable in the spring 2023 term, so we asked questions in our instructor survey about lingering impacts from the pandemic. We heard an earful from our instructors:

72% agreed that “My students are less well-prepared to take on college-level work as a result of the pandemic.”
64% agreed that: “I am devoting more time to guiding and instructing my students on projects as a result of the pandemic.”
70% agreed that: “My students are struggling socially as a result of the pandemic.”

Our open-ended questions resulted in some painful anecdotes, such as this one: “First-time-in-college (FTIC) students are really struggling to manage their time, develop study habits (which they do not have at all), learn how to navigate online LMS, and balance social and school commitments. They are less likely to talk to each other in class or seek out help from other students, which means they spend more time in my office seeking help for minor issues, asking for notes they missed, etc. There is a higher instance of remedial writing, reading, and math. They have almost no experience in doing research projects.”

Additionally, 18% of instructors who told us they won’t teach with Wikipedia next year attributed it to students finding the project too difficult to manage.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

While this is not scientifically valid data, we believe the students who did online school for one of their critical high school years came to higher education quite unprepared. This learning loss led to challenges with basic tasks like research that students should already know. While this challenge is external to our organization, it did impact us, and led to lower numbers.

On the promising side, we started to see this trend dissipate by the end of 2023, so we are hopeful that the impact will rebound back to pre-pandemic levels soon.

In terms of our two learning questions, we continue to use our learnings to recruit from diverse institutions, and we are continuing to serve the needs of movement organizers with our Programs & Events Dashboard.

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?

One of our medical instructors, User:BrainMan2017, has taught with us 7 times. Two years ago, we prompted instructors who don’t teach in traditional “knowledge equity” fields to consider how they might incorporate equity. This instructor was immediately struck by this idea. Since then, his students have created the articles on Alzheimer’s disease in three ethnic groups: Hispanic/Latino, African American, and East Asian. Another student created the article on Parkinson’s disease in South Asians. Since disease presents differently in different ethnic groups, articles like this are critically important for our knowledge equity initiatives. We’re proud of the work we did to prompt him to think about equity, and of course mostly of him and his students for making that prompt a reality.

12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

During the grant period, we made edits to our training resources: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training

Our other resources are available here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Education_Foundation_handouts

Part 3: Metrics for Year 2

13a. Open and additional metrics data

Open Metrics
Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Words added	Words added to the article namespace of Wikipedia in 2023.	11 million	10.8 million	With rounding, we hit this goal.	Wiki Education Dashboard
Statements improved	Statements improved on Wikidata in 2023.	16000	44160	We substantially overshot this goal. Finding the right balance of Wikidata metrics continues to be a challenge for us; participants doing substantial mass editing can really increase our numbers, but one participant not doing that can also really decrease them.	Wiki Education Dashboard
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	Number of courses taught by returning instructors in the Wikipedia Student Program in 2023.	525	442	We missed this goal; we attribute it to the lingering effects of the pandemic.	Salesforce
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	Number of existing strategic partners actively engaged in supporting our work in 2023.	12	15	Partnerships supported both programs in 2023.	Salesforce
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	Number of instructors from diverse institutions (HBCUs, HSIs) added to our CRM (Salesforce) in 2023, to be cultivated to teach with Wikipedia in the future.	300	2295	We substantially exceeded this goal due to this being a primary focus of our work in 2023.	Salesforce

13b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of participants	Number of editors in Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program, plus instructors in the Student Program, in 20223	15250	13412	We attribute this drop to the drop in participation among students due to the lingering effects of the pandemic, as described earlier.	Wiki Education Dashboard
Number of editors	Number of editors in Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program, in 2023.	15000	12869	We attribute this drop to the drop in participation among students due to the lingering effects of the pandemic, as described earlier.	Wiki Education Dashboard
Number of organizers	n/a; our programs are run by staff.	N/A

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Wikipedia	Number of articles improved in 2023.	15000	14274	With fewer students than expected, we just missed this goal.	Wiki Education Dashboard
Wikidata	Number of items improved in 2023.	5000	5653	N/A	Wiki Education Dashboard
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

No

15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.

N/A

16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/wikipedia_scholars__scientists_2023/programs

https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/wikidata_scholars__scientists_2023/programs https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/spring_2023/overview https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/summer_2023/overview https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/fall_2023/overview

Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships

17. Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity dimension
A. Financial capacity and management	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
B. Conflict management or transformation	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values)	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
D. Partnership building	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
E. Strategic planning	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
F. Program design, implementation, and management	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer)	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers)	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
J. Governance	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
K. Communications, marketing, and social media	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
M. On-wiki technical skills	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
N. Accessing and using data	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
O. Evaluating and learning from our work	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
Supporting others in the movement
Having measurable impact on the Wikimedia movement’s mission to provide readers with access to knowledge

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Using capacity building/training resources onlinee from sources OUTSIDE the Wikimedia Movement, Other

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of financial resources

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

In prior grant cycles, we invested money in growing our organizational capacity, especially by hiring staff with expertise in these areas. We’re currently at a point where our organizational capacity cannot grow further without additional funding.

19. Partnerships over the funding period.

Over the fund period...
A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame)	Strongly agree
B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups	Strongly agree
C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups	Strongly agree

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Permanent staff outreach, Staff hired through the fund, Partners proactive interest

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of institutional support from the Wikimedia Foundation

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

Our partnerships work has been ongoing for many years; one of our largest challenges has been overlap and confusion around WMF’s own work. We hope the ongoing roles and responsibilities discussion from Movement Strategy will help resolve these issues. When we do find connections with other organizations, we find these are our two major strategies:

Leading with potential shared values is the best way to have people interested.
Talk about how the partnership will help meet that organization’s strategic goals, not how it will help meet Wikipedia's goals. This approach is necessary for building and maintaining a reciprocal partnership, which is why Wiki Education has partnered with some institutions for nearly 10 years.

Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration

21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Historically, we’ve felt a strong sense of belonging in the movement. However, the regional grant committee’s funding decision for our organization in late 2023 caused us to lose much of this feeling of belonging. It’s very hard to feel like you belong in a movement when you’re told that your impact is great, but because of things that are out of your control, there will be a substantial cut to your funding, and that it threatens the livelihoods of you and your colleagues.

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Decreased significantly

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

See earlier comment about the regional grant committee’s funding decision, which came during this grant period.

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Decreased significantly

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

See earlier comment about the regional grant committee’s funding decision, which came during this grant period.

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.

We strongly believe education is a human right, per the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are inspired by movements like social justice, economic justice, climate justice, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, decolonization, and feminism in the subject matter areas we target for improvement on English Wikipedia.

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration

We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

We presented at EduWiki Conference, Wikimania, WikiConference North America, and GLAMwiki in 2023. We also publish blog posts and routinely propose book chapters and journal articles about our experiences.

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this regularly (at least once a month)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

Our Chief Programs Officer is also the chair of the Wikipedia & Education User Group, so she shares our learnings with the broader Wikipedia & Education community. She also served on the Wiki Movimento Brasil Steering Committee for their educational MOOC, as a mentor to a program leader in Nigeria through the Wikipedia & Education User Group’s Mentorship Program, and as a mentor about how to scale programs to Wikimedia Morocco upon their request. We regularly meet with others in the broader education movement.

Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance

30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

535000

31. Local currency type

USD

32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.

Report funds received and spent, if template not used.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14J9ljXs-RJEsp_xVATLUn2BpiuvtizkEbLyB3OJWRuk/edit?usp=sharing

33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

An expansion of the revenue from (and thus the expenses for) the Scholars & Scientists Program did not happen at the same level as expected, and our Visualizing Impact project got started later in the year than expected, leading to a delay in the increased technology spending.

34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?

34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

N/A

34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

N/A

34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

N/A

35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?

As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.