Wikipedia:Education program/Educators

Get involved in the Wikipedia Education Program

1. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia: Using our experience of working with educators who assigned their students to edit Wikipedia, we created this online orientation for educators. It will walk you through Wikipedia-editing basics, tips for using Wikipedia in the classroom, and some sample classroom assignments.
2. Utilize your resources: In the training, you'll notice the 'Resources' link on the top. Here, you'll find online versions of our step-by-step guides as well as handouts you'll find useful for your students.
3. Recruit a Wikipedia Ambassador: Our volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors are a great resource during your assignment design and during the assignment. They can work with students as well as advise you if you face any problems during the semester. Please check this list of Wikipedia Ambassadors to see if your campus has an Ambassador. If not—don't worry! You can either recruit someone who is interested in participating, ask one of these volunteers to support you and your students on-wiki and through email, or work with one of our online Wikipedia Ambassadors.
4. Design your assignment: Using your knowledge from the training and the resource guides, you should be ready to finalize your Wikipedia assignment. See below for more information.
5. Create a Course Page: You'll also see some important information about creating a Course Page. Creating a page will add you to the list of classes for this term, and it will let our volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors know your students will be editing Wikipedia.
6. Get your students to enroll on your Course page: Once you've created your Course Page and 'enrollment token', you should distribute the link and token to each of your students who will edit Wikipedia. This will give our Ambassadors the opportunity to see when your students make edits, and they can hopefully provide helpful feedback and advice.

Get help!

• General assistance: If ever you need help, either with advice on your assignment, questions while editing, or anything at all, you should visit the education noticeboard and create a new section to ask our volunteers for help!
• FAQ: If you're looking for general information about the Wikipedia Education Program or whether your class assignment is a fit for Wikipedia, please see this FAQ page.
• General guidelines: See this advice for educators for more guidelines.

Designing your assignment

How do you design an assignment that meets your students' learning needs while positively impacting Wikipedia? After six terms of working with professors, students, volunteers, and Wikipedia editors, our program participants have compiled a thorough database of past assignments, the resources professors used to create them, and grading rubrics. Please check out the suggestions for various assignment types.