Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wiki Education Foundation Annual Plan Grant, 2024–2026/Yearly Report (2024)
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
In our proposal, we outlined four areas of programmatic work for 2024: our Wikipedia Student Program, our Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program, our Technology work, and the general “Others” category.
In our Wikipedia Student Program, we focused on recruiting heavily from higher education institutions and in content areas that focus on knowledge equity. We had high success in this area, bringing on nearly 50 new classes from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). We also substantially overshot our goal for new courses in equity subject areas, bringing in 92 (our goal was 75). We’re proud of the efforts we’ve made to diversify the contributors and content on Wikipedia from the U.S. and Canada at scale through this program.
In our Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program, we spent much of 2024 focused on a content campaign around the election in the United States in November. We engaged subject matter experts in political science and public policy to improve articles related to democracy, elections, and candidates and issues that voters would be turning to Wikipedia for neutral, fact-based information about. We also ran courses in other important content areas, including global climate finance (where we supported editors around the world), health care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, science, medicine, and biographies of diverse people. We also embarked on a project to re-think our go-to-market strategy for the program in order to set us up for further growth.
In Technology, our work was focused on two key areas: Building our Visualizing Impact tool and a re-factoring of the Program & Events Dashboard’s revision storage. In our Visualizing Impact tool, available at impact.wikiedu.org, we created a tool that tracks the improvement in a content area on Wikipedia over time, with the ability to demonstrate the impact a particular group of editors has had on that topic. We are also working on a version of it that will be available for the global Wikimedia community to use. For the Programs & Events Dashboard, we spent substantial resources on a project to reconstruct how the Dashboard stores revision data, in an effort to make updates faster and cause the Dashboard to crash less regularly. Both projects were nearing completion by the end of 2024.
Finally, in early 2024, we spent some time engaging with discussions of the future of a potential Education Thematic Hub, as part of a Movement Strategy Implementation Grant we received in 2023. Given the uncertain future of hubs, the lack of long-term funding opportunities, and the failed ratification of the Movement Charter, Wiki Education has decided to not move forward with hosting an Education Hub. We remain supportive of the global education community, actively participating in the Wikipedia & Education User Group.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
We plan to continue building on the key successes from 2024 into 2025 and beyond. In 2024, we laid the foundation for even more recruitment work in the knowledge equity content areas for the Wikipedia Student Program. For the first time since the pandemic, we re-invested funds in traveling to and presenting at academic conferences. In 2024, we presented in-person at the American Sociological Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, the National Humanities Alliance, and the American Academy of Religion. We also presented virtually at webinars hosted by the American Historical Association and American Academy of Religion, and at conferences hosted by H-Net Teach, OpenEd, the Association of Computing in the Humanities, and the American Anthropological Association. We found these to be effective ways of reaching new audiences, having recruited multiple new classes through them. We will continue this work in 2025, with a talk scheduled for January at the American Historical Association Conference and several more in the works. We also created opportunities for people on our email lists to engage with us, hosting regular Teaching With Wikipedia webinars and our popular Speaker Series, which focused on different themes each month. We intend to continue running both of these Zoom-based events into 2025.
As part of our go-to-market strategy refresh for our Scholars & Scientists Program, we’ve identified that a key opportunity for funding the project is a “big idea”, paired with a particular funder. We are launching a project in early 2025 that builds on this learning, focused on U.S. history. We have partnered with the American Association for State and Local History to offer courses, funded by a major donor, that address undercovered areas of American history on Wikipedia, ahead of the semiquincentennial. We anticipate the semiquincentennial, in July 2026, will generate substantial interest in American history on Wikipedia, so we will be working with local historians to improve articles ahead of that time.
We will continue refining and improving the Dashboard, the central technology platform for our programs. In early 2025, we will roll out a major overhaul of the Programs & Events Dashboard's statistics generation system, to address the performance and reliability problems that have affected it in recent years (particularly driven by high utilization in large-scale Wikidata projects). We also anticipate major enhancements to the Dashboard's observability and maintainability, with two Outreachy internship projects in that area already underway.
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
We regularly post updates on our blog: [1]
We also post monthly reports on Meta: [2]
Our fiscal year is offset from this grant, but you can see the first half of 2024’s annual report on our website: [3]
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
We participate in the Wikipedia & Education User Group’s Mentorship Program, as well as sharing our learnings regularly at Wikimedia conferences, including Wikimania and WikiConference North America. In 2025, we also plan to attend the EduWiki Conference. We also regularly document our learnings on Meta and our blog.
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
Yes, we regularly collect feedback from the instructors who teach with Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program. We also collect feedback from participants in our Wiki Scholars program. Both of these are via surveys automatically generated through our Dashboard software when their courses have finished. We use this feedback to adapt our training resources and plan for the future. We also closely monitor English Wikipedia’s Education Noticeboard and staff members’ talk pages to respond to any questions or concerns raised by the editing community.
We often publish reflections on our blog; for example, this post showcases the results from our spring 2024 term: [4]
The rest of the blog often features narrative storytelling about the impact our programs have on individuals: [5]
We also hear from students via reflective essays they write about their experiences, when their professors share them with us. Some favorite quotes from these in 2024:
- "It made me more aware that I have the power, through my access to a lot of resources many people lack, to ensure that people around the world will be able to see and access this knowledge. Information is power, and the more information is tightly controlled, the more people are."
- "I believe that my knowledge of Wikipedia has expanded because of this project, and in the future, I will be able to educate others on the power of sharing knowledge for the whole world to access."
- "Although intimidating at first, the Wikipedia project was quite fulfilling and most contributed to my learning in this course. Overall, it made me rethink my assumptions about the platform, and also enabled be to better understand how I can use my position in academia to make the 'information landscape' more equitable."
- "Working on Wikipedia helped me to recognize the privilege I have as someone who is able to interact with higher education, and the responsibility that comes with that privilege to work to fix inequities, fill gaps in knowledge, and uplift underrepresented voices. This is (hopefully) just the first step in that process, as this project has opened my mind to new ways I can create a positive change."
- "I learned to question institutional narratives."
- "I realized that most academic articles are not going to be read and are pretty hard to access, as they are behind a paywall. If you're not in college it makes it even harder to find academic research. This is why Wikipedia is so valuable, because it makes information easy to access and it also allows other people to edit sources and combine perspectives to produce comprehensive articles."
- "This assignment definitely altered the way I view and understand information sharing. Having a consolidated area to share information freely and publicly and to also have a way for the information to be constantly updated, read, and reviewed is truly so important. I think that understanding the merits of Wikipedia as a tool for community sharing and learning has advanced how I view my own sharing of knowledge."
- “Moving forward, I am more confident in my ability to contribute to open-source knowledge platforms and inspired to continue documenting and sharing cultural and literary narratives that deserve recognition.”
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, people with disabilities, neurodiverse people, indigenous groups , LGBTQ+ groups, young people, other
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, people with disabilities, indigenous groups, LGBTQ+ groups, other
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Partnerships, other
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
To bring in participants from underrepresented groups, we focus our recruitment efforts for the Wikipedia Student Program on institutions of higher education with diverse student populations, including HBCUs, HSIs, TCUs, and other schools classified as “minority-serving institutions” in the United States. We have found great success in building a more diverse editing corps for Wikipedia by bringing in diverse student populations. In our Scholars & Scientists Program, we often have specific goals around diversity of participants. One example of this is our project for the WITH Foundation, which supports health care information for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). As part of this project, we explicitly recruited people with lived experience in I/DD.
For content, we specifically target subject areas that work in that content area. For the Wikipedia Student Program, we target disciplines like African-American Studies, Latino/a/x Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and more. Even within our courses that aren’t as focused on knowledge equity, such as a chemistry class, we encourage students to consider citing scholarly sources written by women or people of color when appropriate, and other ways to address equity in content. Our training, “Improving representation on Wikipedia” (available at [6]) has more information on this.
We focus our retention efforts on partners like academic associations, as well as instructors in the Wikipedia Student Program. Academic associations, over the course of several years, can work with us to host webinars, feature our work in conferences, and showcase their members’ teaching work in their publications. These efforts encourage recruitment of new participants for our projects. For instructors in the Wikipedia Student Program, we rate the quality level of each course at the end of the term. We encourage instructors of high-rated courses to participate in the project again, bringing a new crop of students each term or each year to Wikipedia. In 2024, we celebrated Wiki Education’s 10th Anniversary, and we honored 26 instructors who have been teaching through our program for ten years. The impact they’ve had on Wikipedia combined has been incredible, and showcases the value of this approach.
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
Permanent staff outreach, Staff hired through the fund, Partners proactive interest
Part 2: Metrics for Year 1
[edit]| Wikimedia Metrics | Target (Year 1) | Results (Year 1) | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 13500 | 13818 | Wiki Education Dashboard |
| Number of all editors | 13000 | 13288 | Wiki Education Dashboard |
| Number of new editors | 12500 | 12814 | |
| Number of retained editors | N/A | ||
| Number of all organizers | N/A | ||
| Number of new organizers | N/A |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Target - Number of improved pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of improved pages (Year 1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 15000 | 1420 | 12306 | |
| Wikimedia Commons | ||||
| Wikidata | 5000 | 487 | 1863 | |
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | ||||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
Tool used and comments (optional):
Wiki Education Dashboard.
We had slightly fewer Wikipedia articles edited than expected. We attribute this to a greater use of group work (a group of students all work collaboratively on one article) in the post-pandemic world; we have seen a steady shift toward encouraging group work since then.
For our Wikidata goal, we continue to struggle with adequate goal-setting. Sometimes participants add one statement to many items; sometimes participants add many statements to one item. Both are valuable contributions to Wikidata. In this case, our Wikidata courses resulted more in the latter than the former, meaning we missed the goal substantially. We are still very proud of the work we did on Wikidata.
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Words Added | Words added to Wikipedia | 11000000 | 10039777 | We fell just short of this goal, which we attribute again to more group work, where each student adds slightly fewer words. | Wiki Education Dashboard |
| Instructor retention | Percentage of high-quality instructors who teach with Wikipedia again | 80 | 91 | We exceeded this goal. | Wiki Education Dashboard and Salesforce |
| Diverse new instructors | New instructors from HBCUs, HSIs, and/or TCUs joining our Student Program | 50 | 47 | At 94%, we nearly hit this goal. | Salesforce |
| Equity courses | New equity-related courses participating in the Student Program | 75 | 92 | We exceeded this goal, adding much-needed equity-related content to English Wikipedia. | Salesforce |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
Capacity and skill building and professional development are an integral part of Wiki Education’s work. Each employee has a personal budget to spend on professional development, for classes, books, or coaching that are most relevant to their own growth areas. Most of the materials we gain from these sessions are under copyright from their creators and are not able to be released under an open license, so we cannot add them here.
We also engage in a series of staff-wide trainings, at our two annual in-person All Staff meetings and during our weekly Zoom-based team meeting. In our February All Staff, we had a half-day workshop led by a marketing expert, who helped us refine the messaging we use for emails to prospective and current program participants and funders. In our July All Staff, we welcomed Wikimedian Benjamin Mako Hill, who shared information about recent research related to Wikimedia that might be of interest to our staff. Since many of our staff are focused more exclusively on the education and GLAM professionals, and not the Wikimedia world, this talk was particularly helpful. Finally, we spent several of our weekly team meetings with various guest experts who discussed generative AI and its impacts on our work and higher education. All of these help shape our staff’s understanding of the world we operate in.
Finally, in 2024, staff members attended the Wikimedia Summit, Wikimania, and WikiConference North America, all of which helped immerse us in the Wikimedia community and learn from others in our movement. This exchange of knowledge is critical to our success
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
We had a very good year in 2024 for fundraising, in which our Director of Donor Relations brought in a significant amount of money through institutional donors. We are planning to build on that capacity in 2025 by hiring a second fundraiser. We hope this will increase our capacity for raising funds from non-Wikimedia sources in 2025 and beyond.
Additionally, our Executive Director, Frank Schulenburg, has agreed to work with the Centre for Internet & Society’s Tanveer Hasan and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Jorge Vargas and Ben Vershbow on facilitating the process for creating an AI strategy in 2025.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14) to fulfill the Affiliate Health Criteria requirements.
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for affiliate governance, including affiliate leadership and membership with a breakdown of the demographics; how elections are conducted; how conflicts of interest are declared; and how decisions are made and communicated (2.2, 2.3, 3.1).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for internal membership engagement, such as notes from your regular meetings and how you communicate to or involve your membership (4.1).
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Amount spent (USD) |
|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 1762123 |
| Operational costs | 327276 |
| Programmatic costs | 336561 |
| Total (Year 1) | 2425960 |
| Other revenue | 1980960 |
| Remaining funds (Year 1) | N/A |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
2425960 USD
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 327276 USD
- Programmatic costs: 336561 USD
- Staff and contractor costs: 1762123 USD
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 3046006 USD
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 1980960 USD
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10Ai845P9WpbM0otXCAYq_TY8gJswCylUTbbE3RYiMpg/edit?usp=sharing
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
We were very successful in fundraising in 2024, bringing in well over our goal. It is important to note, however, that much of this money is in restricted grants with the spending to come in 2025 and 2026, so we could not spend that money in 2024. We did, however, shift some priorities and our hiring plans based on positions funded through these restricted grants, as can be seen in the increases in spending in our core areas.
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: No
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance 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 Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. 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
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