Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Ejanish Edit-a-thon (ID: 23759151)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello LKgrenk, my name is Chris Schilling, a program officer supporting review and decisionmaking for Rapid Fund program. Thanks for this proposal supporting training and editing activities in collaboration with Ejanish. Please see my comments and questions below:

• Thank you very much for supporting Wikipedia engagement in your teaching and working to integrate into your course materials. I have had a chance to review some of your past courses supported by the Wiki Education Foundation, such as this advanced writing course from 2025. Could you tell me more about your role in these projects?
• During review for activities that involve training and teaching about Wikipedia, we look carefully at what topics the training will involve and how much experience an applicant has developed in their own on-wiki editing work along those topics. Based on the proposal, it appears some of these topics include:
  • general principles related to Wikipedia editing
  • the overall editing process, broadly speaking, and
  • best practices for editing biographical content, as there is a focus on authors.

In most cases, trainers we fund have several thousand edits, have contributed to several Wikipedia articles, and have experience interacting with other editors that Wikipedia community. One concern I have is that your own editing history mostly includes project pages related to the course, but relatively few direct edits to the article namespace that is central to your training work or to discussion pages where you are interacting with other editors. Can you tell more about the training you've received from the Wiki Education Foundation, and perhaps more about how your role in your past coursework with students has helped you prepare for this proposed training work?

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 07:18, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Hello @I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Chris,

I appreciate the follow up and the chance to explain my involvement with Wikipedia.

I teach advanced writing courses at the University of Southern California focused on building on students’ existing writing skills, while moving beyond the traditional academic paper. The course emphasizes writing for a variety of audiences and explores how academia can meaningfully engage with the public. In the Spring of 2024, I decided to incorporate Wikipedia writing into my courses. I completed training courses with Wiki Education but had no experience with Wikipedia outside of the being an regular reader/user. I have since taught a Wiki Education supported project in the Fall 2025 semester, and will be beginning my Spring 2026 unit in a few weeks.

Each semester, I have an average of 57 students divided between 3 classes. The Wikipedia project is a 6-week section my of course, where I have student choose articles to edit with the goal of filling in information gaps in the arts and humanities. Students complete extensive trainings and exercises on the Wiki Education Dashboard, both in-class and as homework. I review all of the training sessions again in the classroom, reinforce guidelines, guide the research process, and often oversee the editing process, either through direct engagement in class, or checking in on student work on the back end. My goals for the course are to improve digital literacy, reinforce the purpose and function of research and research skills, and hone writing skills.

While I completely understand your concerns about my lack of editing history, I am confident in my abilities to train and teach new editors. Because I wasn’t an active editor on Wikipedia before I began my teaching, I learned about the editing process during my training and with my students during that first semester in 2024. I do believe my training with Wikipedia and my very direct experience with student work (over 100+ articles) makes me more than capable of leading the Ejanish training sessions. While students make their own edits on these articles, they are not without supervision or guidance. I am involved throughout the 6-week process. We make initial edits together in the classroom. I demonstrate all of the processes in class––adding citations, reusing citations, making edits, adding explanations, etc. The only thing I don’t do is actually publish these changes. I have read hundreds of talk pages on my own to familiarize myself with editing expectations. I even go through talk pages during class as an example of community editing and civil discourse.  

Although I have intended to take on a more active editing role, heavy teaching and university service loads have meant that most of my Wikipedia engagement has remained focused on teaching. That being said, my aim for this semester’s class and before the Ejanish workshop, is to make edits on the following article on an Armenian diaspora writer, Hakob Karapents. These changes will come in the form of new information and as translations from the Armenian language Wikipedia page.

I hope that my hands-on teaching experience, combined with my formal Wiki Education training can, at least for now, make up for my lack of direct editing history.

All the best,

@LKgrenk LKgrenk (talk) 20:26, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

@LKgrenk: Thanks for this background and explanation around your experience and involvement around these topics in the context of your courses. Given the time you've spent completed the relevant training courses with WikiEDU, as well familiarizing yourself with key parts of Wikipedia such as the talk pages and editorial policy/guideline pages in the context of your students' article work, and that this has been worked you've supported across several university-level writing courses, this level of experience should be sufficient based on our general expectations for trainers. I will note that anecdotally, even very experienced editors and trainers continue to learn new things about editing Wikimedia projects, so please feel free to use (and encourage your students to use) relevant help spaces on English Wikipedia such as the Teahouse if you encounter an unfamiliar situation or challenge. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 03:13, 6 March 2026 (UTC)