User:Jimmyjrg/Introduction To Wikipedia course

Introduction to Wikipedia
Venue	Wiki Learn
Type	online

About the course

In 2024, I created an online course "Introduction To Wikipedia". It is hosted on WikiLearn, and is self-paced, meaning you can complete the course in your own time without deadlines.

The course was funded with a Rapid Fund from the Wikimedia Community Fund and received additional funding and support from Wikimedia Australia.

The original plan was to create a course about Wikipedia followed by another course about Wikimedia Commons. The Wikipedia course took longer than anticipated, and although the Commons course content was all written and recorded, it was ultimately abandoned after Commons received a redesign that would require everything to be rewritten and rerecorded.

Course content & resources

The course is presented as a series of video lessons, but is also available as PDF documents with screenshots and text to follow along. All of these resources are available on Wikimedia Commons under an open license allowing you to copy, modify, update, adapt them as needed.

All of the PDF guides for each lesson are here. While the videos are here.

The full script written for the videos can be found here on Google Docs. It was last edited 9 July 2024. Note: Some narration in the videos may have been changed during recording or editing.

Below are individual links to each lesson, including the Google Docs version of the PDFs if you would like to copy, update, or adapt them. The links to the video and PDF allow you to view or download the files as needed.

Some lessons were presented as text only on WikiLearn, and don't exist as videos. These include: 9.2 Accessing the Wikipedia Library, 9.4 WikiCon, Wikimania, and community events, 10.1 Notability. They can be read in the links below.

Title	Video	PDF	Google Doc
1.1 Introductions	link	n/a	n/a
1.2 WikiLearn - How it works	link	link	link
2.1 What is Wikipedia	link	link	link
2.2 Tour of Wikipedia	link	link	link
2.3 Tour of Wikipedia articles	link	link	link
2.4 Rules on Wikipedia	link	link	link
3.1 Logging in and Logging out	link	link	link
4.1 Notifications and Preferences	link	link	link
4.2 Skins	link	link	link
4.3 Homepage	link	link	link
4.4 User page	link	link	link
4.5 Talk Page	link	link	link
5.1 Where to get help	link	link	link
6.1 Sandbox	link	link	link
6.2 Editing	link	link	link
6.3 Adding Links and more	link	link	link
6.4 History	link	link	link
6.5 Watchlist	link	link	link
6.6 Manual of Style	link	link	link
6.7 Protected pages	link	link	link
7.1 Copyright	link	link	link
8.1 References	link	link	link
8.2 Adding citations	link	link	link
8.3 Adding a reference area	link	link	link
8.4 Finding articles	link	link	link
9.1 Stats	link	link	link
9.2 Accessing The Wikipedia Library	n/a	n/a	link
9.3 Adding Translations	link	link	link
9.4 WikiCon, Wikimania, and community events	n/a	n/a	link
10.1 Notability on Wikipedia	n/a	n/a	link
10.2 Creating new articles	link	link	link

Reporting

You can read the funding final report from July 2024 here. This was published prior to the course going public due to the funding requirements.

The course officially went live on 6 September 2024, after soft-launching so some beta testers could try things out and provide feedback. It was announced with a post on Diff in September and a post by WMAU in November.

Dashboard

I created a project Dashboard to measure the impact of the course. It served to show whether or not participants continue to contribute to Wikipedia following completion of the course.

Because a lot of people are enrolling in the course to look at it, and not to do the work, only participants who have completed one or more of the quizzes were added to the Dashboard. During the beta testing several WMF/WMAU staff and myself enrolled in the course to test it, and these were excluded from the Dashboard.

Also, several people who have enrolled in the course aren't active on English Wikipedia, which is what the Dashboard is tracking. So, when I try to add them I get the message "There was an error: Sorry, [username] is not an existing user on en.wikipedia.org."

As of 4 July 2025, there are 56 accounts being tracked in the Dashboard. The tracking ran from 30 June 2024 until 1 July 2025.

The Dashboard showed the following stats on 4 July 2025:

Course Dashboard as of 4 July 2025

56 enrolled Wikimedia accounts
722 articles edited on English Wikipedia
Over 2,000 total edits made on English Wikipedia
Over 34,000 words were added to articles
612 references were added to English Wikipedia
10 new articles or pages created on English Wikipedia
Of those articles edited or created, they were viewed over 5 million times.

Participation

In total, there were 180 Wikimedia accounts enrolled in the course, as of 4 July 2025. Only 56 were added to the Dashboard because they participated in the course by completing at least one quiz. Another 6 accounts did complete at least one quiz but weren't added for the following reasons:

Two accounts couldn't be added to the dashboard because they weren't active on en.wikipedia which is what the dashboard was tracking.
Two weren't included because they were my own accounts enrolled to test the course.
Two were WMAU staff who had enrolled to beta test and I decided to exclude from the stats.

If I were to include these, there would be 63 accounts active in the course.

Of these, only 36 are eligible to earn a certificate (as of 4 July 2025), as the others haven't completed enough quizzes yet.

It's possible to follow the course without ever taking a quiz, so I believe at least some of those other 117 accounts did watch or read the materials, but chose not to take the quizzes for some reason. I did warn students at the beginning of the course that they would be added to the Dashboard, so it's possible they avoiding the quizzes so as not to be included in that data. I'm not sure though.

Although there's no stats on Commons for which videos or PDFs were viewed the most, I did upload all of the videos to YouTube as well as @LearningWiki. The video on using the Sandbox is the most viewed video, with 102 views. The second most viewed is on creating articles, with 59 views. The video on adding citations has zero views, while 11 videos have between 1-10 views, 8 have between 11-20, 6 have between 21-30, 2 have between 31-40, and the remaining two have 59 and 102 as already mentioned.

I had originally only wanted to track new Wikimedia accounts or those who previously weren't very active, so I could measure if the course had an impact on the number of contributions made and whether it could be seen as a way to allow new editors to begin contributing with confidence. This was why I didn't include the two WMAU staff in the Dashboard, because I felt they were experienced editors.

But, once the course launched there was an influx of people signing up so I decided to just add anyone to the Dashboard as long as they'd completed at least one quiz. Looking at the contributors in the Dashboard, you can see accounts linked to Wikimedia staff as well as accounts who are very experienced. Several accounts added nearly 2000 files to Wikimedia Commons, something not covered in the course, which suggests they had some experience with Wikimedia projects already as well.

New or Existing Users

Of those 56 accounts added to the Dashboard, 43 were likely created because of the course. This can be seen by the edits made that followed the course (create a User Page, Talk Page, Sandbox etc.) or due to the low number of edits they had. At least 6 others were old accounts reactivated due to enrolling in the course.

20 accounts were created in December 2024. Of those, none have continued editing on English Wikipedia. It's not clear why they all signed up at the same time. But most of these accounts only made edits to their User Page and a few days later never edited again.

In total 5/56 enrolled accounts have contributed to English Wikipedia in the 30 days between June-July 2025.

Interestingly, some accounts never edited English Wikipedia at all, even while taking the course. But some of these seemingly inactive accounts did contribute to other Wikimedia projects, such as Commons, Wikidata, or their local language version of Wikipedia, as seen below:

36 accounts contributed to English Wikipedia
30 to Meta
22 to Commons
14 to Wikidata
4 to Incubator
2 to MediaWiki
2 to Wikimania
2 to Simple Wikipedia
1 to WikiFunctions
1 to EN WikiBooks
4 to EN WikiSource
1 to EN Wiktionary
4 to En WikiQuote
4 to En WikiVoyage
1 to BBC Wikipedia
5 to BN Wikipedia
1 to BN WikiQuote
1 to DE Wikipedia
1 to ES Wikipedia
2 to ET Wikipedia
1 to FF Wikipedia
4 to FR Wikipedia
1 to FR Wikiquote
1 to GOR Wikipedia
1 to HU Wikipedia
1 to ID Wikibooks
1 to ID Wikipedia
1 to ID WikiQuote
1 to ID WikiSource
1 to ID Wiktionary
3 to IG Wikipedia
1 to IG Wiktionary
2 to IG Wikiquote
1 to IG Wikipedia
1 to JV Wikipedia
1 to KCG Wikipedia
1 to KCG Wiktionary
2 to PT Wikipedia
1 to PT WikiSource
1 to PT WikiVoyage
1 to RO Wikipedia
1 to SE Wikimedia
1 to SV Wikipedia
1 to Test Wikipedia

During the lesson on Talk Pages, I suggested people leave a message on my Talk Page here. As you can see, four accounts left a message. This suggest that there is little interest in adding interactive elements to a course like this where people interact with a specific Wikipedia page.

Metric targets

In my previous report I listed two targets:

To get at least 20 participants
To get at least 20 editors

My goal was to reach these targets by the end of 2024, which I did (thanks to the 20 accounts created in December 2024 who signed up to the course).

As mentioned above, by 4 July 2025 the course had:

180 accounts enrolled
63 who interacted with the courses by taking a quiz
36 who earned a certificate

I'm unsure if I'd still say I was successful "To get at least 20 editors" because of how few of those enrolled have edited recently. I think the course on its own likely won't lead to an influx of editors to Wikipedia, and this is better done through events, meetups, or groups where there is some interaction. Instead, this course can be a tool to assist beginners when they join the community.

Uses outside of Wiki Learn:

Below show some of the ways the Introduction To Wikipedia course videos have been shared on other Wikimedia projects.

As a useful resource

English Wikipedia user Rosiestep has suggested the videos in answer to Wikimedians asking for help. Examples here and here. They also listed the video series at the top of their Talk page under Rosiestep's Newbie Central.

The video References has been added to the Wikimedia Commons help page for Misinformation.

Media of the day on Wikimedia Commons

The video Tour of Wikipedia Articles was made Media of the day on Wikimedia Commons on 11 May 2025. It has been added to some Wikidata and Wikipedia pages too (as linked on Wikimedia Commons).

The video History was made Media of the day on Wikimedia Commons on 28 September 2024. It has been added to some Wikidata and Wikipedia pages too (as linked on Wikimedia Commons).

The video Stats was made Media of the day on Wikimedia Commons on 9 April 2025.

The video Protected Pages was made Media of the day on Wikimedia Commons on 28 June 2025.

Other

The video What is Wikipedia has been added to some Wikidata and Wikipedia pages too (as linked on Wikimedia Commons).

The video Talk Page has been added to some Wikidata and Wikipedia pages too (as linked on Wikimedia Commons).

Outside Wiki

The course was shared in the Newsletter of the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network (Feb 2025) in the article 'Ten online contributions you can make right now to the biodiversity and open science communities, from easy to advanced'. The article also links to a series of video tutorials I made for WMAU which preceded this course.

I haven't been able to find any social media posts about the course that had more than a few likes. It's possible that people discovered the course thanks to these posts and didn't 'like' it, but it's unclear how people discovered it overall.

Conferences and presentations

I have spoken about this course at events run by Wikimedia Australia, Let's Connect, and others. Below are some links.

10 August 2024: Wikimania 2024 - Warsaw - Day 4 - How I created an Introduction to Wikipedia course on WikiLearn, an explanation around creating a course in WikiLearn.

28 November 2024: Using Wikiversity and WikiLearn for Teaching and Learning, session run by Wikimedia Australia on using Wikiversity and WikiLearn as a teaching resource.

13 February 2025: Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: WikiLearn Essentials for Course Creators: Building Community Skills Online seesion 2 (YouTube link), introduction to WikiLearn session held by Let's Connect with the WikiLearn team.

Final thoughts

Looking at the stats and participation mentioned above, it's clear this course has had little reach in the past 12 months up to July 2025. Of the 180 people who enrolled, only 63 interacted with the courses by taking a quiz, and only 36 earned a certificate. Of the 56 accounts tracked in the Dashboard, only 5 have made edits within the 30 days between June-July 2025.

This suggests that while the course will likely help people understand Wikipedia better, it doesn't elevate their interest in contributing. At least not regularly.

That being said, I have had good feedback from those who took the course as well as those who run Wikipedia workshops. So, I still believe it is a useful resource.

It's possible many of the people who took the course will re-engage with Wikimedia projects when there is a project that interests them, such as an edit-a-thon, and they will come back with a pre-existing understanding of how to do everything up to creating a new article on Wikipedia.

I had spoken with WMAU about creating something where the course can be used as part of professional development for employees, but as I'm no longer in Australia I haven't spoken with them regularly, and I'm not sure this went ahead.

Regarding the Commons course, I am disappointed I had to abandon this, but I hope someone else can take it up in the future. There is definitely room to create more Introduction courses so people can better understand the Wikimedia projects.