Wikimedia Brasil/Report/2026/Learning/EduWiki Hub/en

Second semester (English version)

EduWiki Hub: from governance to impact in the Wikimedia educational ecosystem

Introduction

The EduWiki Hub, an initiative of the Wikipedia & Education User Group, seeks to promote capacity development in education aimed at the Wikimedia ecosystem on a global scale, expanding access to educational resources while improving the technical infrastructure of the ecosystem and strengthening global engagement.

To promote these objectives, this case study addresses the governance elements of the project that ensured, in the first half of 2026 and on an ongoing basis, a space for expanding the impact of the Hub’s actions. With these elements, which involved renewal of contracts for the dedicated paid team, incorporation of advisory bodies, consolidation of partnerships, and reporting mechanisms, the project found fertile ground for enabling its impact in nearly 1 year of the EduWiki Hub’s existence.

Thus, considering the 2026-2028 Strategy of Wikimedia Brasil, the studied case connects with the three strategic axes of the organization:

Sustain collaborative practices in favor of free knowledge
Articulate strategic alliances in defense of digital public goods
Promote the Wiki methodology on the internet in Portuguese

Given the practices carried out for community governance alongside the planned actions for the project, the formalization of partnerships with diverse educational groups and institutions, and multichannel community engagement strategies.

Questions

How do paid, dedicated team, and volunteer efforts compare in terms of their impact on the pace and delivery capacity of a hub project?
What efforts are essential to ensure global, multilingual, and culturally diverse representation in Wikimedia projects?
How do governance practices support a project's sustainable longevity beyond the pilot phase?

Context

In the second semester of the project’s existence, the EduWiki Hub coordination continued to work toward sustaining its impact through the continuity of governance actions established in the 2nd semester of 2025 and addressed in the case study for that same period.

The work carried out between August and December 2025 enabled the consolidation of the Hub as a funded global education service that, following the planning and structuring period, gained space for the active implementation of its programs and actions.

The current status of the project is the result of the efforts of the contracted team, of Wikimedia Brasil as fiscal sponsor, the institutional funding and support of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the commitment of the EduWiki User Group toward building a hub-project with a dedicated team, better coordination, and more consistent funding.

Thus, this case study addresses how the renewal of contracts for the team mobilized in 2025, the inclusion of the four thematic Working Groups (WGs) as an advisory body, the formalization of partnerships, the monthly reporting cycle, multilingual inclusion, and the planning and participation in events were essential actions for the continuity of the Hub’s work.

Operationalization

As stated previously, the institutional design for the governance of the EduWiki Hub implemented in the 1st semester of the project was essential for the development of the planned actions in 2026.1, which involved workshops, participation in events, monthly newsletters, a mentorship program, among others. Thus, the Hub’s governance is organized in a multichannel manner, intentionally fostering broad community engagement through the dedicated team, Working Groups, and partnerships for the improvement of its actions.

Therefore, the results presented here were made possible through the team dedicated to the project, which organized the regionalized recruitment of members for the four thematic WGs. In total, 24 members were selected from the eight key regions of the Wikimedia movement:

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA);
South Asia (SA);
Middle East and North Africa (MENA);
East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP);
Northern and Western Europe (NWE);
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE);
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC);
North America (NA).

The selection sought regional representation of the movement, directly impacting the construction and validation of the actions carried out by the Hub, where members can contribute in various ways to the monthly newsletters, workshops, and the Open Educational Resources (OER) directory.

Furthermore, since the last case study, the Hub has formalized new partnerships through the Content Partnerships Hub and is in negotiations with other institutions. The formalization of partnerships for external institutional articulation allows for strengthening the capabilities and skills necessary for the project’s execution context, impacting global community engagement.

In summary, the Hub mobilized its structure to engage the community through open calls, collaborative projects, regular communications, mailing lists, and blog posts that document the project’s progress, as well as interactive events designed to involve and empower volunteers from around the world.

Results

Through the WGs, to date, 24 check-ins have been conducted with members, advisory representatives of the Hub who share recommendations, feedback, and suggestions that help shape the project’s services. Furthermore, members and the general public were mobilized and encouraged to contribute to and participate in the project’s impact actions carried out in 2026.1, such as:

Publication of articles in monthly newsletters:


		January	February	March	April	My
Key regions of the Wikimedia movement	Sub-Saharan Africa	5	2	4	1	3
	South Asia	4	5	4	1	1
	Middle East and North Africa	-	1	-	1	-
	East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific	2	4	-	-	-
	Northern and Western Europe	-	2	5	1	-
	Central and Eastern Europe	2	3	6	6	4
	Latin America and the Caribbean	3	3	2	1	2
	North America	-	-	-	-	-
TOTAL		16	20	16	11	10

Submission of contributions to the global Open Educational Resources (OER) directory, which received 25 submissions related to education in the context of the Wikimedia ecosystem. The OERs are organized into the following areas:
- Core Wikipedia Editing & Critical Literacy;
- Wikimedia Project Editing & Digital Literacy;
- OER Creation, Curation, and Teaching Strategy;
- Community Leadership & Project Management;
- Open Pedagogy & 21st Century Skills;
- Higher Education & Curriculum Mapping;
- Case Studies & Educational Research.

Development of the EduWiki Starter Kit, which involved the members of the OER WG, the EduWiki Council, and the expert review of the WMF Hub team for drafting, content refinement, and development of the kit, launched on May 29, 2026. The kit seeks to empower new and aspiring community members with the foundational knowledge, strategies, and best practices needed to succeed in the Wikimedia education ecosystem.

Iteration and implementation of Program and Event Dashboard features based on community feedback in technical testing phases;
Presentation of three Knowledge Showcases:
- EduWiki Knowledge Showcase from 22nd January 2026 took place as part of the global celebration of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary. The session had 56 participants.
- EduWiki Knowledge Showcase from 24th March 2026 brought together 75 educators and Wikimedians from around the world who shared experiences from educational initiatives in the ESEAP, CEE, and MENA regions. The session combined presentations and creative contributions in a space for reflection, exchange, and learning around open knowledge and community engagement.
- EduWiki Knowledge from 22nd May 2026, brought together 66 participants from around the world for an exchange of experiences and reflections on university teaching practices, youth engagement, communication in collaborative spaces, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in educational contexts.

Presentation of bimonthly workshops:
- In February 2026, the Hub welcomed LiAnna Davis, who facilitated the workshop “Tips and Tricks on Using the Programs & Events Dashboard”, with the participation of 74 people from countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, India, Jordan, Madagascar, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The session explored how the platform supports Wikimedia education programs and community initiatives. Best practices and tips on how to use the tool were shared.
- In April 2026, Hilary Onuh Ogali, of Wiki Loves Africa, facilitated the workshop “Making the Most of Wikimedia Commons in Education”, with the participation of 75 people.
- In June 2026, Mohammad Hijjawi, Data Scientist and Full-Stack AI Engineer, will facilitate the workshop “I-Assisted, Human-Led: Combining PetScan and Generative AI for Smarter Editing in Wikipedia”.

Mobilization of members, starting in January 2026, for multilingual interpretation services at events, promoting intercultural connections in favor of education.

In addition to engaging members to participate in the aforementioned actions, the EduWiki Hub team was also responsible for launching the Mentorship Program with two cohorts:

Cohort 1: a program that took place between November 2025 and May 2026 with six mentors and ten mentees. The program, concluded in June, included a certification ceremony for the mentees.
Cohort 2: expected to begin in July 2026, running until January 2027. It is noteworthy that registrations were enabled through the partnership with the Capacity Exchange project.

Beyond the partnership established with Capacity Exchange since the last case study, the project formalized two new partnerships through the Content Partnerships Hub:

Volunteer Support Network: partnership to strengthen support for volunteers in Wikimedia educational programs through mentorship outreach, joint promotion of activities, shared workshops and showcases, program improvement, and coordinated visibility efforts
ESEAP Hub: partnership to strengthen member engagement in the ESEAP region with interpretation support in ESEAP languages for Hub events. The partnership also seeks to support the identification of a host affiliate for the EduWiki Conference 2027 in the ESEAP region.
Ongoing partnerships:
AfLIA: for co-creation and development of a course on AI literacy for African librarians;
University of Wisconsin: for a research project focused on supporting blind and low-vision Wikipedia users;
Digital Child Rights Foundation: led by Peter Joziasse, to co-organize workshops, showcases, toolkits for educators on digital rights and safe youth participation, as well as a possible conference partnership.

Finally, the project team participated in a total of nine conferences and events, some of them external to the Wikimedia movement, six global and three regional:

Wikimania 2025
WECUDI 2025
GLAM-Wiki 2025
ESEAP Monthly Community Call de março de 2026
Northeast OER Summit 2026
Open Education Talks 2026
Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) 2026
AfLIA 2026 Open Education Week Virtual Summit
ESEAP Conference 2026.

The team also submitted proposals for the Language Diversity Conference, OpenEd26 Conference Virtual, WikiArabia 2026, Wikimania 2026, and WikiConference North America 2026. It is noteworthy that the proposals submitted for the latter two events were approved. This highlights the team's efforts in expanding the project's visibility, establishing a presence at events with themes advocated for, developed, and worked on within the Hub's scope of activity.

Analysis

With the efforts made for the governance and impact of the project in the context of global education work, the importance of the directions indicated by the EduWiki User Group for structuring a paid, dedicated team for the Hub becomes clear. With the hirings, the project gained more strength and momentum for building tools and executing programs and partnerships, especially when compared to volunteer efforts.

The EduWiki Hub management also understands that, with the launch of certain impact areas, it was necessary to create ongoing structures for successful community engagement. As in the case of the Mentorship Program, where, following the launch of Cohort 1, the team assessed the creation of follow-up activities as relevant for engagement, such as an optional capstone project and scheduled check-in sessions.

Furthermore, through closer contact with members, it was determined to be essential to continuously adapt communications and materials to the linguistic contexts of each region involved in the project. Through the project’s activities, participants emphasized that the consistent inclusion of broader language support, such as in Spanish, Arabic, French, Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese, as well as greater cultural and gender diversity, are essential points for the Hub to consolidate itself as a globally representative, welcoming, and multilingual project.

In the context of partnerships, these stand out as valuable and fundamental strategies for accelerating impact. This is because contact with partners such as CapX, ESEAP Hub, Volunteer Support Network, and Content Partnership Hub enabled the EduWiki Hub to gain qualified access to the skills and knowledge relevant to advancing the project’s areas of action, such as mentorships, interpreter services, and the use of technical structures for storing project documentation.

Thus, the Hub’s 2nd semester of operation stands as a success, given that, in less than a year, the project was able to quickly implement community desires at a global level in central areas for advancing its impact. With member engagement, the project proves to be an effective and useful initiative for the community’s demands for a coordinated global support structure for Wikimedia education initiatives.

However, despite the significant advances this semester, the Hub’s management considers ensuring truly global representation of the movement to be challenging, requiring continuous efforts to achieve regional diversity.

Furthermore, keeping volunteer engagement active is a costly task, requiring new and innovative strategies in the future. The level of challenge becomes more significant when budgetary constraints and limited staffing are considered. In practice, staff are often required to work beyond six hours, take on additional duties, and continually innovate to keep the project moving forward. This makes it necessary to reflect more fairly on compensation, as adequate funding and remuneration are critical to sustaining the work and supporting the project’s scalability beyond its originally planned scope.

Guidance

Thus, considering the points of success and challenges to date, the active engagement of underrepresented regions through partnerships with local affiliates, efforts to translate calls into multiple languages, and the scheduling of events at different times are assessed as essential.

The implementation of new tools, features, and programs needs to be presented in an organized and gradual manner, allowing space for feedback to emerge at each stage. The project’s current approach of conducting pilot cohorts and workshops for collective iteration is a practice to be continued and improved. Furthermore, community feedback cycles through surveys and forms are essential for improving actions.

For the project’s success, management considers the definition of clear metrics, systematic data collection, and continuous monitoring to be indispensable. In this context, the already established practice of producing monthly reports proves to be a pathway for structuring such a process.

Finally, for the Hub’s sustainability, it is important to ensure multi-year team and funding commitments, securing support beyond the project’s pilot phase. Such actions confer longevity to the actions carried out and the impact achieved.

Legacy

With the deepening of the project’s actions and impact, the EduWiki Hub is assessed as one of the first concrete and successful implementations of the Wikimedia movement’s Hubs vision. Furthermore, by prioritizing multilingualism and cultural diversity, the project puts the principles of knowledge equity into practice at a global level, advancing the practice of community inclusion in education within the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Finally, with the consolidation of the Hub’s governance structure, the present case study ceases to be a conceptual experiment, transforming into a project with tangible services that strengthen regional collaboration and support the Wikimedia education movement beyond the individual efforts of volunteers.

Documentary Reference