Congratulations GO-GN Wiki Scholars!

Over the course of 6 weeks during May and June 32 GO-GN members, friends and alumni, including colleagues from the Open Education Group’s OER Research Fellows, joined forces to become GO-GN Wiki Scholars and improve open education articles on Wikipedia. We had a fantastic few weeks together, led by the awesome Will Kent of WikiEducation, exploring both Wikipedia itself (more than just an encyclopedia!) and the practical skills, good practices and etiquette of Wiki scholarship. Each week of the course comprised of training modules plus a fun weekly online session, where in our two groups, we connected with each other, shared experiences and reflected on the course material. As the course progressed we moved from evaluating articles to selecting some to contribute to, before developing content in our sandboxes prior to review and publication.

A huge amount of work took place over those 6 weeks together, including some really fruitful collaborations and coordinated efforts. A massive thanks to everyone who participated in the course and for all your efforts.

Phew! In addition, 19 of our participants fully completed the training modules. So what kind of pages were improved by our Wiki Scholars? The top five articles with most words added were:

1. Open Textbook (5859 words)
2. Virtual Exchange (4889 words)
3. Open Thesis (new article; 4216 words)
4. Open Educational Resources Policy (3476 words)
5. Open Educational Practices (3545 words)

And what about those three new Wikipedia pages created by participants? These are:

• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
• Open Learning Institute of British Columbia
• Open Thesis

Fantastic work! But what do our participants think? There’s been some great blog posts focused on experiences of the course, including:

• Helen de Waard’s Five Flames 4 Learning blog
• Gabi Witthaus’s post What is an open thesis? Ask Wikipedia!
• Irwin Devries blog post Six Weeks with Wiki Scholars

Look out for more from our participants over the coming weeks and if you have written a post or shared your experiences, we would love to hear from you.

A big thanks again to everyone who participated in the course and for all your enthusiasm and contributions. Special thanks also to the Hewlett Foundation for all their support and for making this training possible. We’re looking forward to building on our achievements and continuing our Wikipedia journey over the coming months – look out for more Wikipedia related activity in the future, including an edit-a-thon to focus on further improvement of open education related pages next year. In the meantime, you’ll find some of us at the annual WikiMania from 13-17 August 2021… come join in the fun!

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Picture credits: Wikipedia logo mousepad by Moheen Reeyad is licensed CC BY-SA 2.0; oer_logo_EN_1 by Breno Trautwein licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia by Shawn is licensed CC BY-NC 2.0 and OER Wiki Scholars Group Photo by Will (Wiki Ed) is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.