Jump to content

User:Jimmyjrg/Introduction To Wikipedia course

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Note: This page will be updated to present a full picture on the below course.

About the course

[edit]

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.

Resources

[edit]

The course is presented as a series of video lessons, but is also available as a PDF with screenshots and text to follow along. All of these resources are available on Commons.

PDF guides of each lesson are here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Documents_for_Introduction_to_Wikipedia

Videos of each lesson are here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Introduction_to_Wikipedia_on_Wiki_Learn

To be added here soon. Table with links to each video, pdf, and original script / documents for people to copy.

Reporting

[edit]

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.

This page will be updated after July 2025 to give a 'one year later' report on how the course has run 12 months after launching.

Things to include in report:

  • Number of accounts enrolled
  • Number of accounts who completed at least one lesson
  • Number of accounts who continued contributing to Wikimedia projects after enrolling in course
  • Number of accounts who were previously contributing to Wikimedia projects before enrolling in course (this might not be possible to track exactly)
  • Links to social media posts promoting course to show likes, comments, reposts, and other engagement if available.

Dashboard

[edit]

I created a project Dashboard to measure the impact of the course. It serves 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 on the quizzes will be 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." They will be counted in the 2025 report.

As of 7 March 2025 there are 48 accounts being tracked in the Dashboard. The tracking will end 1 July 2025.

Dashboard link: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/WikiLearn/An_Introduction_to_Wikipedia/home

Conferences and presentations

[edit]

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

[edit]
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jimmyjrg/Introduction_To_Wikipedia_course&oldid=28381029"