Why student editors are good for Wikipedia
As reported in a special report in The Signpost last month ("WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment"), things went very wrong in December 2021 in a class supported by Wiki Education's Wikipedia Student Program. I came away from the ensuing discussion understanding that there's a gap between what we do and the community's understanding of what we do. Our program is the single largest outreach effort in the Wikimedia community. In 2021 we brought over 12,000 student editors to Wikipedia, who added over 9.6 million words to 12,000 existing articles and created 1,000 new articles.
It's human nature to make judgements based on extreme cases, both good and bad. And once we’ve found these patterns, confirmation bias does the rest. If you only come across outstanding student work — the student who revamps a mess into a high quality summary, or the student who creates a new article — you come away thinking students' work is exceptional. And when you read about the kind of incident stemming from our program that was highlighted in January's Signpost, you can get the impression that the results of student editing are (as one editor said in the discussion) "decisively mixed". My experience, as a Wikipedian since 2004 who supports the 12,000+ student editors writing on Wikipedia each year through Wiki Education’s programs, is different. I see almost everything students do.