There are many ways to learn about Wikipedia when you’re just beginning.
Previously I ran edit-a-thons and introduction sessions with Wikimedia Australia, as well as online drop in sessions to help beginners with any questions they had. But they all required people to take time out of their day to attend.
I wished there was an online course someone could take to learn about Wikipedia in their own time. So I created one!
An Introduction to Wikipedia is a free online course for beginners that guides them through everything from how to edit Wikipedia, understanding good references and notability, to creating a new Wikipedia article.
The lessons are presented as short videos, and students watch my screen as I guide them through each step so they can learn how to contribute to Wikipedia.
Each section is followed by a quiz to reinforce the lessons, and at the end each student receives a certificate and micro credential badge to show they have completed the course.
Below each video lesson are links to download the videos from Wikimedia Commons.
There is also a PDF version of each lesson for people who prefer to read along, rather than watch videos.
Then there are links to relevant pages on Wikipedia, such as help pages, policies, and guides.
The course is hosted on WikiLearn, an online learning platform that hosts courses developed by and for the Wikimedia community.
Unlike most Wikimedia projects, it doesn’t run on MediaWiki and instead uses Open edX. But anyone taking a course can log in using their Wikimedia identity (OAuth). So after signing up to an account on Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia project), they can log in using the same account.
The course is broken up into 11 sections. Starting with an introduction and ending with a final quiz.
In between, I explain what Wikipedia is, what all the menus and notifications are, how to use your Homepage, User page, and Talk page, where to get help, how to edit your Sandbox, a brief introduction to copyright and Creative Commons, how to add good references, as well as how to find your local community and attend events like Wikimania. Finally, we cover notability and how to create an article.
That’s a lot to take in! But I made the course self-guided so students can complete the course in their own time, with no deadline.
If you want to do it all in one week or over several months, it won’t affect whether you can get the certificate.
I hope that this course will serve as a simple introduction to beginners, and bring newcomers into the Wikimedia movement who will contribute for years to come.
You can also adapt the materials as I’ve released them under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, and they can all be found on Wikimedia Commons. Additionally, anyone interested in translating the course into another language for WikiLearn should reach out to the Community Development team in charge of WikiLearn.
An Introduction to Wikipedia is live on WikiLearn for anyone to enrol now.
For more information on how I created this course, you can watch my Wikimania 2024 presentation here.
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