One year later: An Introduction to Wikipedia online course

Just over one year ago, I wrote here about the online course An Introduction to Wikipedia. At the time, the course had just gone live on WikiLearn and I had high hopes it would inspire new groups of contributors to Wikipedia. So did it?

Between the course going live and 27 October 2025, 219 people registered for the course. However, not everyone completed it.

To obtain the course certificate students need to take a series of quizzes to show they have understood the lessons. Each lesson is presented as a short video like the image shown above, or a short page of text. At the end of each section there is a quiz, and then a final quiz covering all of the previous lessons.

Of the 219 people registered, only 79 have completed one or more lessons. Of course, that doesn’t mean the others never looked at the course materials. Just that they decided not to take any quizzes.

In total, only 46 students have obtained a certificate so far. This has gone up since I last checked in July 2025, so the number is growing. Albeit, slowly.

I published a report in July looking at the number of students at the time, where I further broke down the contributions of everyone who had registered. You can read it on Meta here.

For the first year I also tracked everyone who took the course on a project Dashboard. They edited 722 articles on English Wikipedia, adding over 34,000 words, over 600 references, and created 10 new articles or pages.

Since then, additional people have found the course and contributed more. So the course has inspired new contributors to Wikipedia. It’s done this by carefully explaining how to source good references, add them to Wikipedia, and create new or update existing articles.

Others have found the course materials useful in different ways. All of the videos can be watched or read as PDF guides on Wikimedia Commons. Some of these have been promoted as Media of the Day on Commons, or added to help pages. You can see some examples of this in my July report here.

Overall, I’m impressed the course and course materials has found so many people. I hope they continue to find the course useful and more will complete the course as it remains available to the community.