From Mentee to Builder: My Six Months in the EduWiki Hub Mentorship Program

When I joined Cohort 1 of the EduWiki Hub Mentorship Program (November 2025-May 2026), I came in with a question I wanted six months to help me answer: how do you turn scattered technical and community work into something structured, documented, and built to last? This is a reflection on what I built, what I learned, and what I am carrying forward.

A self-driven path, supported by a programme

I want to be honest about the shape my mentorship took, because that is more useful to future cohorts than a tidy story. I entered the programme already building an initiative of my own, and much of my time was self-directed execution rather than top-down instruction. I was matched with a mentor, Obiageli “Oby” Ezeilo, whose strength is education organising rather than technical work – so while the direction and delivery of my technical project were mine to carry, our conversations gave me something I did not have on my own: an education lens, and the steady accountability of someone expecting to see progress.

I share this not as a complaint but as context, because it points to something the programme does genuinely well. A mentorship does not have to hand you the work to be valuable. Sometimes its value is in giving your existing work a structure, an audience, and a reason to be written down. The monthly check-ins, the cohort deadlines, and simply being accountable to someone pushed me to formalise work I might otherwise have left informal. For that steady encouragement, and for the push to think about my work in educational terms, I am grateful to Oby and to the EduWiki Hub team – especially Rita Maliqi, who kept the whole cohort moving.

What I built: Wiki Open Learning

Wiki Open Learning is an open initiative focused on structured, project-based learning across Wikimedia projects. The premise is simple but, I believe, important: most learning material in our movement is scattered, text-heavy, and written for people who already know where to start. A student or first-time contributor rarely has a single place to understand what a project is, how it works, how to contribute, and how to grow within its community.

Over six months this grew into a documented body of work on Meta-Wiki: an initiative page, an events log, and a Learnings hub that organises tutorials project by project – Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia – each structured around what the project is, how to contribute, its governance, and its tools. I also began producing video-based tutorials uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, covering practical workflows such as account creation, the Commons Upload Wizard, and understanding the CC BY SA license – so that the learning lives inside the Wikimedia ecosystem itself, not on an external platform

I want to be honest about the shape my mentorship took, because honesty is more useful to future cohorts than a tidy story. I entered already building an initiative of my own, and much of my time was self-directed execution rather than top-down instruction. My mentor brought an education-organising background rather than a technical one, so the direction and delivery were mine to carry. I share this not as a complaint but as context – because it points to something the programme does genuinely well. It creates a supportive container in which a motivated contributor can take real ownership. The check-ins, the deadlines, and the simple fact of being accountable to a cohort pushed me to formalise work I might otherwise have left informal. A mentorship doesn’t have to hand you the work to be valuable; sometimes its value is giving your existing work a structure and a reason to be written down.

Six months at a glance

The numbers are modest by design – this was a pilot, built to be sustainable rather than to chase scale. What matters more than any single figure is that each piece is documented, reusable, and built so that others can join and extend it.

Reaching students where they are

Two events anchored the initiative in the real world rather than only on-wiki. The first was the Wiki for Students in India Workshop #01, held in December 2025 in Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh. Rather than deliver it myself, I worked through a local teacher to organise an introductory session for school students – their first exposure to Wikipedia, open knowledge, and the idea that they could contribute to it. The full session is documented in a detailed report on Meta-Wiki.

The second was a celebration of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary with the community in Vidisha. The most sustainable thing I did across both was not running events myself, but enabling others to run them – reaching out, supporting a local facilitator, and helping sessions happen that would not have happened otherwise. That is the model I want to scale: not me at the centre, but a structure that lets many people teach.

What I actually learned: four capabilities

If the events are the visible output, the real return on six months was a set of capabilities I will use long after the certificate. Four stand out.

Documentation. In a movement built on open knowledge, work that is not documented barely exists. I learned to write event reports someone else could learn from, to structure initiative pages a newcomer can navigate, and to record work transparently on Meta-Wiki. I came in able to do the work; I am leaving better able to show it – and here, showing the work is half of it.

Measurable impact. I learned to think in outcomes, not activity – to ask not “what did I do” but “what changed, and how would I show it.” Defining outcomes up front, and capturing evidence as I went, is a discipline I now apply to every event.

Grants and sustainability. Through the Nagarathna Memorial Grant supporting my technical work, I learned how grant-funded contribution actually works in our movement: scoping a deliverable, reporting transparently, and building something the community keeps using after the funding ends. Sustainability stopped being a buzzword and became a design constraint.

Outreach. Working through a local teacher, rather than parachuting in, taught me that the durable way to grow is to enable others. The goal is a structure that lets many people teach – not a single organiser at the centre.

One initiative, two purposes: the capstone

WhichTool Screenshot whichtool.toolforge.org

Two threads of my year then converged. Alongside Wiki Open Learning, I have been building WhichTool – a multilingual, natural-language search engine for discovering Wikimedia Toolforge tools, supported by the Nagarathna Memorial Grant. Toolforge hosts over four thousand community-built tools, and they are notoriously hard to discover; WhichTool lets you describe what you want to do, in any language, and find the right tool – surfacing the ones still actively maintained, and layering a human-verified core over the full index for accuracy.

I was already building WhichTool when the EduWiki Hub offered an optional capstone, with the suggested direction of developing a centralised resource for Wikimedia tools. By a fortunate alignment, the capstone the programme proposed was almost exactly the work I had already begun – so I took it on as my capstone and built on it directly. Rather than splitting my attention across two unrelated deliverables, the overlap let me pour concentrated effort into a single substantial piece of work, effectively at double the pace. It is a small lesson with wide application: when your independent work and your programme’s goals point the same way, you stop dividing your energy and start compounding it. My thanks to both the Nagarathna Memorial Grant for making the core work possible, and to the EduWiki Hub for giving it a second home as a capstone.

What I am carrying forward

I came into Cohort 1 as a contributor with scattered work. I am leaving with a documented initiative, real-world events, learning resources, and a piece of open infrastructure now headed for a demonstration at Wikimania. More than any single artefact, I am leaving with a way of working: build in the open, document as you go, and design so that others can join.

Next, I want to extend Wiki Open Learning to more projects – Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikibooks – and into more advanced topics, while continuing to connect structured resources with student-focused workshops on the ground.

To anyone considering a future cohort, my advice is simple: come in with something you genuinely want to build, and let the programme give it shape. That is where the value compounds. And if you would like to help build open, structured learning for newcomers, Wiki Open Learning is open to join.

Dev Jadiya is a Wikimedia volunteer developer and community organiser from India.