From Partnership to Platform: How EduWiki Hub and Capacity Exchange Are Creating Better “Pathways to Mentorship”

What happens when a community that knows what people need meets a platform designed to help people share what they know?

For EduWiki Hub and Capacity Exchange (CapX), the answer has been a partnership that has grown from an idea into something practical: a more connected way for Wikimedians to find mentors, share skills, and contribute to the growth of others across the Movement.

Our collaboration began early in the development of the EduWiki Hub and continued through our first mentorship cohort. But it was during the development of our second cohort that the partnership really started to take shape.

Instead of relying on external tools such as Google Forms, we worked together to bring the EduWiki Mentorship Program directly into Capacity Exchange. EduWiki Hub brought the program model, community knowledge, outreach, and understanding of the skills and support our participants needed. CapX brought the technical infrastructure and worked with us to turn those needs into a functioning platform.

Together, we developed a dedicated mentorship application experience where mentors and mentees could share their skills, languages, interests, and preferences, while keeping the process within the Wikimedia ecosystem. The application data is securely handled through CapX, and the platform also allows participants to receive recognition through EduWiki badges on their profiles.

But perhaps the most valuable part of the collaboration was that the platform was not simply something we were given to use. We helped shape it together.

The mentorship feature itself emerged from conversations between the CapX and EduWiki teams. As we tested it, we identified improvements, suggested new education-related capacities, explored recognition through badges, and discussed how CapX could become more useful for education communities across the Movement.

A partnership that brought new people in

We also saw a measurable effect on CapX itself during the outreach for the second EduWiki Mentorship cohort.

On 30 April 2026, CapX had 1,266 users. By 16 June 2026, that number had grown to 1,510 an increase of 244 users, or approximately 19% during the period in which we were actively promoting the mentorship opportunity.

Of course we cannot claim that all of the growth was a result of the program’s outreach, but we certainly contributed to a major part of it. This is especially evident when looking at the platform’s user growth trajectory, as this period represented an exponential peak in the number of users. 

For us, this is an important outcome. The partnership was not only about building a better application process for an existing program. It is also about creating a pathway for people who are looking for mentorship to discover another Wikimedia resource where they can continue to share and develop their capacities. More importantly, it is about ensuring that this exchange of knowledge does not stop when the program ends, but continues and expands through CapX, creating opportunities for learning, sharing, and collaboration beyond the duration of the program.

The second cohort received 66 applications from mentees and 29 from mentors, with participation also expanding to include more technical specialists and people working in languages beyond English. By August 2026, the cohort had begun with 17 mentors and 23 mentees, following the successful completion of the first cohort with 6 mentors and 10 mentees.

More than a mentorship form

The value of the collaboration goes beyond replacing one form with another.

It has helped us think about how education-related skills can be represented and discovered across the Movement. Together, we began developing and refining education-focused capacities for CapX, including areas such as educational programming, workshops, training, tutorials, Wikipedia, Wikidata, MediaWiki, and other skills relevant to Wikimedia education work.

This opens a bigger possibility: a future where someone looking for support with an education program does not have to know who to ask beforehand. They can find people through their skills, experience, languages, and willingness to help.

That is the kind of infrastructure that can make knowledge-sharing more distributed.

Building with the Movement, not beside it

For EduWiki Hub, one of the strongest aspects of this partnership is that it allows us to build on infrastructure that already belongs to the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Rather than creating another standalone system for education communities, we are contributing to an existing movement-wide platform while also helping it become more useful for a specific community need.

This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia Movement Strategy’s emphasis on investing in skills and leadership, coordinating across stakeholders, improving user experience, and creating infrastructure that helps people learn from one another.

It is also a good example of what collaboration across the Movement can look like in practice: one partner brings community needs and program expertise, another brings technical capacity, and both learn from each other in the process. In this way, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts: rather than reinventing the same solutions each time, we can build on what others have already created, adapting and expanding existing knowledge, tools, and experiences to serve new needs, always with the goal of strengthening and expanding the Wikimedia Movement.

What comes next

There is still much to build.

We want to continue bringing more educators into CapX, expand the range of education-related capacities, improve support for different languages, strengthen the pool of technical mentors, and explore better ways of recognizing the skills people contribute to the Movement.

But the experience so far has shown us something important: partnerships do not always have to mean creating something entirely new. Sometimes the greatest impact comes from connecting existing strengths and building together.

The EduWiki Hub and Capacity Exchange collaboration started with a conversation about mentorship. It has grown into a shared experiment in how we can make skills more visible, mentorship easier to access, and knowledge-sharing more connected across the Wikimedia Movement.

And that is perhaps the most valuable outcome of all: not simply a better tool, but a stronger network of people behind it.