Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Wikipedia Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed. Learn more about subscribing or read the archives.

Education program kicks off on English Wikinews
Wikipedia isn’t the only Wikimedia project students contribute to as part of their coursework. Over the last few terms, more and more journalism classes have started doing classroom projects on English Wikinews. In a post on the Wikimedia blog, The Wikinewsie Group’s Laura Hale offered an explanation of what students can accomplish on Wikinews and why the students benefit from this learning opportunity. Read Laura’s post.

Planning the future of course pages
Have you used the Education Program MediaWiki Extension? If so, you may notice there’s room for improvement with course pages. With our new developer Andrew Russell Green, we've started planning out the future of our course pages and other software features for Wikipedia assignments. Let us know what improvements to the software you would most like to see. Check out the planning page.

Arabic Web Days video features education program
Arab World Education Program Manager Tighe Flanagan (pictured at left) was invited to participate in a Google Hangout conversation as part of an Arabic Web Days program. Arabic Web Days is an initiative of tech companies across the Arab World to improve the availability of information in Arabic on the internet; while more than 5 percent of the world’s population speaks Arabic, only 3 percent of the digital content available today is in Arabic. The Wikipedia Education Program Arab World is trying to change that by adding more content in Arabic to Wikipedia. Watch the video of the Hangout (in Arabic).