Quarterly Brief — July to October 2025

As the Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence project at the City University of New York (CUNY) moves into its second full semester, we’re excited to share highlights from a busy summer and an even more ambitious fall semester ahead. This update covers July to mid-October 2025, building on the momentum established in the spring. 

A Summer of Strategic Engagement 

Image: The CUNY community gathers monthly for Wiki-Wednesdays.  

From outreach meetings with teaching staff and students across departments to international collaborations at Wikimania Nairobi and Wikiconference North America, the team has laid the groundwork this past summer for a fall semester filled with classroom projects, content contributions, and CUNY community wiki-events. Project highlights at a glance: 

Highlight: International Engagement at Wikimania Nairobi 

Photo: CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel and CUNY University Archivist Natalie Milbrodt attend Wikimania Nairobi 2025. 

In August, Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel, CUNY University Archivist Natalie Milbrodt, and Wikimedia NYC Executive Director Pacita Rudder traveled to Nairobi for the 20th edition of the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference, hosted this year for the first time in East Africa. Together, they shared the project’s work in integrating Wikipedia open knowledge practices in a university setting, recruiting new editors, and embracing the roots of the movement. 

The conference has fostered new international connections with educators and Wikimedians in Nigeria, Ghana, Spain, Uzbekistan, Canada, and Mexico, all eager to explore future open knowledge collaborations, as well as fruitful discussions of archival research and oral history practices. 

Team presentations included: 

Wikiverse meets CUNYverse: 25 Colleges Blooming Across NYC

Watch the presentation   

  • Presented by: Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel and CUNY University Archivist Natalie Milbrodt 
  • This session explored how CUNY’s Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence project is helping weave Wikipedia and its open knowledge practices into the fabric of CUNY’s 25-campus system. 

Wikicurious: How to use cultural strategy to recruit and activate new editors 

Watch the presentation  

  • Presented by: Wikimedia NYC Executive Director Pacita Rudder 
  • In this session, Pacita shared how Wikimedia NYC’s “Wikicurious” series sparked curiosity and trained 1,000+ new Wikipedia editors, while also teaching the basics of cultural strategy and how to use it to engage urban and rural communities across the US in the use of Wikipedia.

Keep Wikipedia Weird 

Watch the presentation 

  • Presented by: CUNY’s Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel 
  • In this session, Richard explored the ways Wikipedia/Wikimedia can better embrace its roots, giving the public the nerdy facts they seek while also paving the way toward reviving the eccentric spirit of collaborative wiki-projects. 

Highlight: Institutional Outreach & Strategic Support 

CUNY’s Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel explored a wide variety of topics in collaboration and consultation with staff across campuses this summer and early fall, including: 

  • Baruch College — exploring policy-focused Wikipedia projects and capturing school history 
  • Spitzer School of Architecture — improving school-related articles, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons documentation 
  • CUNY Research Office — training staff on Wikidata to support CUNY’s research visibility 
  • New York City College of Technology — joining staff for a wiki-curious discussion for people new to Wikipedia  

Richard has also joined CUNY community from Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY TV, Lehman College, Guttman Community College, CUNY Graduate Center, Queens College Tech Incubator, and others for fruitful ongoing conversations and brainstorming on future wiki-projects. 

Highlight: Wiki Education Speaker Series Features CUNY Professor Ximena Gallardo C. 

Top (L-R): Kaylea Champion, Joseph Reagle. Bottom (L-R): Helaine Blumenthal, Ximena Gallardo C. 

On September 12, 2025, the Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEdu) convened experts in Wikimedia and open knowledge for a thought-provoking Zoom-based conversation on generative AI and how it is reshaping the approach to research and writing in postsecondary education.  

The discussion, entitled Gen AI and the Wikipedia Assignment: Challenges and Opportunities, included Dr. Ximena Gallardo C., professor of English at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College, who has been teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom since 2014. (Dr. Gallardo, along with Professor Ann Matsuuchi and Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel, are already at work on another wiki classroom collaboration this fall!) 

Watch the presentation: https://tinyurl.com/2cxzh2v3 

Highlight: CUNYpedia Focus Article — CUNY History Is NYC History! 

Photo: Original Hunter College campus on 68th Street and Park Avenue, circa 1895. 

CUNYpedia Focus Articles represent fruitful on-wiki collaborations springing from the CUNYverse. Faculty, staff, and students are actively improving and expanding public information on Wikipedia, while also connecting people to CUNY’s rich library and archive collections.  

Most recently, Associate Archivists from the Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory project collaborated with Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel to reorganize and significantly improve an article on CUNY’s rich history by adding sources, images, and context to help to tell the story of the largest urban university system in the United States.  

The history section now has a mention of every school’s founding and is enlivened with images such as an 1895 photo from the Library of Congress of the original Normal College building (now Hunter College), at 68th Street and Park  Avenue. The team is also adding information about past student protests and how they have served as an impetus for change at CUNY from the 1930s onward.   

CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Project at Wikiconference North America 

Photo (L-R): Outreach and Processing Archivist Regina Carra, Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel, and Associate Archivist Patrick McGee presented at Wikiconference North America on October 18, 2025. 

WikiConference North America was hosted October 16 to 19, 2025, in NYC. Billed as “Wiki World’s Fair,” the event honored diverse contributions of the more than 450 Wikipedians who gathered to promote global collaboration and to explore new ways free knowledge can empower people and transform communities worldwide.  

Over the weekend, CUNY faculty from across many campuses — including Hunter College, New York City College of Technology, Borough of Manhattan Community College, LaGuardia Community College, Brooklyn College, the Graduate Center, and the College of Staten Island — engaged in exciting and fruitful conversations with fellow academics and other individual Wikipedians, as well as representatives from WikiEdu, Wikimedia NYC, the Wikimedia Foundation, and a host of other organizations.   

Discussions included ongoing exploration of the theoretical and practical value of Wikipedia-based learning for their students. CUNY faculty’s wiki-expertise runs deep; many in the CUNY community have been involved with Wikipedia projects for more than a decade and a half. They shared their experiences integrating Wikipedia editing into coursework, emphasizing its ability to enhance students’ research, writing, and digital literacy skills. Conversations also explored the challenges and opportunities around artificial intelligence — questioning whether AI poses too much of a risk for “plagiarism,” or, in the right context, if it can be successfully leveraged as a creative and analytical learning tool.   

These ongoing conversations and collaborations are yielding tangible results for students. Both veteran and new faculty advocates of this pedagogical approach generally agree that Wikipedia editing supports student education by promoting critical thinking, collaboration, and information literacy. Students learn how to critically assess sources and write for a public audience, while gaining the satisfaction of contributing to open knowledge. This hands-on approach not only deepens subject understanding but also empowers their students as active participants in knowledge creation. 

CUNY project team members were also in attendance to share presentations and engage in exciting conversations around how generative AI is shaping Wikipedia editing and how open knowledge projects are helping to unlock CUNY’s archival history for a wider public.  

Team presentations included: 

Wikipedia editing + AI: Could there be a right balance? 

  • Presented by: La Guardia Community College Professor Ximena Gallardo C. and Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel 
  • In this Workshop, the team focused on the challenges and opportunities of using generative AI (GAI) to assist in Wikipedia editing. 

Institutional History, Archival Technology Development, and Collections Discovery: The Contributions of the City University of New York to Wiki platforms 

  • Presented by: Associate Archivist Patrick McGee, Outreach and Processing Archivist Regina Carra, and Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel 
  • In this lecture, the team examined how leaning into Wiki platforms is helping to unlock CUNY’s (and NYC’s) archival history. Additionally, the project team shared an overview of how they secured a $5,000 Rapid Fund grant through the Wikimedia Community Fund for the development of a “Wikidata-ArchivesSpace GLAM plugin” to enhance archival metadata integration. 

Professors Ann Matsuuchi and Ximena Gallardo C. of LaGuardia Community College attended the first full day of the conference on Friday, October 17, with several of their English composition students, some of whom were scheduled to join them in presenting the following session: 

Teaching Writing and Research with Wikipedia+AI – Student Perspectives 

  • Presented by: LaGuardia Community College (LCC) Professors Ann Matsuuchi and Ximena Gallardo C., joined by their LCC students, including Apollo Boissiere, Garrett Morgan Jr., Raul Alvarez, and Nirvana Garcia 
  • In this “Lightning Talk” session, students from LaGuardia Community College plan to share how they used generative AI (GAI) to create original articles on a wide range of topics for an English composition course. This course was the first in the WikiEducation Foundation system to incorporate GAI. Students will also reflect on their experiences using the technology, as well as the concerns it raised. 

As noted in the New York Times, among other sources, on Friday, October 17, an individual entered the venue with a gun and made their way toward the stage, declaring an intention to take their own life. Thanks to the quick intervention of Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel and fellow Wikipedian Andrew Lih, the person was safely disarmed. Police arrived on the scene shortly after, and thankfully, no one was hurt in the incident. 

As a result, all Friday sessions were cancelled following the incident and may be rescheduled virtually for a later date.  

Professor Matsuuchi shared this reflection on the events of that Friday:  

“The only comfort was how our students got to witness what a positive community response to a frightening threat looks like. The Wiki community has defined itself clearly by demonstrating both resilience and kindness in its reaction.” 

Fall Preview: Expanding Classroom Collaborations 

Photo: CUNY Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel visits students at CUNY City College in an engaging session on Wikipedia in action. 

The Fall 2025 semester has brought a robust portfolio of Wikipedia-integrated coursework across the university system, with exciting collaborations with Richard Knipel, Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence. Richard is partnering with professors and students in a variety of courses that will incorporate wiki-projects, including: 

  • At LaGuardia Community College, Professors Ximena Gallardo C. and Ann Matsuuchi return with their English 103 class, exploring the ethics of generative AI through Wikipedia editing. The course was a national pilot with WikiEdu in the Spring 2025 semester. 
  • At the Graduate Center and Hostos Community College, Dr. Jojo Karlin and Dr. Krystyna Michael are leading a collaborative student project on the Save Hostos Movement, where graduate students will mentor undergrads in editing Wikipedia to reflect a key moment in CUNY’s activist history. 
  • At New York City College of Technology, Professor Robin Michaels’s Introduction to Photography class will offer students an opportunity to learn how to contribute their work to Wikimedia Commons, helping expand public knowledge through documentation in areas such as cultural heritage, architecture, and nature for use in wider Wikipedia articles. 
  • New Wikipedia assignments are also underway in history and ecology courses at Brooklyn College, including Assistant Professor Alvin Khiêm Bùi’s courses on Asian Migrations and Diasporas, Shaping of the Modern World and Professor Tony Wilson’s course on the Principles of Ecology. 

At the same time, classroom workshops are ongoing. During a recent session at City College, Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel joined students in Associate Professor Sarah Cohn’s Research in the Digital Age media literacy course to delve into the power of editing Wikipedia.  

Together they explored topics such as the history of Wikipedia and how it works, what makes an article “featured,” Wikipedia’s volunteer community and Talk pages, how to set up accounts and begin editing, and the use of scholarly research to improve public knowledge. 

Students reflected on the following questions… 

  • How has today’s class supported, challenged, or changed your understanding of the role of Wikipedia? Consider this for both your own information habits and for society at large. 
  • What is something from today that was particularly interesting to you, and why? 

… and shared their thoughts, including: 

  • “The most interesting part of today to me was the discussion on how to edit articles. I have made two edits before this class, and both were reversed. Now, I can make my edits even more accurate and can probably make an argument for them as well!” 
  • “It made me see the importance of checking sources for myself.”   
  • “Today’s class made me realize that there was a lot more to Wikipedia that just random people editing an online article. For instance, I didn’t know that different languages had their own separate communities with their own rules, traditions, and writing styles.” 
  • “Today’s class has definitely supported my understanding of Wikipedia’s role in delivering information efficiently… When I published my edits, I realized that so many people could do the exact same thing I did and add more detail to an article, or review the episode summary for a show, or even change incorrect info.” 

From discovering how Wikipedia policies are made to editing live pages (one student even corrected a TV show credit!), students learned how to contribute meaningfully — and critically — to one of the world’s most visited platforms.  

Challenges, Opportunities, and Next Steps

As Wikimedia’s relevance continues to grow and evolve in both academic and public discourse, the Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence project is exploring how best to support and scale this work across a multi-campus institution. The project continues to develop new pathways for departmental engagement across the CUNY system and to support new community editors in their first contributions to the open knowledge movement. 

Opportunities are growing — across classrooms, campuses, and communities. The fall semester includes new collaborations, and project team members will be continuing to lay a solid groundwork for further establishing CUNY as a national model for Wikimedians-in-Residence in an academic/university setting. 

In the News: Wikipedia is the CUNY of the Internet 

On a recent episode of CUNY’s Indoor Voices podcast, LaGuardia Community College Professor Ann Matsuuchi, University Archivist Natalie Milbrodt, and Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence Richard Knipel discussed CUNY’s active role in facilitating community engagement in documenting history and culture for CUNY citizens, New Yorkers, and the world.  

Listen here: tinyurl.com/43n7uzez