When I applied to Cohort 1 of the EduWiki Hub Mentorship Program, I did so as someone who had spent the previous year contributing to the Wikimedia technical ecosystem and organising at the community level in India. I came in with a specific interest — programme design, curriculum development, and technical support — and a question I wanted the six months to help me answer: how do you turn scattered technical and educational work into something structured, documented, and built to last? Between November 2025 and May 2026, that question shaped everything I did.
This is a reflection on that journey: what I built, what I learned, where I think the gaps in our community still lie, and what I am carrying forward.
A self-driven path, supported by a programme
I want to be honest about the shape of my mentorship, because I think honesty is more useful to future cohorts than a tidy story. I came into the programme already working on an initiative of my own — Wiki Open Learning — and much of my six months was self-directed execution rather than top-down instruction. My mentor, Obiageli "Oby" Ezeilo, brought an education-organising background rather than a technical one, and our exchanges were periodic. That meant the initiative, its direction, and its delivery were mine to carry.
I share this not as a complaint but as context, because I think 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, the expectation of documented outcomes, and the simple fact of being accountable to a cohort all pushed me to formalise work I might otherwise have left informal. 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. For that, I am grateful to Oby and to the EduWiki Hub team, especially Rita Maliqi, who kept the 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. Wiki Open Learning is my attempt to close that gap with clear, project-centric learning pathways.
Over the 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 some external platform.
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 awareness session for primary and high-school students — their first exposure to Wikipedia, open knowledge, and the idea that they could contribute to it. We covered what Wikipedia is and why it works, the concept of open source, how articles are written and maintained by volunteers, and the many ways students can contribute: documenting local culture and heritage, writing about nature and nearby places, improving articles in their own language, and uploading photographs. The full session is documented in a detailed report on Meta-Wiki.
The second was the Wikipedia 25 Years Celebration in Vidisha, marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary with the local community. Organising around a movement milestone is a quietly powerful thing: it gives newcomers a sense that they are joining something with history and momentum, not just editing a website.
I mention the organising detail deliberately. The most sustainable thing I did was not running events myself — it was enabling others to run them, by reaching out to a teacher and helping a session 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.
The skill I actually built: documentation
If I had to name the single capability this programme strengthened most, it would not be a flashy one. It is documentation — the discipline of recording work on Meta-Wiki so that it is transparent, reusable, and legible to people who were not in the room.
It is easy to underrate this. But in a movement built on open knowledge, work that is not documented barely exists. Over six months I learned to write event reports that someone else could learn from, to structure initiative pages so a newcomer can navigate them, and to present outcomes in a way that makes impact visible. These are organisational skills as much as wiki skills, and they are exactly the skills that turn a one-off activity into a programme others can join. I came in able to do the work; I am leaving better able to show it — and in this movement, showing the work is half of it.
One initiative, two purposes: the capstone
Here is where two threads of my year came together. 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 that are 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 project, 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 was able to take it on as my capstone and build 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 a wide application: when your independent work and your programme's goals point the same way, you stop dividing your energy and start compounding it. I am grateful 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 as someone with a documented initiative, real-world events, a body of 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 like governance and contributor pathways, while continuing to connect structured resources with student-focused workshops on the ground. My long-term goal is a sustainable, community-driven learning system that helps new contributors, especially students and emerging communities, find their footing in our movement.
To the EduWiki Hub team and to my mentor Oby: thank you for the container, the accountability, and the nudge to write things down. 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.
