How the Imperial Wiki Project is taking over
The rise of online learning, for students, by students
In the digital age, Imperial students are taking their education into their own hands with the Imperial Wiki Project.
Students have created websites that can be edited by multiple users that allow them to share lecture notes and revision resources from their curriculum.
These student-run Wikis act as dynamic repositories for note-sharing and interactive learning and currently span three Departments: the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Department of Physics and the Department of Mathematics.
Just like the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, these Imperial Wikis are written and maintained by a community of student volunteers.
Navigating around the MathsWiki, the student-run Wiki of the Department of Mathematics.
“One of the values of the Wiki Project is that the content is written by students and for students,” said Pierre Walker, one of the founders of the ChemEngWiki, who is now a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology.
Everything is written from the perspective of how we, as students, understood the content."
“Everything is written from the perspective of how we, as students, understood the content. Keeping it in the format of an online Wiki gives us the opportunity to either fix mistakes or clarify different elements,” he said.
All the currently active Imperial Wikis have successfully uploaded notes for all compulsory undergraduate modules in their respective courses. Some are at the stage of uploading notes for elective modules, whilst others aim to build in new features such as revision cards or notes for content outside of lectures, like introductory courses for machine learning.
David, the current webmaster of the ChemEngWiki and a second-year Chemical Engineering undergraduate, said that the Wikis can adapt with the evolving needs of students: “The fact that we have a machine learning course, which we implemented in 2022, could be different years down the line with new computational methods,” he said, “We don’t want the Wiki to just have the conventional curriculum.”
“I hope all departments one day have a Wiki and, in some way, we can support one another with the philosophy of finding improvements with every student generation,” David said.
The origin of the Imperial Wiki Project
In 2018, Pierre, then a second-year student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, shared his lecture notes with other students in his course.
Over the summer, Pierre discovered that the cohort of incoming students had got hold of the notes and were using them to aid their learning and revision. Co-founder of the ChemEngWiki, Thomas Cheng, was one such student.
“At that point, I thought there might be some value here,” Pierre says. Pierre approached Chemical Engineering Teaching Fellow Dr Marsha Maraj to explore different platforms to share notes and recruited Thomas to be part of the project.
Their team received StudentShapers seed funding from Imperial to experiment with note-sharing platforms. After experimenting with Jupyter notebooks and platforms like Confluence, the team settled on Wiki.js, a Wiki engine written in JavaScript.
“There were some concerns initially from some members of staff,” said Marsha, citing that a few lecturers were concerned that a platform like the Wiki would run the risk of plagarising copyrighted academic material, or would discourage students from attending lectures.
Senior Strategic Teaching Fellow Dr Marsha Maraj, Department of Chemical Engineering
Senior Strategic Teaching Fellow Dr Marsha Maraj, Department of Chemical Engineering
“We were grateful for those concerns because it allowed us to navigate how to set up the Wiki responsibly,” said Marsha, “The Wiki was always meant to be inclusive and to have staff and student input.”
The Imperial Wiki Project sees itself as a complementary resource to attending lectures, workshops and tutorials. All notes from lecturers are shared only with their explicit permission, and all pages contain notes written from a student perspective with original content and diagrams.
Upon entering the website, visitors are given the disclaimer that they may encounter inaccuracies and that they use the Wiki at their own risk.
There's an intrinsic sense of responsibility and a sense of altruism in the Wiki Project."
"What’s good about the Wiki is that whenever you edit or create new pages, you have a name that’s put next to the changes so that everyone knows who did what,” said Jaehyun Kim, a MathsWiki admin who is currently in his final year of study. “There's an intrinsic sense of responsibility and a sense of altruism in the Wiki Project."
The idea of a Wiki was shared with members of the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, the MathsWiki and PhysWiki were both launched in 2021.
“The Imperial Wiki Project is more than just a Departmental initiative,” said Samuel Lam, the webmaster for the MathsWiki.
PhysWiki and MathsWiki admins. From left to right: Denis Donskikh, Samuel Lam and Jaehyun Kim.
PhysWiki and MathsWiki admins. From left to right: Denis Donskikh, Samuel Lam and Jaehyun Kim.
“Both staff and students in the Chemical Engineering, Maths and Physics Departments have recognised the need to improve the post-COVID learning experience, which showed unprecedented levels of cross-Departmental collaboration,” he said.
The Imperial Wiki Project’s innovation was recognised by the College's Pedagogy Transformation Fund when it was awarded funding to continue its expansion in April 2022.
Shaping education in real time
The appeal of the Wiki not only extends to its ability be a repository for useful knowledge, says the Imperial Wiki Project team. Administrators can also access site statistics that can be used to understand how students learn best.
Data, like which webpages get the most traffic across different points in the year, can be used to indicate the pain points for students. Lecturers can then adapt their teaching reactively, instead of waiting for written feedback.
David in particular is interested in the Wiki has a pedagogical tool. He, along with other Wiki webmasters and admins, presented their findings about using Wiki meta-data to shape teaching in 2022.
The ChemEngWiki team. From left to right: David, Dr Marsha Maraj, Luc Paoli and Thomas Nok Hin Cheng.
The ChemEngWiki team. From left to right: David, Dr Marsha Maraj, Luc Paoli and Thomas Nok Hin Cheng.
“We have time-series data across the whole academic year, and we can see how usage varies depending on exam seasons,” he said. Student admins like David can even perform clustering and statistical analysis from extracted meta-data to identify cohorts of students that, for example, struggle with mathematics.
“It’s a very large dataset with a lot of dimensions, and I think teaching staff in Departments would be very interested in this type of information,” David said.
Why become a Wiki admin?
Each Departmental Wiki team has around two to five core members who work together to upload and edit content. We asked them why they dedicated so much of their personal time to the Imperial Wiki Project.
Mathematics needs to be very rigorous in how we use definitions and logic. Typing the summaries can help me to refresh on the conditions of a certain theorem or the conditions of a proof. Another motivation for me is the common well-being of the mathematics community."
I think one of the things about maths is that something in particular, like a theorem, can be intuitively true to you but when you try and explain it to others, you are forced to explain your ideas more clearly. It points out flaws in your own thinking, and it’s a great way to learn."
I’m a strong believer in open access to knowledge and open access to resources. I think a historical feature of chemical engineering is that a lot of knowledge can be quite niche or hard to access. I wanted to give my time to a focused resource that I would have found incredibly useful during my degree so that future people can use it."
There wasn’t much of a culture of note-sharing in my Department. I decided that it’d be useful to have student notes for everyone when they were preparing for exams because lecture notes can sometimes be a bit too extensive or not extensive enough."
I think the Wiki is able to accurately reflect the needs of the student body as a whole. We’re not just creating our version of lecture notes, but we have implemented things like flashcards that test understanding and retention as well as coding guides. I think that’s where we add value."
As the initiative has grown, the webmasters of each Wiki have now founded the Imperial Wiki Society (WikiSoc), an inter-Departmental student society where students wanting to run or create their own Wikis can seek help or guidance from others.
“People from other departments can refer to this one Wiki which contains information on the maintenance of their platform,” said David.
WikiSoc was shortlisted by the Imperial College Union as the best new society in June 2023.
All teams are keen to recruit new students to join their projects to ensure the Wikis continue to be expanded and adapted to the needs of current students.
For instance, the MathsWiki are exploring how recent announcement around the UK’s A-Level mathematics reforms may change Imperial’s core curriculum.
“Whenever we have a meeting, we always say that our ultimate goal is to make sure that our Wiki can be self-developing. Even after we all graduate, people will replace us and the MathsWiki can be maintained as a resource for all students,” said Samuel.
Some webmasters even imagine that the Imperial Wiki Project makes it outside the walls of the university. ChemEngWiki co-founder Thomas said: “A full version in a utopic world be democratised, we just open our Wikis to the Internet, like MIT OpenCourse where we give back to other people who may not be so privileged to enter an institution like Imperial."
I feel like the Wiki has untapped potential."
If you are a student who is interested in setting up a Wiki in your Department, you can contact the WikiSoc (icwikisoc@imperial.ac.uk).
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