This presentation offers as a case study a Wikipedia archive assignment that connects classrooms across levels and institutions at CUNY. This project asks graduate students to collaborate with community college students in a hands-on application of key concepts in digital pedagogy and open publishing that also brings visibility to CUNY archival materials. We will give an overview of our assignment and suggest ways others can replicate it to organize initiatives that publish archival materials at their own institutions. We piloted this assignment in Fall 2025, connecting the MA seminar we co-taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” and a first-year developmental writing course taught by Dr. Michael at CUNY Hostos Community College. Our graduate students were introduced to archival work through a guest lecture by CUNY Digital Archivist Bridget Day on “Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory,” a three-year Mellon-funded project that aims to digitize and coordinate the archives held at CUNY’s 25 campuses. We then partnered with a new library publishing initiative, the CUNY Craig Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel, who introduced students to Wikipedia editing. These conversations came together in our week on DH pedagogy, where students got into groups to prepare small Wikipedia assignments that undergraduates would complete in a single session. At the same time, Dr. Michael’s undergraduates were completing a unit on the 1970’s “Save Hostos Movement” that included exploration of the campus archives. At the end of this unit, Knipel and representatives from our graduate class introduced students to Wikipedia editing and the assignments they had prepared. These assignments asked the undergraduates to cite primary and secondary sources in adding a section on the “Save Hostos Movement” to the Hostos Wikipedia page. This assignment brought together library special collections and digital publishing in ways that connect the dots between local knowledge and public scholarship.
