Large companies like Microsoft and Apple offer student discounts, and sometimes free software, to students because:

• Students are the future workforce, and once they stop studying the experience they have had with using the software when it was free makes them more likely to buy it in the future as they'd prefer to continue using the software that they are familiar with

• Students usually have some large expenses (e.g. text books) as well as limited time to work and earn money (i.e. due to study commitments) - so offering discounts or free software helps them signifcantly, and of course, promotes what I mentioned in the first point above

I know that there is a free upgrade to a Pro account for educational sites. However, my understanding is that the user's actual account isn't affected by this - only the site itself?

So I'd like to suggest that Wikidot consider this type of initiative once the user experience has been improved¹.

From a technical stand-point, one way of doing this would be to pre-arrange it with educational institutions (or allow them to contact you to pre-arrange it, if a student of theirs requests that they do so) - and basically someone would enter their school/university email address as confirmation that they are a student.

Wikidot would then check that the email address is still valid (just using the usual "click on the verification link in your e-mail" method), and if it is valid, the user would be granted either a free or discounted Pro Lite account for 12 months (after which time they'd have to validate their email address again to prove they're still a student).