Burleson-Gibson was a Spring participant in one of Wiki Education’s COVID-19 Wiki Scholars courses. Her background in disseminating open data had significant overlap with her interest in becoming a Wikipedian.

“Wikipedia articles and Census Bureau data depend on the public to ensure the best possible information is available. Census data is dependent on people’s accurate responses to censuses and surveys, and Wikipedia depends on the public to provide accurate content through writing and editing articles,” Burleson-Gibson says

While taking the Wiki Scholars course, Burleson-Gibson edited the COVID-19 in Virginia Wikipedia page. She credits the Wiki Education course with providing her the relevant skills and community to properly get started. 

“In addition to learning about Wikipedia’s guiding principles, the course offered loads of tips as well as reference materials, and it allowed time for lots of questions and feedback from students as we edited and wrote parts of articles,” Burleson-Gibson says. 

During a global health crisis like COVID-19, the desire for accurate and accessible information framed Burleson-Gibson’s experience on Wikipedia. 

“There was so much misinformation circulating about COVID-19, I felt that this was a way to help combat some of that by helping to provide relevant, accurate content about the COVID response in my state,” Burleson-Gibson says. 

When professionals and experts turn their attention towards open-data efforts like Wikipedia, the scope of their knowledge immediately grows. Whether it be adding information to accurately represent global issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, or adding information about other individual interests, there are clear public benefits across the board. 

Surrounded by colleagues at the Census Bureau with a similar appreciation for open-data, Burleson-Gibson considered the wide-spread impact of more Bureau professionals getting involved with Wikipedia. 

“Many of my colleagues have such a wealth of knowledge about data and statistics that may or may not be known by the general public. Having a detailed understanding about data-related subjects could be valuable for content creation and editing. Besides, learning and editing Wikipedia is fun and what a great skillset to add to one’s repertoire – whether you know much about data or not,” Burleson-Gibson said.

Burleson-Gibson left her COVID-19 Wiki Scholars course with new skills and a supportive community of Wikipedians behind her. Her words of encouragement and enthusiasm for Wikipedia reflect a larger message about the importance of open and accessible data for all. 

Hero Image Credit: https://www.nursetogether.com/, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

To take a course like the one Burleson-Gibson took, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

The Wikipedia article on ground-glass opacity — a finding from an X-ray or CT scan of the lungs — was created in 2012 and had lingered in stub form, even as the pandemic raged; ground-glass opacity is one of the most common imaging findings for COVID-19 patients. A medical student at the University of Central Florida dramatically improved the article, adding causes, patterns, and a section specific to COVID-19. The article has received more than 127,000 pageviews since the student improved it, with around 1,000 people a day consulting the student’s work during the height of the December surge in COVID cases. A student from Vanderbilt University added information about cytokine storms to the main COVID-19 article, which has received over 537,000 pageviews since the information was added.

As vaccine development became a key topic in late 2020, several student editors improved articles related to vaccines. While the COVID vaccine isn’t an attenuated vaccine, understanding the differences in vaccines was a key factor for public health officials in tackling vaccine hesitancy. Student editors in a Politics of Health Information class at McMaster University collaborated to improve the attenuated vaccine article. Since their work, the article has received more than 77,000 page views. Another group of student editors at the University of Michigan created a new article on RNA therapeutics; as an mRNA vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine is one. Since the student editors created the article in December, it’s received more than 18,000 page views.

Medical content isn’t the only important aspect of COVID-19 information improved by student editors in our program, however. Student editors from University of California at Berkeley, the University of Ottawa, and the University of New Haven contributed content to the article on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media, while others looked at the impacts of the pandemic on mental health, healthcare workers, education, and sports. A business law student editor from Babson College expanded the COVID-19 section of the eviction in the United States section, updating with the changes to eviction law during the pandemic. And a Boston University student editor created an article on Chinese women’s rights activist Liang Yu, who provided female sanitary products to doctors and nurses in Wuhan during the initial outbreak.

These student editors’ contributions helped thousands of people get access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to their instructors’ participation in our Wikipedia Student Program. For more information on the program, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Hero image: Opzwartbeek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wiki Education stepped in to fill this void. As an organization that has spent a decade building a network of academics physically located across the United States, we were uniquely qualified to reach out to experts in nearly every state. And our existing Scholars & Scientists program had previously demonstrated success in teaching experts to add their knowledge to Wikipedia articles. Thanks to the generous sponsorships provided by one of our funders, we set out to use our network to broadly improve Wikipedia’s coverage of state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic through a series of courses that ran between April 2020 and February 2021.

Our key question was: Can we empower subject matter experts across the United States to meaningfully improve the quality of English Wikipedia’s coverage of state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing Wikipedia’s readers information they’re seeking?

A year later, we have our answer. To our knowledge, this initiative was the first effort ever to engage subject-matter experts during a national emergency to systematically improve Wikipedia’s coverage of a topic crucial to the general public.

Today, we’ve published an extensive evaluation report on Meta, the central organizing wiki for the broader Wikimedia community. Reports like these are an important element of Wiki Education’s commitment to transparency, to sharing our learnings, and to acknowledging both our successes and our challenges. We welcome feedback on our evaluation report as either a comment on the talk page of the report or a comment on this blog post.

Hero image: Matt Hecht, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve always been a happy nerd. Whatever job it is I’m doing at a given time, science has always been there, sometimes close to the surface and sometimes hiding behind meetings and emails, waiting to be let out at the slightest opportunity. The pandemic has made it hard to focus on the scientific aspects of my day-to-day activities while also bombarding everyone with a tremendous amount of scientific evidence. Friends ask me the difference between the growing number of vaccines under development, send me messages about novel treatments being investigated, share conflicting accounts on the best way to use face masks… and ask for my opinion, as if I was an expert! It turns out, I can help, even if I’m not an expert. And Wikipedia opened the door for me to share the simple science behind complicated topics to a broader (if anonymous) audience.

The opportunity appeared as an email inviting me to be part of the COVID-19 Wiki Scholars Project, a 6-week training course on how to edit Wikipedia (properly, because literally anyone can do it) and help shape Wikipedia entries based on current scientific consensus. I expected it to be a technical course, on how to use the many applications associated with Wikipedia, but it was also an opportunity to take me back to a time in my life where I spend hours upon hours doing research in peer-reviewed journals, creating citation entries according to APA criteria, cross-checking facts through different sources and finally coming to the realization that I had found some true knowledge I couldn’t wait to share.

By researching trusted sources and posting my findings in the platform, I was able to do something about the information chaos that surrounds this pandemic, instead of just complaining about it, and hopefully bring science to more people than just my friends who ask about the best face mask to get, and whether test results can be trusted. I feel like I’m taking a weight off my chest by openly saying what I was silently thinking: science is for everyone, and our lives would be better if we all followed its principles.

I was not expecting to find happiness through editing a page on pandemic testing alternatives, but that’s exactly where the Wiki Scholars experience took me, back to being a happy nerd. And the best thing is, I can keep on doing it! I hope each one of us has a silver lining to this pandemic, and we all find a way to share our skills to make the world a tiny bit better.

Interested in taking a course like the one Jaqueline took? Visit learn.wikiedu.org.

Image credits: dronepicr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Jackieneumann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Though I had never edited Wikipedia myself before joining Wiki Education, I believed whole-heartedly in its mission of making knowledge free and accessible to all and was thrilled to be part of a team attempting to bridge the gap between Wikipedia and academia. I had come from academia myself, having completed a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley in 2012, and I was excited to bring my own expertise and skills to Wikipedia. Right away, I began learning the ins and outs of editing and had soon racked up edits on talk pages as Helaine (Wiki Ed). I slowly but surely became a member of the Wikipedia community, but still I had not made any content contributions in the article main space. I could speak about notability with the best of them and had shepherded thousands of students and instructors through their Wikipedia assignments, but I had yet to take those first baby steps myself.

Finally, in September of this year, I decided to take that leap. There was no better way to do so than with one of our own Wiki Scholars courses. I enrolled as a student in a course specifically devoted to improving content around COVID-19 led by my wonderful colleague Ian Ramjohn.

I chose to write a topic near and dear to my heart: how the pandemic has affected people with disabilities. I am blind myself, and while I have fared relatively well during this tumultuous period, I wanted to make sure the world had access to information about how COVID has impacted an already vulnerable community.

As User:Hblumen I got to work, scouring the internet for scant information on how the pandemic has affected people with disabilities, and finally encountered both the challenges and the heights new editors face when contributing to Wikipedia for the first time. As a blind editor, in particular, I learned that the VisualEditor is not at all accessible with screen readers and that references are tricky as well. I was glad that I had learned wikicode all those years ago when I joined the team. I also learned that, while I had not contributed article content to Wikipedia, I already knew a great deal and mostly just needed the motivation and confidence boost to make those first edits.

By the end of the course, I was incredibly proud to have written Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with disabilities. I was both dismayed but unsurprised to find a paucity of information on the topic, but I’m hopeful that my article sparks others to think about how COVID has affected populations already at high risk for a host of physical, emotional, and socioeconomic disadvantages.

Thank you to Ian and to my fellow Wiki Scholar participants for helping this would-be Wikipedian take those final critical steps. For years I have read comments from students and instructors on the pride and satisfaction that comes with seeing your edits live on Wikipedia, and now I truly understand how gratifying it is to contribute to public knowledge.

Interested in taking a course like the one Helaine took? Visit learn.wikiedu.org to see our current course offerings.

Sadly, however, that’s not every region of the country. That’s why Wiki Education launched a series of courses in our Wiki Scholars program devoted to improving the quality of content on articles related to state and regional responses to COVID-19. To date, we’ve wrapped up two courses, have a third ongoing, and are actively recruiting for more. Course fees for these courses have been paid by a generous sponsor who is supporting the improvement of COVID-19-related articles on Wikipedia.

The two courses that have wrapped up demonstrate the benefits of the Wiki Scholars model. Wiki Education staff recruits experts in public policy, political science, journalism, and other related topic areas to take a 6-week course where we teach the participants how to edit Wikipedia articles related to the pandemic. In our first two courses, 36 subject matter experts have added content to articles that have been viewed millions of times.

Many of the participants improved the “timeline” sections of state articles, adding the daily and weekly updates, and most also improved other sections in articles. One participant wrote a large section in Maine’s article on the impact to higher education in the state. The Arizona article has a section on epidemiology and public health responses written nearly entirely by a participant in one of our courses. The South Carolina article now has a section on the epidemiology and public health response, as well as impacts to K-12 and higher education schools and the economy.

Our courses also offered an opportunity for participants to address Wikipedia’s equity gaps in this content area. One participant added a section on the pandemic’s impact on the Northern Arapaho tribe to the Wyoming article. Another noted the Navajo Nation, which at the time had a higher per capita positive rate than any U.S. state, didn’t have an article about COVID-19, so our participants created one. Another participant added a section about New Mexico’s Navajo Nation to the New Mexico article.

A participant from our course wrote most of the article about North Dakota’s response, but once they finished the course, the article edits stopped as well. These courses have demonstrated that it takes more than just an individual or even a group of individuals to keep these articles up to date. Articles like this desperately need regular edits; that’s why we’re offering more courses. The work our past participants have done has demonstrated the value of these improvements; now, we need to do more.

If you’re interested in learning how to improve Wikipedia’s articles related to COVID-19, we are actively accepting applicants for our next course.

Header/thumbnail image of COVID-19 testing in Arizona by User:Prim8acs, a participant in one of our courses, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us something in recent months, it is how impactful local governments are during a crisis and how their actions (or inaction) can be a matter of life and death. That’s why I’d like to extend to you an invitation from Wiki Education to join us in improving Wikipedia pages about state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Understanding the pandemic on a global level is important, but when it comes down to deciding whether or not to go to the grocery store, people need information on a more localized scale. Wikipedia may be the most neutral way people receive information about their state’s guidelines, actions local governments have taken, and data regarding documented cases of COVID-19.

That’s why we’ll be running Wikipedia training courses with all tuition fees waived to invite scholars into the Wikipedia community and provide support as you help build these important pages:

• Course dates: The weeks of July 6th – August 14th (6 weeks)
• Time commitment: 5 hours per week (includes 1 hour of virtual meeting time)
• Free of charge
• No prior experience with Wikipedia necessary

If you have a background in political science, public policy, journalism, combined with a passion for translating complex topics into understandable and easy-to-read pieces of information, please consider applying by June 26th.

Amidst the anxieties and uncertainties of our collective future, I’d like to express my compassion for all members of our community affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are in solidarity alongside you as we all face new personal and professional challenges.

Because Wiki Education is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, we took the first steps to ensure the safety of our staff in February. We are well-equipped to work remotely and continue offering support to all program participants with little to no interruption.

Sharing reliable and trustworthy knowledge freely with others is an invaluable project that we’re honored to pursue with all of you. Never in living history has a crisis reached so far across the globe. Making sure everyone has information to best make well-informed decisions for themselves and their families right now is essential. We’re proud that our programs are helping to bring that information to where we’re all looking for it: directly into Wikipedia.

Thank you for continuing to work with us to achieve this big goal. Seeing so many people around the world getting their information about the current global health crisis from Wikipedia, everybody on staff is more than ever devoted to the mission of our organization.

Please stay safe and well,

Frank Schulenburg