Over the past decade, Kate Grillo’s classes have worked to fix that problem, at least on Wikipedia. Initially at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and now at the University of Florida, Dr. Grillo’s classes, supported by Wiki Education’s Student Program, have added almost 200,000 words to Wikipedia’s coverage of African archaeology. Student editors in the latest iteration of her class, Introduction to African Archaeology, created four new articles about archaeological sites – Takarkori in Libya, al-Khiday in Sudan, the Jarigole pillar site in Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria. In addition to creating these new articles, the class also made improvements to another 20 articles.

Takarkori is an archaeological site in southern Libya, near the border with Algeria. Evidence of human habitation dates back over 10,000 years to a period when this area, now deep in the Sahara, was much wetter and supported lakes, wetlands, and flowing streams. 

The article provides readers with a sense of the depth of history of the site and manages to meet a reader’s need for background information without delving too deeply into tangential topics. 

A good Wikipedia article needs to strike a careful balance between providing the reader with enough information to keep reading without adding so much background that it ends up duplicating information that should be in a separate article dedicated to the topic. When writing in an underdeveloped area of Wikipedia like this one, getting that balance right can sometimes be a challenge.

Al-Khiday is a group of five sites on the western bank of the Nile in Sudan that were discovered in 2004. The best-studied of these sites, al-Khiday 2, was occupied at least four separate times between the pre-Mesolithic and the Late Meroitic (a time period that relates to the city of Meroë, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush).

This article provides a glimpse at life in the Upper Nile Valley at various points in time over the course of thousands of years. It also lifts the curtain as to how archaeologists learn about life in ancient times through clues like charring in food remains, starch grain sizes, and the imprints of bacteria on prostate stones. 

Jarigole pillar site, a communal burial site in northern Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria, the capital city of the Oyo Empire which was abandoned in 1835 after Fulani attacks, round out the set of articles created by student editors in this iteration of Dr. Grillo’s class. Together, these articles help fill gaps in an area of Wikipedia where significant absences abound.

Popular – and sometimes scholarly – knowledge is shaped by the information that’s available. Wikipedia’s existence has put an incredible amount of information at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection (and a decent command of English or one of the other major language Wikipedias). But the information on Wikipedia tends to reflect the biases in popular content. By adding specific scholarly content in an area that’s less visible in the public imagining of the ancient world, student editors like those in Dr. Grillo’s classes can help chip away at systemic issues in the representation of human knowledge. 

Just by doing a class assignment, they can start to change the world.

Interested in learning more about teaching with Wikipedia and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

Hero image by Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

In Spring 2022, students in Edmund Palermo’s Biology in Materials Science class returned to the subject area for the fourth time, building on contributions by prior classes in 2017, 2018, and 2020.

Biofoams are a broad class of biologically-derived foams that now have a Wikipedia article, thanks to these students. Biofoams can include natural compounds like antlers, horseshoe crab shells and toucan beaks, but can also include synthetic compounds that serve as alternatives to petroleum-based products in areas like packaging or flip-flops. The article created by Professor Palermo’s students serves as an overview of many individual materials that previous incarnates of the class created or expanded Wikipedia articles for.

And speaking of new articles, one group of students created one on the toco toucan beak. While the beak of a single species of bird might seem like too narrow topic for its own page, the amount of research about it is enough to meet Wikipedia’s notability status. The inclusion of extensive information on the beak from the a biomaterials perspective, and its role as in biomimetic design — where it serves as a model for manmade systems — makes this article more than just one about a bird’s body part.

Fungal mycelium, the basic body tissue of most fungi, is the basis of a wide range of environmentally-friendly materials that can be used as alternatives in packaging, building materials, acoustic dampening, and in the fashion industry. By creating an article on mycelium-based materials, students in the class were able to tie together information that would otherwise be covered in a more disjointed fashion across articles about specific products or specific companies using them.

In addition to these three new articles, students in the class expanded a range of other articles. The amylopectin article, for example, was short and barely touched on its importance as a key component of starch foods like rice, potatoes and corn. The previous version also gave little useful information about the compound’s structure, history, or its important roles in diet, textiles, drug delivery systems, or tissue engineering. By adding all this and more, students in the class were able to transform the article into something much more useful to readers, while also integrating it into the wider bodies of information on Wikipedia. Connecting concepts on Wikipedia make them more discoverable, both to readers clicking links and search engines looking at information networks. The act of making these connections also inspires students to think across topics and disciplines.

Other students in the class expanded the bio-inspired photonics, nano-scaffold, and abductin articles. The last of these is especially intriguing because it’s the elastic protein that forms the hinge that connects the upper and lower halves of a bivalve mollusk’s shell together. The students were able to expand the article from four-sentences into something substantial and useful to readers.

Wikipedia’s coverage of a lot of areas is uneven. For subjects like biomaterials, which have the potential to play such an important role in the future of Earth as a livable planet capable of sustaining human life, filling those gaps is important. Maybe one of these Wikipedia articles — or one on a totally different topic one of your students creates — will help guide someone into a field where they go on to make an important discovery. We can all dream about making a difference, but by improving Wikipedia, you and your students actually are.

To incorporate an assignment like this into your next course, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support.

Mars often attracts interest from student editors — after all, it’s the best-known planet after Earth, Mars exploration is a hot topic, and its the only planet known to be entirely inhabited by robots. At the same time, a lot of the gaps that exist in information about Mars require specialist technical knowledge to understand the topic, along with access to scholarly resources that are frequently behind paywalls. A student in Journey to the Center of the Earth created a new article on the magnetic field of Mars, while one student in Planetary Atmospheres created one about Mars carbon dioxide ice clouds and others expanded the water on Mars and climate of Mars articles. In these kinds of specialized topic areas, student editors have a lot to offer.

From engagement rings, to conflict diamonds, to hidden loot in heist movies, diamonds fascinate. While people are usually only familiar with inclusions in the context of gemstones, the material trapped in diamonds during their formation can provide information about conditions in the Earth’s mantle at the time when the diamonds were formed. While inclusions are mentioned in the Wikipedia articles about both the mineral diamond and diamonds as gemstones, the nature of of the inclusions, their formation, and their importance in studying the interior of the planet isn’t a good fit in either article. A student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class was able to recognize this omission and fill it by creating the diamond inclusions article.

While earthquakes are difficult or impossible to predict, certain areas are subject to repeated cycles of earthquakes driven by the accumulation of stress, followed by periodic release. One student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class created an article about this phenomenon, the earthquake cycle while another made major expansions to the Earth’s outer core article. Others created articles about notable academics like geologist Holly Stein and geochemist François M. M. Morel.

Wiki Education’s Student Program offers opportunities for instructors in planetary sciences — be it this planet or others out there — to fill content gaps while empowering students to make a meaningful contribution. For more information, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Thumbnail image in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been a Wikipedian for 18 years. Were it a person, on Friday August 26, my account will be old enough to vote. Over the years, my role has changed from new user to administrator, from pure volunteer to that odd dual role of volunteer editor and Wiki Education staffer. In the last year I experienced an odd identity crisis when the edit count of my work account surpassed that my volunteer account. While my activity waxed and waned over the years, the drive to contribute, to make the internet better by making free knowledge widely available, has remained a constant.

Over those years, Wikipedia has changed dramatically, as has the knowledge environment in which it is embedded.

So many Wikipedians origin stories include an encyclopaedia — maybe bought by parents making a significant financial sacrifice, or an older edition purchased at a garage sale. For me, it was different. I grew up, not just in a world where knowledge was scarce, but also where it was fleeting. I learned about the world through the stories in daily newspapers. Not only did you need to catch it the day it was published — unless, for some reason, you clipped the story, there was no way to go back. Hard facts were only what you captured in your memory, and when people debated what had happened a week or a year or half a decade ago, the only verification was what you remembered.

My perceptions of what was available changed once I went to university, and later to grad school. But even though I knew so much more was available, it still wasn’t accessible. A journal database search was something you needed to request. And whether you read it in a book or a journal, your ability to access a fact depended on the quality of the notes you had taken, and on how well you organized the slips of paper that you worked from.

The internet changed things, but not always for the better. My first decade online (1994 to 2004) saw the birth of the World Wide Web and the rise of the search engine. Though it was growing explosively, the content that was online represented only a sliver of human knowledge. You could find all kinds of weird and wonderful facts online, but finding the same website twice might be a challenge. And whether to trust this arcanum was an open question.

The early 2000s brought further changes. The rise of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere meant that these websites developed more of an identity. The blogger’s creed — I link, therefore I am — meant each blogger was a window onto a world of other sites, often less popular, less widely read, but more likely to be written by an expert. But these were also the days of the Bush administration and their “Post-truth politics”. Bloggers were some of the few to challenge the alleged rationale for the invasion of Iraq, but other blogs and websites emerged as cheerleaders for the administration, or as proponents of dodgy ideas like intelligent design or what was then called global warming skepticism.

This was the state of the world when I began to contribute to Wikipedia. The old ethos of write what you know was crashing into not just a strengthening verifiability policy, but also a (still nascent) idea that you should include citations and a debate over what constituted a reliable source. Calls to include citations also faced another challenge — for many Wikipedians, sources meant sources that were available online. Even if you did consult a scholarly source, before things like Google Scholar and Google Books the only way to search these sources was something like Web of Science, which were slow and clumsy to navigate (assuming you were fortunate enough to have access to a university library).

In a world like this, with Wikipedia on the rise, knowledge was still fragile. The neutral point of view policy gave amateurs the ability to document what experts said without having to decide which experts were correct. The techno-utopian view that we might be above these debates between scholars makes sense until you realize that you need some way to distinguish between the serious scholars and the cranks. To make matters worse, members of the community might support the cranks or worse yet — you might be the one who believes the cranks.

The community eventually figured out a lot of this. Addenda like the “due and undue weight” section of the neutral point of view policy were eventually written. As the breakdown of cultural transmission of the norms of the project broke down under the weight of the “eternal September” of 2006 (where the size of the community exploded), more and more policies and guidelines were written down. The adage that policy was “descriptive, not prescriptive” became less and less true. And the encyclopaedia became less fragile.

Eighteen years after I first registered my account on the English Wikipedia, I’m amazed at what the project has become. When I started contributing to Wikipedia it was at the front lines of “post-truth politics”. Today, not only is it one of the most important sources to combat misinformation and disinformation, it’s also the place where the quality and reliability of sources is debated with more commitment and enthusiasm than anywhere else I’m aware of. It’s far from perfect, it may not even be good enough, but in aggregate, it’s probably the best hope for non-specialists looking for accurate information.

And that is a big achievement.

Back in 2019 I wrote about a study by Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley which suggested that Wikipedia content helped shape the scientists’ understanding of their own field of study. They showed that the language used in the technical literature in chemistry converged with the wording used in Wikipedia articles about a given topic. Through a fascinating study, they were able to demonstrate experimentally that this wasn’t coincidental — the way topics are discussed on Wikipedia influences the way they’re discussed in the literature. The fact that Wikipedia articles influence the way people understand their own fields highlights the importance of experts getting involved in the process of editing articles.

In a new study of Irish legal cases, Neil Thompson and colleagues were able to show that judges rely on Wikipedia articles to inform them about settled cases and precedents, and concluded that judges are relying on Wikipedia as a replacement for their own reading of Supreme Court rulings.

Much like in the previous study, the researchers created 154 new articles about Irish Supreme Court cases, and uploaded half of them to Wikipedia, while keeping the other half as a control set. Most of these articles were created by law students with the support and supervision of faculty (using a methodology based on Wiki Education’s Student Program). Wikipedia’s coverage of Irish Supreme Court cases was very incomplete, which meant that it was easy to create new articles about cases where none existed previously.

What happened next was probably not a huge surprise — creating a Wikipedia article about a case increased its rate of citation in rulings by almost 22%. While this showed that judges are relying on internet searches to locate relevant cases, it said little about how they are using the information on Wikipedia. But the second part of the study looked at the textual similarity between rulings and the Wikipedia articles. Here again, they found a statistically significant effect. In other words, judges (or, perhaps, their law clerks) were paraphrasing Wikipedia articles as they drafted their rulings.

The implications of this study are pretty major. While the best Wikipedia articles provide accurate, comprehensive, unbiased coverage of a topic, most fall short in one area or another. This is rarely intentional — while Wikipedia’s contributors are usually dedicated to producing high-quality articles, they’re mostly volunteers who face constraints of time, access to sources, and sometimes subject-matter expertise. But Wikipedia’s open nature also means that people with vested interests in the outcomes of a case have the ability to manipulate articles about important precedents.

To avoid these sorts of problems, Thompson and colleagues suggest ways to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles: “Policy-wise, this could be addressed by buttressing the reliability and review of Wikipedia content by including legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality, or by augmenting the content of authoritative but less-broad sources, and using those for the provision of legal information about particular jurisdictions.”

These are reasonable suggestions, but they’re also ones that the community has tried without much success throughout Wikipedia’s existence. It’s hard to convince experts to dedicate their limited time to reviewing Wikipedia articles. It can also be difficult for experts to work with the Wikipedia editing community, especially when outside experts don’t have a good sense of the community. (Despite the frequent assumption that Wikipedians are just random amateurs, many have advanced degrees in the subject areas where they contribute, while others have become experts while contributing over the last two decades.)

Short of convincing judges not to use Wikipedia, there are other ways to mitigate some of these problems. The more active editors there are in a subject area, the harder it is to insert bias. People pay more attention to changes to existing articles, especially if they are actively being edited. It’s much harder to insert bias into existing articles than it is to do it when you’re creating a brand new article. Programs that bring more contributors to Wikipedia — like Wiki Education’s Student Program — not only can fill content gaps in legal topic areas, they also bring more traffic and more editorial attention to these articles (and to articles that are downstream from them). After all, the articles that Thompson and colleagues used for this study were mostly created by student editors.

The other way to mitigate potential harm is to make people better consumers of information from Wikipedia. Few people who consult Wikipedia articles ever look at the history tab or the talk page, despite the fact that they can provide crucial information about the state of the article. Even fewer know about plug-ins like “Who Wrote That?“ that supply information about when individual “facts” were added (and by whom). Training judges (or the pool of legal professionals from which judges are appointed) would make them better consumers of Wikipedia. This isn’t a far-fetched idea — the model for this kind of thing exists in our Scholars & Scientists Program, where participants gain these kinds of skills (among others).

As Thompson’s research has shown, Wikipedia is influential on multiple disciplines. If you’re interested in influencing the public’s understanding of your topic area, as well as future ways of writing about your subject area, adding neutral, fact-based information to Wikipedia is the way to go. Instructors who are interested in teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support for assignments. Knowledge or disciplinary organizations, empower your staff or members to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of your topic by hosting a Wikipedia editing course.

Thumbnail image by Blogtrepreneur, (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Most people are familiar with the invasive species, but might have a hard time separating that concept from the related idea of introduced species. Familiar ideas like these got added to Wikipedia first (the invasive species article was created in 2002, while the introduced species article was created in 2003). The article on tramp species, on the other hand, wasn’t created until November 2021 when a student in Sarah Turner’s Advanced Seminar in Environmental Science class created the article. It’s a concept that fits an important part in our understanding of this topic, but as long as it had no Wikipedia article, it’s likely to be invisible to many people learning about the topic. Since undergraduates rely heavily on Wikipedia as a freely available alternative to textbooks, the topics that are missing from Wikipedia are more likely to slip through the cracks for students learning ecology.

Disease, as we have learned during the Covid-19 pandemic, is more than just the interaction between a pathogen and its host. There’s a whole world of environmental factors that means that there’s much more to disease transmission than simply infection rates. These sorts of things are part of the science of disease ecology, but more than a year into the pandemic, Wikipedia’s article on the topic was just a short overview. A student editor in the class was able to transform the article into something much more useful and information to to readers.

Climate change affects not only global temperatures, but also rainfall patterns and sea level rise. By expanding the ice sheet model and flood risk management articles, student editors were able to improve the information that’s out there for people trying to understand these important tools for forecasting changes in the world we live in. Other new articles created by students in the class include CLUE model, a spatially-explicit landuse-change model, Cooper Reef, an artificial reef in Australia, Indigenous rainforest blockades in Borneo, the Impacts of tourism in Kodagu district in Karnataka, India, and Soapstone mining in Tabaka, Kenya. Other existing articles that they made major improvements to include Alopecia in animals, Blond capuchin and Stream power.

Wikipedia’s coverage of environmental science is uneven. Many are covered well, but there are large gaps. Other articles suffer because they’re incomplete, badly organized, or out of date. This leaves a lot of room for student editors to make important contributions.

Image credit: Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 US, via Wikimedia Commons

Major waves of diversification have occurred at various times in the history of the Earth; the Cambrian explosion being the best known. During the Devonian, a geological period between 419 and 359 million years ago, the surface of the Earth was colonized by green plants. The first forests arose as plants evolved the ability to produce wood. Later in the Devonian, the first seed-producing plants evolved. This period of rapid plant evolution and greening of the land surface is known as the Devonian explosion. This greening of the land surface of the Earth represented a huge increase in biomass, which triggered a major decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide and increase in oxygen; this in turn triggered changes in ocean nutrient concentrations and cycling patterns. Although this topic was briefly covered in the article about the Devonian, Wikipedia had no article about the Devonian explosion until a student in Mitch Cruzan’s Plant Evolution class spun off a stand-alone about the Devonian explosion. By spinning off this article, the student editor was able to add a lot of valuable information to Wikipedia that would have unbalanced the main article about the Devonian, had it been added there. In addition, the creation of a separate article increased the visibility of this information as a plant biology topic, as distinct from the parent article about a geological period.

Life on land posed a variety of new challenges for plants including the need for support (air is much less buoyant than water) and reproduction. In the water, it’s possible for sex cells to swim from male to female, but this doesn’t work so well on land. Beyond this is the fact that although reproduction in plants is superficially similar to reproduction in animals, there are actually two separate generations – a haploid gametophyte generation and a diploid sporophyte generation. As plants colonized the land there was an evolutionary trend towards endospory – the retention of the gametophyte generation within the sporophyte generation. While this important process was mentioned a few times in Wikipedia prior to this term, the creation of the endospory in plants article by a student in this class filled a major gap in Wikipedia’s coverage.

People often think of species as distinct entities that are unable to interbreed or, if they do interbreed, the resulting offspring is sterile (like a mule). In reality, a lot of species are capable of interbreeding; a group of species that frequently engage in natural hybridization is called a syngameon. As hybrids back-cross with members of their parental species, genetic material can be exchanged between species, a process which is called introgression. Introgressive hybridization in plants is especially important because of its use by plant breeders to improve important crop species like wheat and ornamental species like daffodils. Student editors in the class were able to create new articles about these two topics; while the syngameon article is entirely new, Wikipedia already had an article on introgression, but its section on plants was just two sentences long. With a broad topic like introgression, it can sometimes be difficult to decide whether you should expand a section of an existing article or create a new daughter article, but in this case the importance of introgression in plant breeding makes the creation of a new article a very reasonable choice.

Student editors in the class also created articles on related topics like transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in plants, pollinator-mediated selection, photoautotrophism and temporal plasticity, while others expanded the developmental selection and heterospory articles. Advanced undergraduate classes like this one can bring the ability to recognize — and fill — important gaps like this one to Wikipedia. Without their participation, lacunae like these might otherwise go unnoticed.

Interested in improving Wikipedia in your subject area? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on how to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education classrooms.

Image credit: Eduard Riou (1838-1900) from The World Before the Deluge 1872, United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Over the last few years, the tragedy of Kalief Browder, an African American boy who was imprisoned without trial on Rikers Island for three years (and later died by suicide) has gotten more of the attention it deserves, but in Spring 2017 it was still possible for a student in a Wiki Education-supported class to make important changes ot the way he was presented in Google searches by adding 26 words to the lead section of the article.

Because of Wikipedia’s ubiquity, changes like this can be transformative. And student editors who improve Wikipedia articles as part of a Wiki Education-supported class are in an excellent position to address racial justice issues while making articles better for all readers.

In addition to creating and expanding articles about Black anthropologists like Donna Auston and John L. Jackson Jr., students in Hanna Garth’s BlackLivesMatter class created an article about the Museum of Black Joy and expanded the Black Lives Matter art article. Another group of students expanded the school discipline article to add to and expand coverage of disparities in the ways that school discipline impacts Black students.

When faced with a broad topic like school discipline, it’s easy to focus on the median. The task of trying to cover an entire area of knowledge like this can be overwhelming, and it’s entirely natural to start with what’s broadly applicable to all groups. But when you create a framework about the median, the next editor who comes along and tries to expand the page is likely to be guided by what’s already there. Over time, as a page is expanded and revised, you can end up with a page that seems complete, but actually elides important information. By adding topics like these to an article, student editors can fill important gaps. And when the experience of Black and other minoritized communities are added to Wikipedia, they become that much more visible to the world.

Students in Laura Gutierrez’s Hispanic USA class focused on a number of articles related to racial justice, in particular the Sterilization of Latinas articles, adding a lot of information about policies in California and the eugenicist organization that spearheaded them, and about the treatment of women in Puerto Rico. Striking in their additions was this quote:

the Immigration Act of 1924 further developed the idea that labor-migrants were needed, but women and children were not as there was a fear of Latino and Immigrant invasion

Another group of students in the class expanded the Bracero program article. By adding information about the wives and families of the men employed in this program, the students added humanizing dimensions to an article that previously covered the program in mostly economic and labor history terms. The class also created a new article about the 1970 takeover of the Lincoln Hospital in South Bronx by the Young Lords. The goal of the takeover was to raise awareness of the disparities in health care and health outcomes experienced in this primarily poor, primarily non-white community.

Topics related to the health of Black and minoritized communities were also addressed by a student in Carwil Bjork-James’ Biology and Culture of Race class who created an article on race and maternal health in the United States and by students in Diana Strassmann’s Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities class who created articles about medical racism in the United States and environmental racism in the United States. Other students in this class also expanded the racial disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States article and the racial capitalism article, among many others.

The article on discrimination based on skin color attracted edits both by a student in this class and by a student in Coleman Nye’s Feminist Approaches to Research class.

While Wikipedia policy does a good job of addressing deadnaming, the issue of slave names is only indirectly handled through the guidelines related to changed names. This mirrored in a comparison between the encyclopaedia’s 1000-word deadnaming article and the slave name article which covers the common meaning together, the practice in Ancient Rome and Sinéad O’Connor’s conversion to Islam, all in a little over 300 words. This, in a large part, reflects the way that Wikipedia reflects the composition of its editing community. Student editors are part of the process of making that editing community more representative.

Interested in adding a Wikipedia assignment to your class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image credit: August Schwerdfeger from Minneapolis, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I was born in a town built on the slopes of a single hill standing beside the sea on the west coast of Trinidad. Though it rises less than 200 m above its surroundings, the hill is the only high point between a flat plain to the east, and the Gulf of Paria to the west. The hill is also Nabarima, the Guardian of the Waters, and the residence of one of the four Kanobos of the Warao, who are an indigenous people of the area. Knowing this, I headed to Wikidata to try to incorporate Érica’s suggestion.

And I ran into problems immediately. In Wikidata, information is modeled as part of a “triple”, where the thing being modeled (the particular hill that my home town is built on) is associated with a property that takes a specific value. In this case, the property I was interested in is called “instance of”, and it’s straightforward enough to assign that property the value “hill”: San Fernando Hill is an instance of a hill. But it’s also the residence of a Kanobo.

So what, precisely, is a Kanobo? A divine spirit, of a sort. A grandfather spirit. There’s a part of my brain that handles unstructured, nonlinear information effectively. But that doesn’t help much when you’re trying to add values to Wikidata.

And how do I model “residence of” a divine being? For guidance, I looked at Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. I tried Valhalla. I even checked out the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. None of these left me the wiser. To model the hill properly I suspect I would have to model it as an instance of a “residence of a Kanobo”, but first I would need to create an item for “residence of a Kanobo”. And to do that, I’d need to create an item for Kanobo. It’s difficult, I’m out of my depth, so I end up going with “instance of” a religious site. Whose religion? Neither Wikidata nor Wikipedia will tell you. And even if you found your way to the Warao people article on Wikipedia, you’d learn that they are an indigenous group in Venezuela, with little hint of their presence in Trinidad. Archaeologists like Arie Boomert believe that the Warao were the original inhabitants of Trinidad, but the borders drawn by the Spanish and the British left the Warao cut off, foreigners in what is by right their homeland.

Across Wikipedia, the connection between indigenous people and their lands is cut off. While land acknowledgements have become common, especially in academic settings, there’s a large gap between knowing whose land you’re on and understanding how those people relate to this land. If we’re lucky, a Wikipedia article will tell us the indigenous name of a particular geological feature, but it’s extremely rare for the article to document more than that.

The Denali article documents seven indigenous names for the mountain and group them into two categories of meaning — “the tall one” and “big mountain” — but says nothing about how indigenous Alaskans see or relate to the mountain. It’s in the category “sacred mountains”, but the article fails to explain why. Visit the Wikidata item for Denali and you’ll find nothing about sacredness or spiritual meanings.

Wikipedia and Wikidata aren’t notably bad in this regard, but I believe they should be better. Much better. It’s a problem that’s systemic — it’s hard to add content to Wikidata when the statements don’t exist to build the relationships. And it’s harder to add the statements to Wikidata when the relevant articles don’t exist on Wikipedia. But in the end, it’s hard to write about Kanobos when you don’t actually understand what they are.

Non-indigenous contributors can — and should — work to improve the coverage of Indigenous content across Wikimedia projects, but unless the movement includes more Indigenous people writing about their own communities, we will always fall short. That challenge is exacerbated by the fact that Indigenous communities aren’t interchangeable, just as manitō isn’t interchangeable with Kanobo.

Native American Heritage Month is a good time to reflect on our movement’s shortfalls in this regard. How do we work in partnership with Indigenous communities to tell their own stories? And how do we convey an invitation honestly, knowing that our sourcing policies that exclude so much knowledge?

But while we grapple with ideas, we also need action. Do you, or your colleague teach at Tribal Colleges in the US? Put them in touch with our Wikipedia Student Program. Do you know someone who can sponsor a Wiki Scholars course or a Wikidata course with a focus on Indigenous communities? Please get in touch.

Image credit: Denali National Park and Preserve, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons