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

Like many notable women of color in STEM, Hernandez’s work was missing on Wikipedia – until just two months ago, when four undergraduates living across the country from Hernandez came together to add her story.

“Jessica Hernandez is an Indigenous scientist who gets very little exposure and advocates for communities and groups that are also underrepresented,” said Dayanara Mendez, a first-year English student at Lone Star College-Kingwood, a community college in Houston, Texas. “To get the chance to write an article about a woman of color in STEM, especially since I’m Hispanic and I always love the chance to learn more about other Latinos, made this a great opportunity.”

Classmates Natalie Ramirez, Alexandria Ravina, and McKenna Sealy joined Mendez to create the new Wikipedia article for Hernandez, working collaboratively to outline sections, find high quality sources for citations, and review each other’s research and writing. For Sealy, the Wikipedia assignment was a chance to share an inspiring and important perspective.

“Jessica Hernandez has a lot to offer our world from her Indigenous perspective and research as an environmental scientist, activist, author, and researcher,” said Sealy. “She’s learned a lot through her family heritage about the environment, and that, combined with her formal education, can be very powerful in helping us to better understand the world around us and how to take care of it.”

Sealy noted the power of Wikipedia in shaping awareness and understanding of notable figures like Hernandez, emphasizing its accessibility.

“Because of Wikipedia, no one needs a database that costs money to learn more about people making a great impact on the world,” Sealy explained. “The assignment helped me realize that we can all contribute to big and important things even if we feel small and don’t think we can have an impact.”

At first, Mendez dreaded the research for the project, but once she began, quickly changed her mind.

“When I actually started, I found that it was pretty fun,” Mendez shared. “It was kind of challenging and I’m grateful for it because it was something new. It helped kill the boredom that I normally get from writing the same kind of essay consistently.” 

While she was a little nervous for the Wikipedia page to go live for the world’s eyes, Mendez received positive feedback from friends and would look forward to another Wikipedia assignment in the future.

Sealy agreed, noting the feeling of accomplishment when they finalized and published the article.

“This was a great assignment compared to a traditional assignment because rather than turning in a paper no one will ever see again, I’m actually making a difference and my work will be seen,” said Sealy.

Guided by course instructor Dr. Brian Shmaefsky, the group’s Wikipedia assignment is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which encourages the creation of new biographies of diverse people in STEM on Wikipedia.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates and resources that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.

Explore other related stories:

• Adding Claibourne Smith’s Wikipedia article: “like it was a piece of art that I kept looking at”
• Telling the story of an African American chemist
• Clovis students add biographies of diverse people in STEM

These student editors may have channeled their research on birth control into unexpected areas of Wikipedia, but they weren’t the only students in Chris Babits’ History of Sexuality class who focused on adding information related to contraception to the online encyclopedia. Classmates also enhanced related pages including the Cornstock laws and Family planning in the United States. And until one Utah student jumped in, the Views on birth control in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints page was missing arguably the most relevant view: the church’s current stance on contraception. 

Just as real-world events can lead to spikes in readership of related Wikipedia articles, student editors can be motivated to work on topics that experience a peaked level of public interest, wanting to add information to the in-demand area of knowledge.

Babits’ students’ decision to explore the topic of contraception may have been influenced by the real-world interest in the information following a milestone decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court officially ruled to reverse Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. The decision undoubtedly drew attention to Wikipedia’s abortion article, which noted a significant jump in page views the following day, as well as to Wikipedia’s article on birth control, which nearly quadrupled in daily readership by June 25. 

So it should come as no surprise that Babits’ class, who’s collective edits on Wikipedia articles have been viewed nearly one million times, isn’t the only recent class in our Wikipedia Student Program to address knowledge gaps related to contraception. 

In fall 2023, three of Caroline Smith’s students at The George Washington University collaborated to create a new article on emergency contraceptives on college campuses, exploring the history, accessibility, and legislation of access at colleges and universities across the country. Their article explores the first time morning-after pills were sold in vending machines on a college campus at The Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, the spread of the concept to other institutions, and the related legislation.

This spring term, four of Smith’s students also worked together to create another new Wikipedia article to share the history of Julie, a healthcare company that markets a non-prescription emergency contraceptive pill. Julie launched their product in September 2022 in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade with a mission of removing stigmas around emergency contraception and increasing access for marginalized communities.

By filling in missing information for topics of public interest and need, student editors like Babits’ and Smiths’ can make tremendous impact through the Wikipedia assignment. Interested in learning more and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

In the 1950’s, the Canadian government set forth a campaign that resulted in the mass expulsion of federal workers, military members, and police force members that identified as or were suspected of being part of the LGBTQ+ community. The institutional persecution of LGBTQ+ people in Canada is known as the Gay Purges and spanned almost half a century from the 1950’s to 1990’s. This significant part of Canadian LGBT history didn’t exist in any language of Wikipedia until a student in Jennifer Evans’ course, History of Sexuality, created it. Fast forward months later, and the article was translated for the French Wikipedia, and is now available for readers in both official languages of Canada. This one example is unfortunately emblematic of the wide scale underrepresentation that the LGBTQ+ community faces on Wikipedia, but students in our program are making significant strides in remedying these content gaps.

If we dig a little deeper, a key influence in the Canadian Gay Purges was the Lavender Scare in the late 1940’s in the United States, where thousands of LGBTQ+ workers across American institutions were expelled from their jobs. Investigations into federal workers’ sexuality continued into the 90’s, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the State Department formally apologized for the Lavender Scare. Despite the lasting impact of these discriminatory practices, the US experienced a major shift in its political culture in 2018 known as the Rainbow wave. This term refers to the unprecedented number of openly LGBTQ+ candidates running for political office in the United States for the 2018 election year. Created by a student in Instructor Diana O’Brien’s course, the Rainbow wave article details the history of LGBTQ+ folks in politics and representation in the US government.

In addition to covering historical discrimination, students across courses also created several articles on activist groups in LGBTQ+ movements. Students from Jennifer Evans History of Sexuality class created the article on an activist organization out of San Diego, CA called San Diego Blood Sisters. The organization sponsored lesbian blood drives in order to help with the country’s blood supply shortage during the AIDs crisis in the 80’s. Other students made sure to create content inclusive of gender identities, like the improvements done to the Sex work movements article. Students in Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Gender and Sexuality in Latinx Pop Culture added a section on transgender sex work movements, highlighting the the intersecting issues faced by transgender people in this line of work due to their transgender identity.

Students working in this specific topic area of LGBTQ+ studies come up against the well-known challenges of establishing notability and finding enough reliable sources to support their topic. It is well established that Wikipedia’s content gaps are a reflection of the broader systemic bias present in society. It is no easy task for student editors to find the necessary information needed to bring these LGBTQ+ topics into existence on Wikipedia. But it is exactly because of their unique position as students in higher education with institutional access to paywalled information that they can increase the much needed representation of LGBTQ+ content on Wikipedia.

In addition to the entries on activism, students also wrote about the cultural and artistic contributions of LGBTQ+ people across the globe. A student in Danielle M. DeMuth’s class, translated the Spanish article on LGBT literature in Iceland for the English Wikipedia. While students in Alma Lopez’s Queer Arts class, generated the biographies of several queer artists like Joey Terrill and Homo Riot. Together, the articles mentioned throughout this blog have been viewed around 14,376 times. By participating in knowledge creation for the most visited encyclopedia in the world, student editors are ensuring the legacy and resilience of the LGBTQ+ community is there for thousands to read about.

For an upper-division composition course for engineers at the University of Southern California (USC), we edited a Wikipedia article on the Chinese online marketplace, Temu, by adding over 3,700 words and 56 references and raising the article’s maturity rating from start-class to intermediate-class. This article is very popular with daily average views in excess of 6,700, and our edits have been viewed over 110,000 times. By doing this assignment, we honed our writing, research, and collaboration skills and we were also able to integrate our multilingual skills in a formal classroom assignment. In addition, writing for a real-life and public audience helped us to view our abilities as students in a U.S. university in a more expansive way, as we could see how our language skills are valued in the classroom and on Wikipedia. 

While we all are proficient in Mandarin, we come from different backgrounds in North America and China. Nicole was born in Toronto, Canada and grew up in Beijing, speaking Mandarin at home. However, she spoke English almost exclusively at school starting in the sixth grade, as she attended an international school where speaking English was strictly enforced. Nicole majors in Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy (IYA). Peiyi also majors in Arts, Technology, the Business of Innovation at IYA  and is from Beijing. Peiyi’s first language is Mandarin, and he began learning English from an early age. Iris, from Northern California’s Bay Area, studies at IYA alongside Peiyi and Nicole. Iris is proficient in Cantonese and attended an English and Mandarin immersion school from grades K-8. The engineering major of the group, Juntong, studies computer science and applied mathematics, and like Peiyi, he was born and raised in Beijing. He expanded his English-language skills by taking Advanced Placement classes and studying abroad in high school.

We chose to work on the Temu article because we were familiar with Temu’s parent company, PinDuoDuo in China, and also because the article received a lot of daily page views but was missing a lot of key information. We wanted to help make the page more comprehensive and balanced, as it originally consisted mostly of the company’s negative reviews. As a team, we discussed some of the potential biases of the English-language sources towards Chinese businesses and brainstormed new ways of creating a well-rounded article that included the company’s problems, as well as information about how it operates. We used our Chinese-language abilities to conduct research to find quality sources to add more reliable content to the Temu article. For example, Nicole suggested we use a Chinese database, CNKI, to find academic research about Temu’s discounting and marketing policies. Because of her experience with working with CNKI sources at Tsinghua University, she was confident with the database’s credibility. Juntong also used popular Chinese news sources like NetEase for company information and facts about Temu’s parent company, PinDuoDuo. Applying these sources, we added information that is difficult to find in English-language sources.

Despite choosing the Temu page for its high volume of readers, we were still surprised at the negative and positive reactions of other editors to our additions and some of their wholesale reversions caught us off guard. Rather than engage in edit wars, however, we worked with our professor to reach out to editors and learned that they perceived our initial edits to be overly promotional and biased; in response, we removed any content that lacked a neutral tone and added more reputable sources. In this way, vigilant editors helped improve our work, and our subsequent edits about Temu’s logistics, lawsuits, and pricing strategies were not reverted. As of today, Peiyi, who, along with Iris and Juntong, made the edits on Wikipedia on behalf of our group, is the top editor for the article in terms of amount of text added.

We take great pride in our contributions to Temu’s Wikipedia page, as they contribute to the world’s understanding of a growing global company. Like many college students, we have been taught to avoid Wikipedia because anyone can edit it. However, looking at the obstacles we encountered even when adding information from reliable sources, we realized that information on Wikipedia is highly scrutinized by editors who care about Wikipedia’s quality. We also learned that adding information is not enough – we must also consider the geopolitical context in which editors operate while keeping in mind the goal of providing neutral information. 

As one of the few instances in the U.S. composition classroom in which our multilingual skills were officially part of the curriculum, the Wikipedia assignment helped boost our confidence in our communication skills. We not only added information that might not otherwise be available to English-speaking Wikipedia, but we also learned that our cultural insights can be critical tools for making meaningful and lasting contributions to the world’s encyclopedia.

DeLoatch’s life story is one of championing African American engineers. He provided an opportunity for countless of his students to see him as a role model. That makes him exactly the kind of person who Wiki Education is empowering students like Kimberly to add to Wikipedia, thanks to an initiative funded by the Broadcom Foundation to support diverse students as they add biographies of the hidden figures of STEM to Wikipedia.

“If it weren’t for this assignment I’m not sure if I would have ever been introduced to Eugene DeLoatch and all of the other subjects of my classmates’ Wikipedia biographies,” Kimberly says. “Ultimately I gained an abundance of knowledge while writing this article.”

Kimberly is an elementary school teacher in San Jose, California, who’s pursuing her doctorate in educational leadership from Santa Clara University. She constantly uses Wikipedia but had never thought about contributing herself until her instructor this term, Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles, assigned Kimberly and her classmates to create biographies of diverse figures in STEM.

“I was excited, intrigued, and intimidated all at the same time,” she says. “I knew it was going to take a lot of thought, preparation, and energy to create an article. My initial impression of this assignment was, ‘this is innovative!’ Requiring us to become Wiki editors and create a Wikipedia biography article is unprecedented, and I would choose a Wikipedia assignment over a traditional term paper every time. Not only did we learn a valuable skill, but provided a service to the community.”

Kimberly took Wiki Education’s training and got feedback from Wiki Education staff on her draft. She found the experience meaningful, and intends to contribute content again, as part of her efforts to highlight achievements of African Americans.

“Learning about Wikipedia’s lack of biographies of people of color and women in STEM fields opened my eyes to the privilege and power that news and social media platforms possess,” Kimberly says. “Our nation has a history of presenting information that portrays African Americans and people of color in a negative light. The absence of positive contributions from groups that have been historically marginalized can be equally oppressive. Because of these inequities that exist, I made a conscious decision to choose an African American male as a subject. After learning about DeLoatch’s development of Morgan State University’s engineering program, and that he is responsible for training more African American engineers than anyone else in the world, writing his Wikipedia biography became more than a graded assignment. DeLoatch deserves the type of public recognition that possessing a Wikipedia biography article grants.”

“I’ve referenced Wikipedia extensively throughout my academic career and enjoyed the idea of contributing to it,” says Marina, who just wrapped up her first year of the Social Justice Leadership EdD program.

Her course was participating in an initiative funded by the Broadcom Foundation to create diverse biographies of people in STEM on Wikipedia, so Marina set out to create the biography of Arnaldo Díaz Vázquez. As a self-identified Latina, Marina says she wanted to increase the presence of Latinx scholars on Wikipedia.

But she didn’t stop there. A guest lecture by Dr. Daniel Solórzano in another class she was taking inspired Marina to learn more about his work. She found that many of the scholars whose work she looked up to were connected to him.

“I became curious about what his Wikipedia page might say and how extensive it might be. I was shocked that Dr. Solórzano didn’t have a page despite having hundreds of people study under him for several decades, many of whom have been successful in their own right,” she says. “After my shock subsided, I thought about our assignment and why we were creating the pages in the first place; because of an underrepresentation of people of color on Wikipedia in STEM fields. I realized that underrepresentation might also be the case for scholars of color in Education on Wikipedia.”

Armed with her research mindset and newfound knowledge of how Wikipedia worked, Marina dug deeper. She searched for academics that inspire and inform her work, such as Dr. Angela Valenzuela (aesthetic vs. authentic caring), Dr. William G. Tierney (cultural integrity vs. cultural suicide), Dr. Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar (school and kin support networks), and Dr. Mark Granovetter (social network theory), among others.

“I was disheartened to find that those who identify as people of color, Dr. Valenzuela and Dr. Stanton-Salazar, did not have Wikipedia pages. Yet those who identify as white, Dr. Tierney and Dr. Granovetter, both did,” Marina says. “I wasn’t surprised, and yet I still felt disappointed. This frustration, added to the disappointment of Dr. Solórzano not having a page, caused me to want to do something beyond simply being upset; I wanted to take action. Creating a Wikipedia article for Dr. Solórzano allows me to expand on whose knowledge we value and whom we consider important enough to have a Wikipedia page.”

Marina says she felt compelled  to start a page for Dr. Solórzano after learning how to create and edit Wikipedia articles and is now confident that she can. Given Wikipedia’s neutrality and conflict of interest rules, it’s better for someone like her — who has no personal connection to the subject — to create the article. So she is working on it.

She credits Wiki Education’s staff (with special thanks to Wikipedia Expert Brianda Felix) for  helping her learn the ropes of Wikipedia. Marina says her favorite part of the assignment was sharing her course output  with friends and family instead of a dense, jargon-heavy academic paper.

As a scholar of education and information science, Marina sees the value of the assignment in developing  open educational resources (OERs) like Wikipedia as a way  to support students of color as a future university librarian.

“Most people assume that information literacy is intuitive, but it’s not, particularly when finding and utilizing academic resources such as library search engines,” Marina says. “At the beginning of the quarter, we discussed OERs and how people access information. This conversation, combined with my developing interest in the field of library sciences and  supporting students of color in expanding their information literacy skills, made this assignment particularly impactful. I considered how many people without access to academic resources such as scholarly journals and peer-reviewed articles use OERs such as Wikipedia. I also thought about the frustration that comes with being a student, trying to complete an assignment, and hitting a wall because the institution you belong to doesn’t have access to a particular journal. Despite my extensive experience searching for academic resources, this continues to happen to me. Now, more than ever, I realize the value of OERs and am excited about contributing to one through Wikipedia.”

And she’s grateful for the skills she gained. She hopes the articles she’s adding to Wikipedia will help raise the profile of other scholars of color.

“Without this assignment, I don’t think I would have thought twice about not finding a Wikipedia page for scholars of color that I admire,” she says. “The skills I learned through the experience of completing this assignment will benefit me long after this class ends. I now know more about OERs, adding to them, and will encourage others to do the same. I look forward to completing an initial draft of Dr. Solórzano’s Wikipedia page so that more people learn about his extensive and powerful work. I hope that creating Dr. Solórzano’s page supports communities  of color by amplifying our voices and lived experiences so that the lenses applied to research on our communities aren’t all deficit-based and instead, highlight our strengths.”

Take lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides, for example. This is an important material in the lithium-ion batteries made for electric vehicles and our phones. Why is that? How do they work? Well, you can ask Enoch Rassachack who wrote the Wikipedia article about it as part of an assignment. He’s completing an honours degree in chemistry at the University of British Columbia and entering his final year of undergraduate study. He drew upon his studies and research experience to update this public resource.

“I have some co-op experience working with batteries which helped me find this article,” Enoch shared. “I also hope to work as a researcher in materials chemistry after (hopefully) going to grad school, and this project helped me practice communicating some of the knowledge I acquired. I see climate change as the key issue defining this century as well, so I hoped to work on an article that would educate people on something related to it, whether it be atmospheric and environmental chemistry, or technology that’s helping counteract the climate crisis. Considering all this, the page on lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides fit me perfectly.”

Most of Enoch’s improvements to the article focus on adding new sections about the material’s structure and synthesis. The original version of the article touched upon these points a bit, but Enoch knew he could build upon it with the academic sources he had on hand. He also found the introductory lede section to be difficult to follow without already being knowledgeable on battery materials. This is the beauty of students engaging in this science communication work. They remember what it was like learning about these topics for the first time. But they also have developed some subject matter expertise in their studies. Enoch simplified the opening paragraphs for Wikipedia’s general audience.

“While a majority of my edits involved technical writing, my main goal was to help folks who hand’t heard of NMC materials get a basic understanding of what they are. To this end, the relatively short lead section was the most important part of the article to get right, in my opinion. Of course, my work on the body sections were also valuable, as the summarized technical knowledge would be useful for more savvy chemists/material scientists. But for most readers on Wikipedia, these sections would not be nearly as helpful as the lead.”

For Enoch, this practice in distilling a complex topic into digestible and concise explanations was good practice. He knows he’ll draw upon these skills in his future classes and career.

“There is a lot of focus on more complicated details in an undergraduate chemistry program and even in the technical writing course I did this Wikipedia assignment in, so trying to write for a more general audience was a nice change,” he shared. “Being able to generalize my research later on as a scientist will likely be a useful skill, too. I know that public sentiment can potentially be a factor in getting research funding so spreading knowledge about my own work to people without my chemistry training could help with getting grants. Practicing more concise writing will also help me be clearer in my writing in all aspects of any future career.

“I think Wikipedia can be a great reference tool as well as a good starting point for curious individuals to begin looking into certain topics. Being an online encyclopedia makes it really unique because it’s very convenient for finding generally credible information, but can still be scrutinized since anyone can modify articles. Summarizing topics is Wikipedia’s biggest strength so it is most useful for finding general knowledge in a field without going too much into detail.”

All in all, Enoch found the experience to be valuable in many ways. Considering most students say they’ve been told never to use Wikipedia, diving into its inner-workings and learning to interact with the resource critically and actively is a great experience.

“This was one of the most unique assignments I’ve ever done and gave me a good glimpse behind one of the best Internet resources available. It really showed me a more balanced side to Wikipedia; I knew how the site operated before doing the assignment, but actually taking part in edits gave me much more appreciation for the anonymous users that edit or write huge parts of articles. It’s a lot more work than it seems! My expectations for information from Wikipedia were tempered down closer to reality, too, after seeing how many pages still needed significant work in project pages. It’s still a super useful resource, but its limitations as an ever-expanding collection of knowledge are much clearer, which will ultimately help me use Wikipedia more effectively.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates and resources that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.

Dayanna Perez is a senior at California State University Dominguez Hills, who’d never heard of a Latina working for NASA until she wrote the biography of Christina Hernández.

“I chose Christina Hernández because she is the very first representation that I have seen in all my 22 years of Latinas in the aerospace field,” Dayanna says.

Inspiring students to understand there is a diversity of role models in the STEM field is a key element of the project. And what better place to do that than Wikipedia, the first place people turn to when wanting to know more about someone? But Wikipedia’s representation gaps lead many people to not find biographies of people of color or women; instead, figures in STEM with biographies on Wikipedia are often white men.

“Learning about Wikipedia’s lack of biographies of people of color and women in STEM fields opened my eyes to the privilege and power that news and social media platforms possess. Our nation has a history of presenting information that portrays African Americans and people of color in a negative light. The absence of positive contributions from groups that have been historically marginalized can be equally oppressive. Because of these inequities that exist, I made a conscious decision to choose an African American male as a subject,” says Kimberly Ivy, a student in Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles’s class who created the biography of Eugene M. DeLoatch. “After learning about DeLoatch’s development of Morgan State University’s engineering program, and that he is responsible for training more African American engineers than anyone else in the world, writing his Wikipedia bio became more than a graded assignment. DeLoatch deserves the type of public recognition that possessing a Wikipedia biography article grants.”

All told, students this spring added 18 new biographies of STEM professionals of color. The biographies have already received thousands of page views, bringing more attention to the contributions of people like:

• Rodney Adkins, the first African American senior vice president at IBM
• Abdul–Aziz Yakubu, a scholar and mathematical biologist who chaired Howard University’s mathematics department
• Marcus McCraven, a nuclear scientist who served as the only African American engineer on the team who built the hydrogen bomb at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Asmau Ahmed, an advocate for women in technology and founder of Plum Perfect, a beauty technology company
• Camille Hearst, a technical entrepreneur who leads Spotify for Artists
• Juan C. Meza, an influential mathematician and computer scientist

In crafting these biographies for Wikipedia, the students also learn key research, writing, media literacy, and collaboration skills. As students graduate and pursue careers, these skills become even more valuable.

“Wikipedia has helped students to understand more about why they should grow, learn, and earn a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They were able to be proud of people who look like them. Wikipedia has helped students to continue to see others who are working in many of the areas where many minorities are underrepresented,” said Corry Stevenson, a professor at Denmark Technical College, a Historically Black College and University, whose students created the biography of Marc Hannah. “Students gained a better understanding for procedures and requirements for why reading and writing skills are needed in today’s careers, and many of the students have modified their views. This initiative helped change their mind about pursuing a career in STEM.”

If you’re a college or university instructor at a diverse institution in the United States who’s interested in adding more biographies of historically marginalized people in STEM, teach with Wikipedia! If you want to learn more, register for one of our upcoming webinars.