What if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual but in your ability to be part of a collective? You can’t solve the climate crisis alone, but it’s even more true that we can’t solve it without you. – Mary Annaïse Heglar

When people first learned about Wikipedia in 2001, they couldn’t fathom its eventual success. Building a massive online encyclopedia that relies on individual contributions to share knowledge? This is a lost cause! 22 years later, Wikipedia has proven that we can imagine a better world and collectively work to create it. Small contributions from people all over the globe working together and on their own to make something influential for the good of humankind. This sounds a lot like what we need to do in order to mitigate climate change.

Wikipedia gets billions of visitors every month and actually affects peoples’ behavior, so representing topics well on the site has a wide-reaching impact. That’s why it’s vital that Wikipedia represents the latest in climate science and solutions.

We’re thrilled to be doing just that in our latest Wiki Scientists course sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS). One of the central components of the APS mission is to share physics knowledge. Since 2019, the association has fulfilled this promise by partnering with Wiki Education to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of physics and physicists. APS has given 93 members—from a high school student to a Nobel Prize laureate—the opportunity to practice their science communication on a worldwide stage, write biographies of historically excluded physicists, and leverage Wikidata—the open data repository behind Wikipedia–for research, dissemination, and teaching. APS members in this Initiative have reached 31.1 million Wikipedia readers with their work in only three years.

“If other associations have the goals of fostering equity, inclusion, and diversity in their field, as well as increasing access to their discipline’s knowledge, Wikipedia is a great avenue to explore,” says Allie Lau, Public Engagement Programs Manager at APS.

Communicating new discoveries as they happen is one great way experts can elevate their field through Wikipedia. An APS Wiki Scientist from MIT added a recent notable demonstration of quantum supremacy to the quantum computing article, which received 1.8 million views in 2021 and 2022 after they made these changes. We’re excited to have that kind of impact come from our current course with APS, which is working on energy and climate science, especially as advances in mitigation strategies and technologies become newly available. We’re particularly thrilled to be working with the American Physical Society in this mission because they have long urged members and the surrounding academic community to research and understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to develop the technological solutions for the near and longer term.

Disseminating physics research through a popular open access tool like Wikipedia is important for advancing science. Research shows that journal articles cited in science-related Wikipedia articles receive a boost in citations; language in those Wikipedia articles affects future scientific literature; and traffic to knowledge institution websites (like those of academic journals) increases. Thus, this project helps fulfill the mission to share science with the public, and the work the APS Wiki Scientists do will help people make decisions informed by science.

APS members in our most recent Wiki Scientists course offer a diverse range of expertise including:

• Studio physics
• Thermoelectricity
• Extreme condition physics
• Nanophysics
• Particle physics
• History and philosophy of physics
• Technical writing for congress
• Instructional design, and more.

They will gather with our Wikipedia experts each week over Zoom. There, they will bring their expertise as physicists to address content gaps on Wikipedia related to energy and the climate. Together, they represent a cohort of scientists who are approaching climate science from many angles. We’re thrilled to see what they will do, both as individual contributors to Wikipedia and as a collective force for climate communication.

Sign up to be part of an upcoming course focused on climate solutions. Or visit partner.wikiedu.org to start building your own Wikipedia Initiative with our support.

In four Wiki Scholars courses, museum professionals who work at one of the Smithsonian’s nearly 200 Affiliates collaborated with each other and Wiki Education’s team to add and expand biographies of notable women on Wikipedia. Over 6 weeks, they learned how to use Wikimedia projects as tools in their work to preserve and share knowledge with the public. All told, we trained 74 museum professionals how to edit Wikipedia, representing 53 different Smithsonian Affiliate museums, and they improved more than 160 articles. By embedding Wikipedia know-how within their institution, the Smithsonian has developed a network of new Wikipedians to continue this important work both through their own editing and through organizing local projects.

This is the story of how we worked together to bring high-quality information about historic women to the public — and how other organizations can make that happen for their faculty, staff, or members.

There are two key components to this project:

1. museum professionals from across the United States learn how to edit Wikipedia; 
2. we expand public knowledge of notable American women from across the U.S. by leveraging museum collections and materials.

1) Wiki Scholars courses teach museum professionals how to edit Wikipedia

During the 6-week courses, Wiki Education’s team of Wikipedia experts facilitated collaborative group sessions among the museum professionals and provided ongoing support as the scholars made their first edits. We worked together as they incorporated published information about notable and underrepresented American women from their collections onto Wikipedia, helping them navigate Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural practices. One participant reported that “it was great to have timely responses to even the smallest questions. It was also great to just have a safe environment in class to be confused while starting up the project.” When asked if the experience met their expectations, one participant said, “YES! I was eager to learn the back-end and was gobsmacked about how much actually goes into the development and editing of pages. I really had no idea about the back end of how the Wikipedia process comes together.”

Our tried-and-tested Wiki Scholars course curriculum brings “newbies” into the community in a relatively short period, and we’re thrilled with how much participants enjoy the whole experience. One said that the course “exceeded [their] expectations with an exceptionally well thought out curriculum and a thoughtful instructor who made the content digestible.”

On top of learning how Wikipedia works, this course gave employees across Smithsonian Affiliate institutions the unique chance to collaborate with each other and learn about work at other museums.

Now, they’re primed to continue adding archival materials to Wikipedia, and they can find the tools and support they need to organize in their regions. Deborah Krieger, the Exhibit & Program Coordinator for the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, has already hosted an edit-a-thon, where she and fellow participants helped improve articles related to five women featured in the museum’s recent exhibit, Rhode Island Women Create. Another participant said, “I learned exactly what I came in to do and can use these tools for additional programming!”

2) The public benefits from untold stories about American women

With its wide availability, Wikipedia presents a unique chance to democratize knowledge about notable figures in U.S. history. But who traditionally determines what’s ‘notable’? Both the volunteer editors and the publications available to them, since Wikipedia biographies require citations from reputable sources. The community of editors in the United States typically cluster geographically in major cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Those active editors have built strong initiatives in their localities, running editing events, responding to local interest in Wikimedia projects, and fostering fun and fulfilling communities that keep editors engaged for years.

Thanks to those organizers, we’ve seen an influx of new editors in these regions over the last two decades. They excel at writing local legends into Wikipedia, making their stories more widely known. So how do we shed light on the hidden figures from other parts of the country?

Wiki Education has been eager to activate editors outside of the major clusters who can build Wikipedia outreach into their professional lives. This project with the Smithsonian presented a great opportunity to bring together Wikipedia novices from across the United States, working with people from Rhode Island, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, and 21 other states.

By bringing editors from diverse regions to Wikipedia, we are able to tell the story of American history beyond the names we know from our history books, especially when these editors have access to hyper-local archives and materials. Museum professionals identified the untold stories from their institutions’ own collections and brought them to a broader audience than the visitors who walk through their doors. As one participant, Freya Liggett, of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, said, “Projects like the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative can make significant contributions to Wikipedia’s content and open new ways for people to connect with resources at your museum.”

Freya developed a new biography for Wikipedia, writing about Estelle Reel. The suffragist and politician served as the national Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898 and 1910. After the “many news stories [in 2021] about the grim legacy of North American Indian boarding schools,” Liggett thought it was important to add Reel’s role in the history of Indian schools, thus documenting the “individuals behind America’s assimilation-based education policies and the effects on Native children.” Though Reel’s role in developing racist curriculum to assimilate Indian children into white society is not a pretty one, these stories deserve to be accessible to the public, especially to honor Indian culture and history.

Erica Schumann, a member of the Development Team at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, created an article about Opal Lee, widely known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.” Erica says she was shocked Opal Lee didn’t have an article, despite the considerable amount of national media attention she’d gotten. The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History had been working with Lee’s family to develop an exhibit display recognizing her for her achievements. So Erica dove right in to create her biography in her sandbox, a private drafting space on Wikipedia. While Erica’s draft was still in her sandbox, another editor created the article; Erica ended up moving her drafted text into the article others had started. “When I started sandboxing the article, I had no idea Juneteenth would become a federal holiday just a couple weeks later!” she said. “In the middle of the course, on June 17, 2021, Opal Lee saw her dream become a reality as she joined President Biden as he signed the bill formally establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. This led to Ms. Lee gaining a significant amount of national and international attention over the course of just a few days, and it was incredible to see all the views the article was immediately getting! It was fantastic to see the article being updated in real time to reflect Ms. Lee’s huge accomplishment, and I am so grateful I got to be a part of that editing experience.” In only six months, Opal Lee’s biography has reached more than 20,000 readers, bringing one Texan’s story to a huge audience thanks to Wikipedia and editors like Schumann.

In 2021, a Wikipedia editor approached the Hagley Museum and Library with a rights and reproductions request: could they have images of the patent models Hagley had in their collection for inventor William E. Sawyer? Hagley Registrar Jennifer Johns immediately saw Wikipedia as another way to generate interest in their collection. As a part of the Wiki Scholars course, Jennifer expanded biographies of four notable women: Frances Gabe, Harriet Tracy, Clarissa Britain, and Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville. All are subjects of Hagley’s collection; the first three are inventors and the fourth is an artist in the collection whose work Jennifer likes. Because Jennifer had access to the museum’s collections, she was able to use photographs she’d taken of the patent models. Hagley is opening a new patent model exhibit, Nation of Inventors, in spring 2022, and Jennifer has made it her mission to ensure all the represented have Wikipedia biographies. After that, she says, she’ll tackle a larger project: ensuring all women inventors in Hagley’s collection have Wikipedia articles.

Above, you can see the quantitative impact this group has had over the past year. Their hard work (adding 81,000 words!!) has reached nearly 3 million people in less than a year. Now, anyone with access to the internet can learn about Anne Burlak, a labor organizer from Pennsylvania who helped shape labor standards for textile unions. Perhaps they’ll read about Cornelia Clarke, a nature photographer from Grinnell, Iowa, or Minnie M. Cox, the first Black postmaster in Mississippi.

3) We brought unique perspectives to Wikipedia

This project had another unintended impact on Wikipedia: 86% of the Wiki Scholars use “She/Her” pronouns.

You’ve probably heard of the Wikipedia gender gap — that far more people who identify as men edit Wikipedia than those who identify as women or different gender identities. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other projects, releases periodic “Community Insights” reports, which include demographic data on Wikipedia’s editing community. The 2021 Community Insights report shows the progress that’s been made on that front recently: Globally, women made up 15% of contributors, but in Northern America, where Wiki Education’s programs operate, that number is 22%. In contrast, self-reported survey data from across Wiki Education’s programs show that 67% of our program participants identify as women. The Smithsonian collaboration had an even higher percentage of participants who use “She/Her” pronouns: 86%!

Wiki Education has shown time and time again that providing a space for structured learning and discussion — like the weekly Zoom classes — helps new Wikipedia editors tackle the work it takes to write high-quality Wikipedia articles, especially for the first time. On this International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating that we’ve created a supportive learning environment that brings more diversity to the projects. As one Smithsonian Wiki Scholar put it, “REPRESENTATION MATTERS. Our course was focused on populating Wikipedia with notable women. The benefit is that now at least 50 or so new articles will be online for women who otherwise would have no online presence. That matters.” That matters for representation in Wikipedia’s content, and it matters for representation among the editors.

How other institutions can celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month by developing a similar project

Our team works personally with organizations like the Smithsonian to set up Wikipedia training courses that align with their mission and bring untold stories to Wikipedia. We’re eager to continue this work, but we need your help. You can sponsor a course like this one for your team. This unique, fun professional development experience is fulfilling for scholars as they share knowledge with the world, and we can’t wait to bring more subject-matter experts into our community.

If you’re interested in beginning a conversation about buying out a customized course for members or staff of your organization, contact us at partner@wikiedu.org.

Photo credits: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371, Box 02, Folder: December 1975, Image No. 75-14850-05; Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Baroness Anne-Marguerite-Henriette Hyde de Neuville, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“So often, we hear that girls in science need more role models and inspiration. We’re asked, ‘Where are the women in science?’, as if we’re not already here.”

– Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam and Dr. Jess Wade, Nature

500 Women Wiki Scientists is a project between Wiki Education and 500 Women Scientists to increase visibility of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) through Wikipedia’s vast reach. Since May 2020, we’ve partnered to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women and other historically excluded scientists. 500 Women Scientists has given 75 members—predominantly early career scientists—the opportunity to work with Wiki Education’s Wikipedia experts to learn how to join the Wikipedia community and ensure the encyclopedia reflects the most accurate and equitable representation of STEMM.

In three Wiki Scientists courses to date (with a fourth one starting this week), scientists affiliated with 500 Women Scientists have collaborated with each other and Wiki Education’s team to add and expand STEMM biographies on Wikipedia. Over 6 weeks, they’ve learned how to use Wikimedia projects as tools in their work to preserve and share knowledge with the public. By embedding Wikipedia know-how within their institution, 500 Women Scientists has developed a network of Wikipedians to continue this important work both through their own editing and through coordinating Wikipedia-editing events.

This is the story of how this group has become an integral part of the Wikipedia movement, and how other organizations can make that happen for their faculty, staff, or members.

There are two key components to this ongoing project:

1.  we expand public knowledge of notable scientists who have been historically excluded from the narrative;

2. scientists learn how to edit Wikipedia, later applying their learning outcomes to teach others.

1) The public benefits from more inclusive information about scientists

The US Department of Education says that women earn 57.4% of bachelor’s degrees and 62.6% of master’s degrees. But only 31% of degrees and certificates in STEMM fields go to women.

This gap has an uneasy, well-known counterpart on Wikipedia. Roughly 83.7% of the volunteers writing Wikipedia are men. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Wikipedia’s biographies of women are often lacking in quality (sometimes highlighting a woman’s work through her husband’s career), and some are missing altogether, as only 19% of biographies on Wikipedia are of women. Wiki Education and 500 Women Scientists celebrate the idea that access to knowledge is a game-changer. We believe the same holds true for young future scientists. The gap in Wikipedia’s coverage of women reflects worrisome stereotypes of women in science, especially when we know that women already “do groundbreaking work and pave the way for more like them to join the ranks of the scientific workforce,” as Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam of 500 Women Scientists puts it.

That’s where the 500 Women Wiki Scientists come in. The participants in our courses have added more than 373,000 words to Wikipedia, primarily to biographies, and they’ve created 92 brand new articles. This is a feat for any group, but especially first-time editors who are new to Wikipedia’s technical and procedural nuances. They’re able to do this work because the publications about these scientists’ work already exist—notice they’ve added 1,400 references—but nobody else has taken the initiative to add it in to Wikipedia.

Participants’ hard work has reached over 7 million people curious to learn more about these scientists. Now, anyone with access to the internet can learn about Jean Langenheim, a plant ecologist and pioneer for women in the field. Perhaps they’ll read about Angela Christiano, a molecular geneticist whose research shows promise for treating hair loss, or Mercedes Concepcion, a Filipino social scientist whose outstanding work in population studies in Asia has earned her the nickname “Mother of Asian Demography.”

Thanks to the 500 Women Wiki Scientists, there are dozens of other stories like this now waiting for the world to discover them. We’re excited to continue this partnership, sharing stories that better represent the existing diversity among scientists, especially to encourage even more diversity in the coming generations. As Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam and Dr. Jess Wade have said, “If we can inspire enough editors to take to Wikipedia and fill in the gaps forged by gender bias, we will improve our scientific record, celebrate the outstanding science done by scientists from underrepresented groups and, maybe, inspire a new generation of girls in science who can find stories of girls just like them who grew up to do and discover incredible things.”

2) Wiki Scientists courses teach scientists how to edit Wikipedia, and alumni pass their new skills to other newcomers

Over 6 weeks, Wiki Education’s team of Wikipedia experts facilitates collaborative group sessions among 500 Women Scientists’ members to immerse them in Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural practices. Wiki Education helps these scholars incorporate published information about notable and underrepresented scientists from their field of study to Wikipedia.

Upon course completion, participants receive a shareable, electronic certificate issued by 500 Women Scientists and Wiki Education, designating them as 500 Women Wiki Scientists. At this stage, they have developed the technical skills and Wikipedia know-how to disseminate their knowledge to the public and facilitate Wikipedia-editing activities among their peers.

We’re proud of our Wiki Scientists course curriculum and the ability to bring “newbies” into the community in a relatively short period, and we’re especially thrilled with how much participants enjoy the whole experience. One participant said, “I was hoping to create two new Wikipedia pages – which was a huge stretch for me, since I had very limited editing experience before this program. I ended up creating three pages and participated in two additional edit-a-thons during the program. I plan on continuing to edit and make contributions. The course set me up to succeed.” When asked how they would describe the benefit of learning how to edit Wikipedia to someone else, another participant said, “Having the tools to contribute and improve one of the most visited sources of information is pretty empowering. Especially if you have a niche you’re excited to work on/learn more about. Editing Wikipedia is also a good exercise to become a better writer.”

And, of course, we love seeing that all post-course survey respondents reported satisfaction and that they would recommend this course to a colleague.

To date, we have trained 55 members of 500 Women Scientists how to edit Wikipedia, and we’re starting a new course this week, which will bring 20 new scientists into the community. The new cohort will join their peers in moderating virtual events to bring more scientists to Wikipedia. Check out their ongoing impact as they train others how to add biographies of historically excluded scientists to Wikipedia.

How organizations can partner with Wiki Education around a training course

Amplify reliable information to the public

Our team works personally with organizations like 500 Women Scientists to set up Wikipedia and Wikidata training courses that align with their mission and expand the public’s access to high quality knowledge. In conversations with one of 500 Women Scientists’ executive leaders, Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam, we identified what Wiki Education could help their members achieve, and we built the first course to ensure it would be an excellent learning experience for 500 Women Scientists’ participating members and would contribute to the public scholarship about women in STEMM.

Give your team the skills they need to train others

500 Women Scientists has been active for a few years in running Wikipedia edit-a-thons, events where trained Wikipedia editors guide interested newcomers through the early stages of contributing content to Wikipedia. Though they originally held events in regional “pods,” the COVID-19 pandemic shifted their events into a virtual space. These events proved engaging for members and have long had a high turn-out, but we determined that a more in-depth Wiki Scientists course would provide a deeper learning experience for anyone who prefers structured assignments and milestones as a part of their learning process. That way, 500 Women Scientists could expand their pool of members who were competent in Wikipedia editing and confident enough to train others, thus passing on their new skills to other members.

Help make open knowledge more inclusive and equitable

500 Women Scientists’ mission to make science more inclusive aligns with Wiki Education’s initiative to make Wikipedia more equitable. Not only do their members bring more inclusive content about scientists to the public through Wikipedia, but they represent a much more diverse group of editors than the existing community on English Wikipedia.

98% of the 500 Women Wiki Scientists alumni report their pronouns as “she/her” or “they/them,” which means this partnership is bringing more diverse voices to Wikipedia, as the existing editor base is 83.7% men. Additionally, we can compare the reported race and ethnicity of Wiki Education’s participants in the 500 Women Wiki Scientists courses to the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2021 Community Insights Report and see how much more racially diverse the 500 Women Wiki Scientists are compared to the existing Wikipedia community within the United States.

Join our movement!

Together, 500 Women Scientists and Wiki Education are working together to improve Wikipedia’s breadth, quality, and equity. We’re eager to continue this work, both with 500 Women Scientists and other partners. 500 Women Scientists has sponsored 75 seats since May 2020, creating a free, engaging learning opportunity for their members. This unique, fun professional development experience is fulfilling for scholars as they share knowledge with the world, and we can’t wait to bring more subject-matter experts into our community.

If you’re interested in beginning a conversation about buying out a customized course for members or staff of your organization, contact us at partner@wikiedu.org.

I was reflecting on how Wikipedia’s gender gap has changed over the past 10 years when I heard the news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. It was sort of apropos, as I think Justice Ginsburg’s fight against discrimination on the basis of sex resonates with those of us who have spent 10 or even 20 years (almost!) fighting for better gender representation on Wikipedia.

Like the broader fight for gender equity in the United States, it can feel especially degrading to read constantly about the poor state of gender parity on Wikipedia, especially when you know so many people working hard to bring women’s voices and knowledge to the masses through the encyclopedia. Over the last few years, journalists have written about Wikipedia’s egregious gender gap in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Magazine, the Washington Post, and so many other media outlets. The story is usually the same: English Wikipedia’s volunteer editors largely (at least 85%!) identify as men; women experience bad harassment when they try to participate; where are all the women?! And occasionally, you get an inspirational anecdote about one person or group working to upend the gender imbalance on Wikipedia.

None of this is inaccurate. As far as we know, our community hasn’t made major progress in attracting more regular editors who identify as women over the last 10 years, at least not in a way that begins to ensure women’s history is even close to being “complete.” With the barrage of reporting on Wikipedia’s gender gap, it’s easy to think we’ve made no progress over the last 10 years. But for those of us in the community, who constantly critically evaluate Wikipedia content, processes, and editors, we know there have been some inspirational leaps forward to make this website more representative of human knowledge. And like Notorious RBG’s many victories for human rights, we have so many successes to celebrate, and I don’t think we talk about them enough. Now that we have run our flagship program for 10 years, I’d like to highlight some major successes, both from within the general Wikipedia community and from Wiki Education’s program participants.

First: What is the Wikipedia gender gap?

According to various studies, only 9–16% of Wikipedia’s editors identify as women. In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation—the non-profit that powers Wikipedia—set a lofty goal for its 5-year strategy: increase participation on Wikipedia to 25% women. Spoiler alert: we’re still not there, nearly a decade later. But our community has embraced that the gender gap is, in fact, a problem, and several people, groups, and organizations have taken the initiative to build a more inclusive encyclopedia.

Student editors help close the gender gap

One of the most powerful aspects of our Student Program, which we’ve been running for 10 years, is that Wikipedia assignments bring new editors who may never have contributed content on their own. In the spring 2020 term, roughly 60% of our students identified as women. Of the 7,500 students we supported, that means approximately 4,500 women came to Wikipedia over a four-month span thanks to their instructors’ choice to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into their curriculum. While they may not have come of their own volition, they quickly learned how much they have to offer thanks to their studies, their lived experiences, and their access to academic publications through the university library.

And of course what makes this so important is not just that they participated in building Wikipedia but what knowledge they shared with millions of readers. Take Dr. Nadine Changfoot’s fall 2019 student at Trent University in Ontario, who expanded the article about reproductive justice. This student added a section about coerced sterilizations of Indigenous women in Canada, which happened as recently as 2018 but was not previously covered on a page that skews heavily toward the United States. Approximately 2,000 readers access that article each month, and thanks to this student, they now have a more global understanding of reproductive justice and injustice.

Another student in Dr. Jo Ann Griffin’s fall 2019 course at the University of Louisville worked on the article about transgender health care. Specifically, they added a section about mental health, citing studies reporting high suicide rates in the transgender community. Perhaps more importantly, they cited reports that mental health struggles decrease when transgender individuals transition—either socially and/or medically—to their identified gender. This information about mental health problems (and potential solutions!) was previously missing from a page that reaches 1,500 readers per month. Some of those readers are likely transgender themselves, and I’m incredibly proud that one of our students had the opportunity to summarize and share this scientific literature with the world thanks to their university assignment.

Our community is better thanks to community organizing

If you are new to Wikipedia, you may not know that we consider ourselves a community. I’ve spoken with thousands of people over the years about Wikipedia, and I feel like I’ve heard it all: Where does content come from?; So who approves changes?; Are Wikipedia pages imported from other encyclopedias? But our incredible community of volunteers makes the entire project possible, including more than 6 million articles on English Wikipedia alone. So how does a relatively small percentage of the population keep it up? Largely through community organizing—either on-wiki or offline.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a ton of community groups form to help curb Wikipedia’s gender gap. In July 2015, a small group of Wikipedians founded Women in Red after assessing Wikipedia’s biographies (anyone from scientists to musicians to cricket players) and realizing only 15.53% of the total biographies were of women. This group has grown to hundreds of active members who work each day to recognize women and their achievements. We’ve seen the percentage of women’s biographies increase to 18.58%, and, as I like to joke, that’s without mass deleting biographies of men. This dedicated group of volunteers builds lists of missing women, creates new biographies, runs virtual and in-person events, lends a helping hand to new editors like our students, and presents at Wikipedia conferences to raise awareness about their project and the need to add more women into the encyclopedia.

A like-minded group, Art + Feminism, launched a campaign in 2014 to add women artists to Wikipedia during community-led edit-a-thons (events where experienced Wikipedians guide newbies through their first contributions). Their initiative has expanded into a non-profit organization that works to counter the gender gap in the arts on Wikipedia, and their participants have improved more than 84,000 biographies on various language Wikipedias, Wikidata, and other ally projects.

Another group that emerged in 2015, AfroCROWD, regularly hosts edit-a-thons in partnership with GLAM institutions to add Black culture and history to Wikipedia. I’d be remiss to ignore how intersectional feminism is and that, for example, in order to support women on Wikipedia, one must support Black women on Wikipedia. The editors at AfroCROWD have done phenomenal work over the past 5 years not only to raise awareness about content gaps on Wikipedia, but to facilitate as experienced and new editors work to close those content gaps.

These are just a few of the groups working hard to make Wikipedia more representative of the sum of all human knowledge, and it’s one of the most impactful changes we’ve seen to the gender gap over the past decade. Wikipedia is only as good as its community members, and its community only becomes more inclusive as it reaches out a purposeful hand to guide new editors excited to lend their voice to our projects.

Strategic partnerships and targeted content

One of the approaches to diversifying Wikipedia that we’ve taken at Wiki Education is to form strategic partnerships. In 2014, we partnered with the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) to launch a Wikipedia initiative for their members, who teach in Women and Gender Studies (WGS) departments in colleges and universities. At this time, NWSA actively asked their members to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, and they regularly gave Wiki Education a platform to share why this experience is so meaningful to students. We have since supported more than 400 WGS courses with nearly 9,000 students in our Student Program. They’ve added a staggering 6 million words to Wikipedia, or more than 4 volumes of the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Students in these courses have shared knowledge with the world about so many topics related to gender and intersectional feminism: from disability studies, to LGBT rights in Nepal, to Black feminism, to countless biographies of notable women.

And for Wiki Education, as so much has changed over the last decade, one of the most significant is the way we partner with mission-aligned institutions. Now, with our Scholars & Scientists program, we’re able to partner with institutions who are eager to improve a specific topic area and directly train their members, faculty, or other stakeholders how to lend their expertise to relevant topics. Thanks to this program, we’ve partnered with the Society of Family Planning to train more than 40 medical practitioners and scholars how to fill in content gaps on Wikipedia related to women’s health. This work has given the public better access to information about women’s health in Uganda, telehealth and medical abortion access during a pandemic, and tubal ligation and other common medical procedures.

Through our collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), we facilitated as historians and archivists rewrote the Wikipedia article about the 19th Amendment. Before these scholars got to work as a part of our course, the article documenting the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited governments from discriminating against voters on the basis of sex, not only centered the narrative on white people, but on white men. The Wiki Scholars added crucial information about how this amendment did not enfranchise women of color. We’re so grateful for the opportunity to work with subject-matter experts who are eager to join the Wikipedia community but are not ready to do so on their own.

The next 10 years

2030 has been a hot topic in the Wikipedia community for the last several years, as our global community has worked together to envision what our projects might look like in 2030. I’m certain we’ll have made progress in ways I can’t even imagine at this stage. What I can imagine is that we’ll finally make changes within the community that will invite more women, non-binary people, and other currently underrepresented groups to participate, both in knowledge production and as subjects of Wikipedia articles. I envision an encyclopedia more inclusive of oral histories and less restrictive of notability. One that treasures educators as much as military leaders. I’m certain university students will still be finding and fixing missing, inaccurate, or misrepresented information, and our community will still work best when organizing to make Wikipedia and the world a better place. I’m hopeful we’ll create systems outside of Wikipedia that better support women, creating more “free time” to build an encyclopedia. When I’m asked when there will be enough women on Wikipedia, and my answer is “when there are 90% women editors,” people are shocked. But there’d been 90% men, and it took a decade for anyone to ever raise a question about that.* **

* Adapted from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous quote about the gender imbalance of the Supreme Court.
** This is a joke.

Informing citizens on the issues and candidates on their ballots in a neutral, fact-based way is critical to a functioning democracy. One such neutral source? Wikipedia, which receives 3 billion page views each month from the United States alone.

Wikipedia needs subject matter experts to ensure the public has access to high-quality information. But Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural barriers to entry keep most scholars out.

Enter Wiki Education’s virtual courses.

Participants will collaborate for 6 weeks to add neutral, fact-based content to articles related to local ballot initiatives, races, and issues. The course, which will run between August 21 and September 25, involves a one-hour Zoom meeting each Friday, plus an additional three hours of independent work.

Will you add your subject matter expertise to make it better ahead of the November election? In doing so, you’ll simultaneously learn to write for Wikipedia while giving back to a resource you use daily.

Participants will receive a shareable, electronic certificate-of-completion issued by Wiki Education upon course completion. Tuition is $800, with an early bird discount that brings the total to $600 if you enroll by July 31. We encourage you to seek professional development funds to cover the cost of tuition. We’re happy to work with you to provide your department or organization more information about the course.

Many past course participants have tried to edit Wikipedia on their own or at an edit-a-thon; Wikipedia’s large cultural and technical barriers kept them from successfully contributing content. In our structured, 6-week courses, we’re able to help participants overcome those barriers to successfully edit Wikipedia.

Learn more about the course and enroll today.

Header/thumbnail image by magerleagues, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Thus, the volunteers who curate Wikipedia’s content take the quality of medical articles very seriously. But keeping content accurate, complete, and up-to-date is a never-ending task with lots of work still to be done. Maybe it’s updating an outdated citation with the latest research. Or correcting a subtle misleading detail in the definition of a medical concept. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of Wikipedians available to update medical content and meet the high standards created by Wikipedia’s medical community. That’s why inviting more medical experts to participate can be so worthwhile.

Involving more subject-matter experts is not only beneficial for Wikipedia’s content, readers, and existing contributors. It’s a great experience for the medical professionals themselves. Just ask OB-GYNs Dr. Jennefer Russo and Colleen Denny, MD. In 2019, the Society of Family Planning (SFP) sponsored 2 courses to train their members how to add medical content to Wikipedia’s family planning-related articles. Jen, Colleen, and 30 other medical professionals, spent 3 months working closely with Wiki Education’s team to learn how Wikipedia works and improve pages related to their interests. We’re delighted that we will be running two more SFP Wiki Scholars courses in 2020, continuing this effort to bring high quality, rigorously scientific family planning information to the public. Earlier this week, Dr. Jennefer Russo, Dr. Denny, and I joined SFP’s Director of Grantmaking and Evaluation, Dr. Jenny O’Donnell, for a webinar to encourage others to join SFP’s upcoming Wiki Scholars courses.

Why Wikipedia?

“When I saw this being offered, I thought it was really exciting,” Colleen Denny, MD shared as part of the panel discussion. “As a layperson and even a doctor, I use Wikipedia all the time. It’s not only incredibly powerful, but also one of the few news sources in the United States today that is actually viewed neutrally. I’m a practicing clinician and do a lot of patient counseling, but in terms of sheer impact of getting medical information to my patients, it’s hard to beat Wikipedia. The impact is just so huge.”

When partnerships help both organizations fulfill their missions

SFP and Wiki Education saw an opportunity to partner because of a shared mission to give the public access to scientific research. As Dr. O’Donnell said in the webinar, “Though oftentimes our subject matter feels deeply political by its mere existence, the SFP sweet spot with Wiki Education is just putting the science forward.”

Wiki Education aims to reach more readers with the best, most accurate, up-to-date scientific research. Wikipedia is an excellent medium for science communication because it encourages contributors to distill complex topics into a digestible format. And we know people are looking for medical information about family planning. As the topics pop up in the news, readers flock to the Wikipedia articles to learn more.

Thanks to this partnership, we have supported 32 SFP members through 2 courses in 2019. They added 40,000 words, 390 new references, and that content has received over 2 million page views already. They have improved topics like tubal ligation, self-induced abortion, reproductive coercion, late termination of pregnancy, mifepristone, unintedned pregnancy, doula, family planning in Uganda, vaginal bleeding, medical abortion, miscarriage, reproductive rights, compulsory sterilization, and more. Now, SFP members have two additional opportunities in 2020 to join this initiative.

What participation means for subject matter experts and for Wikipedia

Members of the Wikipedia community not only want to involve more subject matter experts in the open knowledge movement, it’s also a priority for many to help correct the gender disparity in editors and invite more women and non-binary identifying folks to lend their perspectives and expertise.

The scientists we work with feel a personal responsibility to get science out to the masses, and they can be a part of diversifying knowledge production on Wikipedia. In this week’s webinar panel, Dr. Jennefer Russo noted that as scientists and health professionals, “it’s part of our responsibility to balance out the voices at the table.”

What’s it like in the training course?

So why not just learn about Wikipedia’s mechanisms on your own? Through nearly 10 years of training new editors and creating resources for people to feel comfortable entering our community, we’ve found it helps to have other people learning right there with you.

“Maybe it’s generational, but for me and others in the course, the idea of editing an online resource that so many people look at and that seems static was intimidating,” Dr. Jennefer Russo shared. “Going in and changing information and feeling like we wouldn’t get in trouble was a mental hurdle that we overcame.”

“In the beginning it was hard to figure out what to start with,” Colleen agreed. “Should I write a whole new page? Or fix an existing one? Something I learned through this seminar course that I wouldn’t have known is that there are all these people curating Wikipedia, looking for and identifying articles that need to be fixed. Like WikiProject Women’s Health. Finding that kind of toe-hold is a good way to start.”

Ultimately, the live group discussions led by Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady and Wikipedia Experts Ian Ramjohn and Elysia Webb during the course provided a space for SFP members to get comfortable with the culture of Wikipedia edits, as well as the mechanisms for making them. Now Colleen says she’s comfortable continuing to correct small things here and there as she sees them.

Colleen also touched on what surprised her most through the process of learning Wikipedia’s ins and outs, “At first I wondered, if someone else can switch my edits back to the misinformation that was there before, what’s the point? But I’ve been really surprised by how much the Wikipedia community protects accurate content. I really felt like if I’m putting good content out there, even if others in the community aren’t experts, they’ll protect what is well cited and well written.”

It was clear from our discussion that Colleen Denny, MD and Dr. Jennefer Russo feel a sense of deep mutual respect with other Wikipedians. They touched on the sense of responsibility they feel not only to share their research expertise outside the walls of academia, but also the responsibility they feel to the Wikipedia community to operate within the agreed-upon systems of content creation. Joining the Wikipedia community meets their goals of reaching more patients and freeing up more scientific knowledge for the masses. And their involvement in the community meets Wikipedia’s goals of making more information free, and providing accurate info. That symbiosis is the kind of balance we’re so happy to have found in our partnership with SFP.

Want to get involved?

If you’re a member of the Society of Family Planning, you can apply to participate in the next Wiki Scholars course. They are sponsoring this opportunity so that members need only donate their time to participate. Selected Wiki Scholars will meet weekly on Mondays from 11:00am–12:00pm Pacific/2:00–3:00pm Eastern from March 3, 2020 – May 18, 2020. Applications close next Monday, February 3rd.

Learn more about our partnership with the Society of Family Planning by reading our blog posts. For inquiries about partnering with Wiki Education, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org or visit partner.wikiedu.org.

Plus, we know systemic bias among Wikipedia’s contributors leads to egregious content gaps. Only 18.14% of biographies are of women—a number I’m proud (and sad?) to say has been increasing over the past several years. The growth in that piece of the pie is not, as I like to joke, because we’re sneakily deleting biographies of men. It’s largely thanks to communities deciding they can do something about gender parity on Wikipedia and then actually doing something about it.

That’s why I love seeing organizations that promote and support women take a stand and decide to take part in correcting this imbalance. Earlier this year, Wikipedian extraordinaire Jess Wade connected me to the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. They were interested in leveraging their platform to raise awareness of Wikipedia’s gender gap, and they wanted to invite members to be a part of the change they wish to see on the internet. But learning how to participate in a community like Wikipedia, which has 19 years of its own procedures and cultural norms, can be incredibly difficult. It’s helpful when new editors have guidance in their efforts.

Women’s Forum Global Meeting edit-a-thon

So last month, Samantha Weald and I were honored to attend the Women’s Forum Global Meeting in Paris as a part of the effort to give interested new users the space (and human faces!) to learn the ropes. At the conference, we spent three days speaking to attendees–mostly women–about how they are poised to change the face of Wikipedia. We signed up new users, helped several people make their first edits, translated pages, and started conversations we anticipate leading to long-term impact on the encyclopedia.

With the help of our friends at Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia France, and French Wikipedia’s les sans pagEs (an effort similar to the excellent Women in Red project on English Wikipedia), we introduced conference attendees to the process of adding biographies to Wikipedia. We even added items and details to Wikidata! Thanks to the multilingual nature of the global event, we facilitated as people translated pages from one language to another, and new editors added content in English, French, German, and Arabic.

Moving the needle to close the gender gap

The Women’s Forum wielded their influence as a leader with a mission to enact change, and 57 attendees walked away with new Wikipedia user accounts and the confidence that they, too, can be a part of this initiative. Countless people know where to get help as they familiarize themselves with the procedures and community norms that have made Wikipedia such a reliable resource for the world.

Together, we added 33 new pages to the Wikimedia projects, added to 71 pages, and added the equivalent of 32,600 words to Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Some attendees wrote their first stub article, expressing the pride they felt at such an accomplishment. Others approached us to share the effects of imposter syndrome—a feeling that they don’t have enough “knowledge” to share confidently to Wikipedia’s 500 million monthly readers. This conversation, of course, helped us impart to interested new editors that adding to Wikipedia isn’t about what you know but about what you can find out, summarize in your own words, and add with citations so other readers can verify the claim. In short, the group representing Wikipedia was able to quell common fears and remove the barriers that keep prospective community members—especially women—from trying to be a part of this prodigious effort to free knowledge.

Changing the face of Wikipedia

We were thrilled to see new biographies come out of this event, representing a group of women with a diverse set of accomplishments. One participant translated the French page on Kidi Bebey, a French journalist and author, into English. Another translated the English page on Rosalind Brewer, an executive at Starbucks, into French. We saw new pages about rising stars in the business world, scientists combatting climate change, and even Ai-Da, a humanoid robot designed as an artist. One attendee approached us knowing exactly who she wanted to represent on Wikipedia: Gerard Fernandez, a Roman Catholic nun who counseled inmates on death row in Singapore. As we explained to several people, once you start looking for missing women on Wikipedia, you’ll discover historic women whose work is underrepresented in nearly every discipline and occupation. Thanks to efforts like this one, curious readers can now learn about them on Wikipedia.

Overcoming imposter syndrome

Perhaps my most memorable encounter was with one attendee whose professional background includes decades as a science writer specializing in climate change. In the final 30 minutes of the conference, she sheepishly approached me to admit she’d been convincing herself to stop by our space for three days. After all, what if she wasn’t qualified to add content to Wikipedia? Thankfully, we quickly overcame those doubts as she dug in to find enough information about a businesswoman who launched a start-up to use chemical technology to recycle plastics, a feat that has generated several awards and prizes for the organization. This new editor had a knack for finding multiple sources and innately understood why third-party sources are required to ensure quality and prevent promotional editing. In theory, our community welcomes people with this skill set, but it doesn’t always work like that in practice. Thanks to this opportunity to connect in real life, I’m confident she knows her knowledge is exactly what Wikipedia wants and needs.

We loved working within this space to affect change, not only in the content on Wikipedia but also on people’s understanding that this precious project is one we’re all accountable to uphold. Thank you to the Women’s Forum for seeing how urgent it is to raise women’s visibility online and for taking steps to do something about it.

If you’re interested in spending more time with our team of Wikipedia experts to learn how to add to Wikipedia, consider joining our upcoming Wiki Scholars course, April–June 2020. For inquiries about partnering with Wiki Education, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org.

This year, we did this by partnering with the National Science Policy Network (NSPN) as part of its 2020 Election Initiative to give their members—primarily early career scientists—the skills and tools they need to communicate science policy information to a broad audience. One NSPN Wiki Scientist reworked several sections in the water resource policy page, adding crucial information about floods, droughts, and oceans. They expanded the coverage of climate change’s impact on natural disasters and pollution’s devastating impact on the oceans, giving the page more context about why communities need to enhance their water resource policies. Now, their hard work lives on in an accessible space, influencing people as they make behavioral and voting decisions.

At Wiki Education, scientists and scholars are our superstars. We see how much you contribute to our world. Paper by paper. Pipette by pipette. That’s why we’re here to help you boost the impact of your work and knowledge by using the biggest instrument we know – Wikipedia.

By adding to the world of information on Wikipedia, you can share your knowledge with millions of people who are looking for it. You can also join a community of your peers who have found a new way to make their mark and further their field.

Next week is the deadline to sign up for an upcoming January course like our public policy-focused one with NSPN. Over eight weeks, virtual sessions meet once a week for an hour and dive into how to add to the world’s biggest open resource—Wikipedia. Even though Wikipedia is for everyone, the process of creating and adding to pages in the beginning can feel like learning to read and write music. Our expert instructors can show you how to make the most of your time and effort in our virtual and small-group training course specially designed for elevating science to the public.

Enroll with a colleague and get $250 off the $1,000 course price. Financial aid is available for those without access to professional development funds.

Science & Society

An online course for beginners on Wikipedia. Perfect for scientists and researchers looking to amplify and explain scientific findings to the public, especially as they relate to policy and the 2020 Election.

• Register here for: Tuesdays from 1:00 – 2:00pm Pacific / 4:00 – 5:00pm Eastern January 7, 2020 – February 25, 2020

What better way to kick off the new decade than to drastically expand the reach of your science communication efforts and ensure that the masses can find the most up-to-date scientific information?

Header/thumbnail image in public domain.

There are three key components to this project:

1) faculty learning how to edit Wikipedia together;

2) student participation in Wikipedia; and

3) expanding public knowledge of notable women.

1) Wiki Scholars course teaches faculty how to edit Wikipedia

Over 10 weeks, Wiki Education’s team of Wikipedia experts will facilitate collaborative group sessions among UMass Lowell faculty to immerse them in Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural practices. Wiki Education will help these scholars incorporate published information about notable women from the community or from their field of study to Wikipedia. The Center for Women & Work, a research center at UMass Lowell, has compiled a list of women scholars for inclusion in the project. Each scholar will use publications available to UMass Lowell, this list of women scholars, and other relevant sources to significantly expand at least two biographies of notable women.

Upon course completion, participants will receive a shareable, electronic certificate issued by UMass Lowell and Wiki Education, designating them as UMass Lowell Wiki Scholars. They’ll have developed the technical skills and Wikipedia know-how to disseminate their knowledge to the public and build Wikipedia-writing assignments into their curriculum.

2) Faculty pass on their new skills to students

Once participating faculty members complete their Wiki Scholars course, they will commit to teaching with Wikipedia in the following academic year. That’s when they’ll sign up to receive free tools and support for their classrooms through our Student Program. Building curriculum around Wikipedia-writing assignments is a great way to engage students and enhance their 21st Century digital literacy skills.

We believe this training period will give UMass Lowell instructors added confidence and competence to implement Wikipedia-writing projects into their curricula for the very first time.

3) The public benefits from more information about notable women

Institutions like UMass Lowell have archives about historic women in the community that they are eager to share with the public. Faculty who are accepted into this Wiki Scholars course will help uncover the lives and contributions of those women by bringing the information to Wikipedia. In doing so, they’ll also be helping correct a serious imbalance in Wikipedia’s content: only 17.97% of Wikipedia’s biographies are of women.

If you search for ‘Jacqueline Moloney’ there is no Wikipedia page for her. She is listed as Chancellor on the UMass Lowell Wikipedia page, one of the six women mentioned on the page (four of whom have buildings named after them, like Dierexa Southwick). Professor Holly Yanco, Distinguished University Professor, is mentioned as well, in the description of the NERVE Center.

If you search for UMass Lowell, you’ll find two Wikipedia pages: one for the University itself and one for the River Hawks. But under ‘notable’ people of UMass Lowell are four individuals, all men: Andre Dubus III — novelist and UML faculty member; Craig MacTavish — former NFL player and GM; Marty Meehan — former Congressman and current president of the UMass system; and, James Costos — former ambassador to Spain and Andorra.

Nowhere are the notable women of UMass Lowell mentioned. Not Thelma Todd, the film actress, who attended UMass Lowell when it was the Lowell Normal School. Or Mary Agnes Hallaren, who graduated from Lowell Teacher’s College in 1927 and went on to become the head of the Women’s Army Corps. Hallaren was the first woman to serve as a regular Army officer. She commanded the first women’s battalion to go overseas in 1943. Mary Agnes Hallaren was awarded the Legion of Honor, the Bronze Star, and the Army Commendation Medal. She was featured in Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. Todd and Hallaren have their own Wikipedia pages, but are not mentioned as ‘notable’ on the University’s own page. Is there a bias here?

For UMass Lowell faculty interested in joining this project, visit the landing page for more information and to apply by September 20, 2019.

This project is a collaboration among the UMass Lowell College of Education (supported by Judith Davidson), UMass Lowell Libraries (supported by Sara Marks and Anthony Sampas), and the Center for Women & Work (supported by June Lemen). These departments have sponsored 13 seats in this course. Participation for accepted UMass Lowell faculty is free.

If you’re interested in buying out a customized professional development course for faculty at your institution, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org.