A 2015 study concluded that “Wikipedia appeared to be the most utilized online healthcare information resource” in the world. And yet, there are only about 100 articles (out of 6.6 million) that cover developmental disabilities. Thanks to a $55,000 grant from the WITH Foundation, we plan to work with a passionate group of experts to change that.

We’re thrilled to announce that the WITH Foundation has not only renewed–but generously increased–their support of our initiative to improve healthcare and disability-related articles on Wikipedia, ensuring that the world’s largest free information resource is as equitable and accurate as possible. 

“We are pleased to continue our support for this project. We appreciate the partnership with Wiki Education as they work with self-advocates and disability healthcare professionals to enhance healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia.” – Ryan Eastery, Executive Director of WITH Foundation

In three WITH-sponsored Wiki Scientists courses, we will support 45 experts, including more self-advocates (adults with lived experience of I/DD), as they expand between 30 and 40 high-value Wikipedia articles about disability healthcare. Nearly all of the existing Wikipedia articles about adult developmental disabilities are rated as a “start” or “stub” class, meaning the article has a lot of room for improvement in quality and depth of information. 

There’s plenty of work to be done, but thankfully this cohort of experts will be building upon previous iterations of these courses. The WITH Foundation funded a similar project in 2019. The highest rated Wikipedia article in this topic area, Developmental disability, was expanded by experts previously enrolled in WITH Foundation-supported Wiki Scientists courses. Three of the top Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities have received over 170,000 pageviews to date in 2022 alone, indicating strong public demand for helpful resources on related topics.

We’ve also seen a strong demand among disability healthcare professionals, experts, and self-advocates to be part of this initiative. In 2019, we received almost twice as many applications than there were seats available for the two Wiki Scientists courses. In total, 31 experts improved 43 Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities and related topics. All work from these courses are available on Wiki Education’s online Dashboard.

Join us!

We are now seeking participants in these courses who can add accurate, reliable information about developmental disabilities to Wikipedia. We welcome individuals with developmental disabilities to participate, either as course participants if they are academic experts, or by recommending the course to people in their networks. In addition to working with some of our existing partners, we’d love to connect with organizations we haven’t yet collaborated with, especially healthcare and disability studies groups.

If you or your organization is interested in participating in any capacity, please email Jami Mathewson, our Director of Partnerships, at jami@wikiedu.org.

Let’s make a lasting impact

As a recent study has shown, Wikipedia articles have the power to influence hundreds of scientific articles and become highly cited in scientific literature. Researchers have also found that when groups of Wikipedia editors improve a specific content area, the pageviews of those articles and other linked ones increase by 12%. The work from our Wiki Scientists courses will remain accessible on Wikipedia going forward, impacting the public’s understanding of important healthcare and developmental disability studies topics and creating a snowball effect on the amount of healthcare resources available in the future.

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.

On November 21, 2022, Google’s Doodle of the day featured Marie Tharp, whose discovery led to the acceptance of continental drift theory. Tharp’s impressive career as an oceanographic cartographer was on full display that day as more than a hundred thousand internet users swarmed to her Wikipedia biography. Thankfully, the biography was robust—touting her contributions to her field and the barriers she overcame as a woman geologist in the ’40s and ’50s. Not all women on Wikipedia are as lucky. Only 19% of the biographies on the site are even about women. When they do have a page, bias mirroring gender inequities in STEM and journalism can creep up in the content. Today, Marie Tharp’s biography is comprehensive and an excellent summary of her contributions to science. But just 6 years ago, it told a very different story.

If you read Tharp’s Wikipedia article in 2017, it might escape you that the Library of Congress considers her one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century. The page focused more on the work of her colleague Bruce Heezen than it did on her, painting him as the more experienced scientist, rather than her collaborator. At the time, women weren’t allowed on board research vessels, so Tharp relied on Heezen’s sonar data to create her maps of the seafloor. This earlier version of Tharp’s biography contextualized her discovery of an oceanic rift valley in terms of what Heezen thought about it. He was skeptical, calling her theory “girl talk” and even going so far as to erase her work. Once he was convinced she was right, Heezen took credit for Tharp’s discovery for more than 10 years until her contribution was finally acknowledged. The 2017 version of Tharp’s Wikipedia biography hinted at the injustice, noting that her name was mysteriously missing from publications, but it didn’t explain why. A reader might assume Heezen simply did more of the work.

It was a group effort through Wiki Education’s programs, spanning years, that corrected the narrative.

First, in 2017 an undergraduate student completing a Wikipedia assignment in a Wiki Education-supported course added the barriers that Tharp overcame in pursuing geology, namely that only 4% of all earth sciences doctorates at the time were obtained by women. The student also noted the Library of Congress’ honoring of Tharp’s legacy.

Then, in 2018 a geoscience graduate student trained as a Wiki Scientist came along and detailed how Tharp’s discovery of a rift valley supported the theory of continental drift, which was new and controversial at the time. By adding this point, the Wiki Scientist focused the biography more on Tharp’s findings than on Heezen’s skepticism. They also added the reason Heezen finally came around—a male colleague confirmed Tharp’s work. Perhaps most poignantly, the Wiki Scientist replaced the page’s photograph with one of Tharp herself, rather than one of Heezen “showing” her a map of her own creation.

In 2019, another undergraduate student in a Wiki Education-supported geology course gave more context about Tharp’s map of the ocean floor in the introductory section, adding that it specifically charted the ocean’s topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape. The student found a preliminary manuscript sketch that Tharp and Heezen made and included that too. The student added an award that Tharp received in 2001 and also updated the section about Tharp’s early life, noting that joining her father in his field work as a soil surveyor sparked her initial interest in cartography. Considering that narratives about women scientists (on Wikipedia and off) are more likely than a man’s to focus on their personal life over their career accomplishments, including the origin of Tharp’s passion for science is a great addition to the information about her upbringing.

Where before, the biography passively mentioned that Tharp’s name wasn’t included in publications of her work, this student made the language more active, noting that it was Heezen who took the credit for Tharp’s discovery in 1956 and that the discovery was not attributed to her for more than a decade. There are plenty of historical instances where discoveries made by women were credited to men at first: from the existence of dark matter to the invention of wireless communication and the first computer language compiler tools. Women scientists are still less likely to be credited for their work than men. Given the persistent barriers women face to being recognized, it’s important to accurately document the contributions from women scientists and Wikipedia is a great place to tell the real story in real time.

When we don’t tell the full story of women scientists’ achievements, we miss the opportunity to positively influence future generations of scientists. Instead, young people may be exposed to pervasive negative stereotypes suggesting that they don’t belong in STEM, which change the way they talk about their dreams and negatively affect confidence and test performance. Sustained over time, this undermining of confidence can lead to women abandoning careers that don’t align with expectations of their gender, race, or class.

We have the chance to change the story–not only for pioneers like Tharp, but for scientists working now. A Wikipedia biography recognizes a scientist’s contributions in real time. It surfaces her expertise to journalists and panel organizers, humanizes her beyond her CV or university profile, and shows young people interested in STEM what career paths are possible for them. Considering women and people of color are chosen less often for speaking opportunities, are contacted less often by journalists, and aren’t recognized for their work in equal measure to white male peers, exposure on Wikipedia can help turn the tides.

We’re proud to see that the work of students and scientists in our programs lives on, and this process worked exactly as Wikipedia was designed to: building upon itself over time as contributors uncovered more of the real story. Together, we’re helping correct the narrative of women’s place in the advancement of STEM, and there’s one thing we know for sure: a woman’s place is in Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world, and the go-to resource for reference and background information,” said Christian Anderson who completed our recent Wiki Scientists course sponsored by the American Physical Society. “When STEM minorities are included in Wikipedia, their visibility immediately increases. It’s difficult to imagine a more efficient way to celebrate achievements from all kinds of folks. As a physicist (one of the majors with the fewest women) at BYU (one of the least ethnically diverse schools in America), it’s easy to think only white men do what I do; Wikipedia is a powerful counter to those sorts of historically-deterministic blinders.”

Christian Anderson is a marine biologist and theoretical physicist, who also studies Finnish in his spare time. When he realized that the English Wikipedia was missing a biography of Dr. Eugenie Lisitzin, an oceanographer who was the first Finnish woman to earn a PhD in physics, he figured he was a great person to write it.

“I’ve been strongly committed to increasing minority involvement in STEM for decades. I have also taught myself a bit of wiki editing, and I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to combine both interests. I was delighted to find a physical oceanographer (my two fields) who broke so many gender barriers in her own country, and that I happened to have rudimentary abilities in the uncommon language containing most of the secondary sources about her. But what really made me feel like this was meant to be was late in the project, I stumbled upon a list of visiting scholars to my own former department (The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD), and learned that Lisitzin had spent a six month sabbatical on the same campus as me in 1959.”

There are a few reasons a biography might not exist on Wikipedia yet. The figure may not meet Wikipedia’s requirements for notability. There may not be enough secondary sources about them to cite. Or, (and what is very often the case), someone simply has not taken the time to write it.

The argument could definitely be made for Dr. Lisitzin’s deserving an article. But at first, Christian had some trouble tracking down enough online resources about her.

“I understand Wikipedia’s policy of referencing secondary sources to maintain standards of notability. Unfortunately, one side effect of this policy is that it causes Wikipedia to reflect societal bias against women and minorities in science,” said Christian. Luckily, he knew where else to look.

“I sought help from some wonderful people. Ari Miettinen at the University of Helsinki dug Dr. Lisitzin’s 1927 dissertation out of the archives and scanned the first five pages for me, so I could find out who her advisor was. I also discovered that her future boss at the Institute of Marine Science was on her committee, explaining why she shifted from particle physics to oceanography. Researchers in the Finnish Genealogy Facebook group and at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City were able to help me find the family’s immigration records from Germany (where her father was a railway engineer) to Finland, and her only obituary in a small local newspaper. Without their help, I wouldn’t have known even where she died, much less that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1961 to allow her to become the first director of a federal science ministry when the current director took a two year sabbatical.”

It’s exactly this kind of collaboration, crowd-sourcing, and passionate follow-through that makes Wikipedia work and makes it wonderful. And having the support of our Wiki Scientists course gave Christian some added skills and confidence, even though he had been editing Wikipedia since 2014.

“I had written two articles before taking this class, but learned something new every meeting, including how to customize my personal profile, all about the wiki journal, community standards in talk pages, where to get help, and so on. Will Kent was an excellent discussion leader.

“I love Wikipedia as a source, and am always delighted when I get to contribute. After the class, I went back and improved an article I created in 2016 about Ludwig Berwald, a brilliant Jewish mathematician in Vienna who submitted his last paper for publication the morning before Nazis took him to the concentration camp where he would die. That is a powerful story, and one that deserves the best writing I can bring to it.”

“Ludwig and Lisitzin show that even with the millions of articles already available, significant and inspiring stories are still waiting to be told. I’m delighted that I now have the skills and opportunity to share them via Wikipedia.”

Sign up for an open course at learn.wikiedu.org or explore sponsoring a customized course like the American Physical Society did at partner.wikiedu.org.

Sofía Flores Fuentes is a science communicator. She’s been a university professor, a civil servant, and an independent public engagement person. Currently, she’s working as a communicator at the Physics Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her most recent medium of science communication? Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is a great platform, if not the best platform, to freely communicate science and information based on evidence,” Sofía says. “It reaches any corner of the world (that has internet access) so anyone can exploit the information located here. I think as science communicators we have the responsibility of knowing how to use Wikipedia.”

Sofía learned to edit Wikipedia through a recent Wiki Scientists course run by Wiki Education and sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS). A colleague had recommended the course, and she knew it was the help she needed to jumpstart her work on Wikipedia. The course focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists on Wikipedia, a cause near and dear to Sofía’s heart.

While the course was taught in English and focused on the English Wikipedia, Sofía took the opportunity to use her bilingualism to improve Spanish Wikipedia articles too. She expanded the article on María Ester Brandan and created the article on Myriam Mondragón Ceballos.

“The Wiki Scientists course gave me the tools to write an article. Even though the Spanish version changes a bit, I had the chance to go into the platform, learn the process and how it works in general terms,” Sofía says. “However, the most important thing I got from the course was the confidence to do it. Wikipedia seemed like a dark universe to me, that couldn’t be penetrated that easily. After this course I now feel like it is a fascinating world created and nourished by a vibrant community, and all the respect and values involved.”

Sofía found the differences in processes between the Spanish and English Wikipedia interesting, as well as the differences in discussions. She’s inspired to keep editing articles about Mexican physicists, especially women. And she hopes to have events at her institution to support others to edit as well.

“I am a science communicator who loves writing articles. But I also stand for the access to information, so I try to dedicate my professional work so people can have the possibility of learning and being informed. I also think that humanity can do great things that can benefit other people, so I believe Wikipedia is a great effort for humans to reach this goal,” Sofía says. “I’m just grateful for APS giving me the opportunity to learn. I think that a lot of people like me can make the most from your work so we can also help others.”

One of the central components of the American Physical Society (APS)’s mission is to share physics knowledge — and, since 2020, one way the association has done this is through partnering with Wiki Education to host a series of Wiki Scientists courses. In these courses, Wiki Education staff teach APS members — physicists — how to contribute to Wikipedia. Some courses have focused on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of physics topics, while others have focused on biographies of historically excluded physicists.

“In the APS Wiki Scientist courses, our members build their science communication and public engagement skills. They work on articles of notable women and historically marginalized groups in physics, increasing the visibility of these physicists. This helps expand the public perception of ‘who is a physicist’ and can promote broader participation in the discipline. They also contribute to articles on various physics topics, using their expertise to add information and supporting references. Articles with clear, accessible content help physics learners and can generate excitement for physics topics,” says Allie Lau, Public Engagement Programs Manager at APS. “Taken together, the contributions of APS members help develop Wikipedia content that accurately reflects the makeup of the physics community and the work of physicists.”

In the five courses to date, 84 APS members have added more than 109,000 words of content to 311 articles on Wikipedia. The physicists’ work has already been read more than 13 million times. For example, the nitrogen-vacancy center article edited by a participant in one of the courses has been read more than 58,000 times. From a biographies course, the new article on Qatari physicist Ilham Al-Qaradawi has been viewed more than 10,000 times. These examples showcase why these Wiki Scientist courses are helping advance APS’s mission. Participants report the courses are meaningful — and numbered among them is even a Nobel laureate!

In addition to supporting our overall partnership, Allie signed up to participate in the most recent Wikipedia course focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists. Since she has a background in physics education, Allie chose to expand the article on Lillian C. McDermott, a pioneer in the field.

“The course taught me the core pillars of Wikipedia editing and I learned about the neutral tone of voice to use in articles. I also learned about the guidelines for notability and verifiability,” Allie says. “Wiki Education provides our members with access to high quality training from expert Wikipedians who are also excellent teachers.”

Allie says she’d never used Wikipedia’s talk pages before taking the course. Understanding those helped Allie see the community of volunteer contributors who work tirelessly to keep Wikipedia the reliable source it is. Thanks to the course, Allie now feels comfortable participating in APS edit-a-thons and other Wikipedia events.

Overall, Allie says she enjoyed the course — and so did the members she took it with. APS routinely gets positive feedback from members who participate in the course, which leads them to keep partnering with Wiki Education to offer more courses. Up next is a Wikidata course, focused on improving the coverage of physics on the linked open data counterpart to Wikipedia.

Allie sees these Wiki Scientist courses, especially those focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists, to be an important part of APS’s strategy.

“A core part of the APS’s vision is to foster equity and inclusion in physics, and increase diversity in all its dimensions. When we improve the diversity of physicist biographies on Wikipedia, we are amplifying the voices and increasing the visibility of physicists from groups historically marginalized in the discipline,” Allie says. “This is important not only because it recognizes their contributions to the field, but also because it helps shift and expand the perception of who can be a physicist.”

She encourages APS’s peer academic associations who are also interested in improving representation in their discipline to consider partnering with Wiki Education to host courses.

“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,” Allie says. “It is one of the most popular websites in the world and it is easy to contribute to.”

Interested in learning more about a Wikipedia or Wikidata course? Visit learn.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: PhysicsSphinx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Carmen Fernández Fisac had long wanted to start contributing content to Wikipedia.

“It’s a resource I’ve used countless times and I was excited to give back by adding content that could help others as well, but I always felt like I lacked the tools to do it properly,” she says. “What if instead of helping I ended up making it worse?”

Enter Wiki Education’s Wiki Scientist training course, hosted by the National Science Policy Network (NSPN). A Ph.D. student, Carmen studies biomedical engineering and neuroscience. She’s researching how the brain balances sensory information and intention during voluntary movement, using brain-computer interfaces.

“I am also at my core a science communicator: as fulfilling as conducting research is, nothing makes me as happy as writing about science for different audiences and teaching students what I know,” she says. “This course was the push I needed, not just because it made navigating the editing process easier, but because it was a confirmation that Wikipedia wanted people like me to contribute. The course offering through NSPN was an explicit invitation for scholars to dive in and have a tangible impact on knowledge accessibility, and I was thrilled for the possibility.”

Carmen says the NSPN Wiki Scientists course gave her the skills to navigate Wikipedia’s rules and guidelines in a way that wasn’t overwhelming. She also learned about the community of Wikipedia editors, something she’d never before considered.

“The thing that completely blew me away was the powerful sense of community among Wikipedians,” she says. “I knew the premise of Wikipedia and had heard the classic ‘it works, despite all odds’, but I had never really dived deep into discussions in Talk pages or the internal initiatives bringing editors together to push through more meaningful improvements. I don’t think I understood the extent of it until the course dropped me right in the middle of it and encouraged me to engage in those conversations. Watching people collaborate selflessly like that was inspiring and heartwarming, and it only made me want to do more in Wikipedia.”

Carmen tackled Wikipedia’s article on neurotechnology, which averages thousands of page views each month.

“Like with other transformative technologies, I think it is incredibly important to stay ahead of scientific advances in neurotechnology and consider their potential ethical and social repercussions, not only for policy makers but also for those conducting the research,” she says. “Because it is something that has been present in science fiction for a long time, I especially wanted to work on the definition and the ethical considerations of neurotechnology to help separate the fantasy elements from the reality so that the concerns that do exist can be identified and put in context. A lot of the work I did ended up focusing on restructuring content in addition to writing to make sure sections were balanced and written in a neutral tone.”

Although the course wrapped up, Carmen has continued editing the article, making gradual improvement. She’s excited to keep editing Wikipedia — both the English and Spanish language versions.

“I have noticed that many science-related Wikipedia articles are less detailed in Spanish than they are in English, possibly due to the majority of international research being published in English,” she says. “As a bilingual speaker with a scientific background, I feel this is somewhere I can make impactful contributions to make Spanish articles more complete. I think multilingual science communication is absolutely critical if we want to reach local communities everywhere, and I am excited to help reduce language barriers if I can by making more information available in Spanish.”

Carmen hopes more experts like her are able to contribute — in any language. And she sees courses like the Wiki Education one she took that brings experts to Wikipedia as being key for the future.

“You don’t have to be an expert to add accurate information, but the unique value that an expert brings to an initiative like Wikipedia, I think, is not given by the wealth of detail they could go into on a certain subject — which would likely overwhelm the non-expert reader — but rather by their insight into the building blocks of the subject, allowing them to identify which are the critical details that need to be included to capture the essence of a concept and making a complex field of study penetrable to its outsiders,” she says.

She found the immediate impact personally rewarding as well.

“It’s so rare in life to be able to identify an issue that you would like to correct for those coming after you and in the same second be able to fix it, then and there,” Carmen says. “Getting a closer look at Wikipedia and the community behind it has restored a bit of my faith in humanity. Sometimes the world seems a little bleak, but I see Wikipedia continuing to work despite all odds and I think ‘you know, we might just make it as a species’.”

Interested in hosting a course like the NSPN course Carmen took? Visit partner.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Chemist Maggie Tam had never edited Wikipedia before taking one of our recent 500 Wiki Women Scientists courses — in fact, she didn’t even know you could.

“I used to think that each Wikipedia article was written by a single author,” Maggie admits. “I didn’t realize that anyone can edit and make changes to articles. Before the class, I never clicked on the History page, or the Talk page of articles. It is very heartwarming to find out the extent of community collaborative involvement in the articles.”

Maggie is now part of that community. As a volunteer, she’s the Communications Committee Co-Chair for Females in Mass Spectrometry, a nonprofit community that supports women in the field of mass spectrometry. In an effort to help improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the topic, she connected with 500 Women Scientists, an organization that partnered with Wiki Education to offer this course, led by Wiki Education’s Will Kent and Ian Ramjohn. Maggie signed up.

“I imagined the class to be similar to learning to drive, that there would be studying about rules, a road experience in a car with an instructor and dual brakes, and finally a road test,” Maggie explains. “I was skeptical to hear that we could begin to edit in the real Wikipedia (not just the sandbox) after the first week of training, which would be equivalent to driving on the road! As a matter of fact, it is astonishingly easy to start editing and creating an article, especially with visual editing. The course covered a good number of Wikipedia policies and resources to give us confidence. In the driving analogy, Will Kent and Ian Ramjohn are the dual brakes, who helped troubleshoot issues. There is a continuous road test in the form of reviews and edits from the Wikipedia community.”

She started by creating an article on chemist Hilary R. Bollan. Next, using Professor Hannes Röst’s list of mass spectrometrists, she created the articles for two “red links”, or missing articles, Catherine E. Costello and Jennifer Van Eyk. Then she made edits to the existing articles on Ying Ge and Vicki Wysocki.

The outcomes were great for representation of women chemists on Wikipedia — and for Maggie, who says she liked the class setting.

“I enjoyed the comradeship,” she says. “Once a week, I get to spend my lunch hour with other women scientists from different parts of the world, all working towards creating biographies to improve representation on Wikipedia.”

Now that the class is over, Maggie intends to keep working on adding more women scientists to Wikipedia, and engaging others in the Females in Mass Spectrometry group with an edit-a-thon using the 500 Women Scientists and Wiki Education resources. She wants Wikipedia’s coverage of women scientists to reflect the reality of the women already in the field — and inspire the next generation of scientists.

“There is a song in Girl Guides called ‘Yes She Can’,” Maggie says. “When I ask girls in my Girl Guides Brownies unit to research on women role models, they often start with online resources — Wikipedia being one of them. These little girls will learn more about the amazing pioneering work of women scientists when more articles exist in Wikipedia.”

Interested in hosting a course like the 500 Women Scientists course Maggie took? Visit partner.wikiedu.org.

Tristan Fehr has a deep interest in science policy, and particularly science communication. As a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, Tristan knows how important it is to be able to clearly convey scientific information to the general population. So when a colleague recommended he take a National Science Policy Network Wiki Scientists course, he signed right up.

“I have been looking for forums to share science and policy more publicly than academia’s usual route of writing for scientific audiences in journal publications, which are often limited to people who can reach behind paywalls and translate scientific jargon,” he says. “Writing for Wikipedia offers a chance to share research and policy information with anyone who has access to the internet, and this truly open-source approach really drew me in!”

The NSPN Wiki Scholars course, led by Wiki Education’s Will Kent, met weekly via Zoom for six weeks. Tristan says it gave him insight into best practices for editing Wikipedia, both in terms of policy and culture among the community of Wikipedia contributors.

“When I read articles now, I am more aware of how easy it would be to add to and edit them, and it makes the whole experience feel more alive,” he says. “In many respects Wikipedia is such an obvious choice for public communication of complex topics that I overlooked it as a writing outlet before—but now I know how easy it is to write and edit, it seems definitely like a missed opportunity to not learn how to get involved.”

After all, he says, Wikipedia comes up first on many search engines, so articles serve as primary bridges between subject matter experts and members of the public.

“When expert contributors cultivate a greater understanding of their fields by freely sharing their expertise on Wikipedia, the articles they touch could become key to recruiting future members of their fields, and to increasing taxpayer and policymaker support for their domains,” Tristan says.

Tristan’s academic studies are on the effects of early-life exposures to anesthesia on the brain — so it made sense to him to create Wikipedia’s article on the topic.

“When I was deciding how I wanted to contribute early in the course, I started by looking at the pages for different general anesthetics. Although several decades of research and a policy recommendation exist related to how anesthetics can impact the brain and behavior when given in early life, I was surprised that pages for individual anesthetics either didn’t include this information, or only had out of date references. Rather than adding the same information across 8-10 articles, I decided to write a new umbrella article that could bridge all of them,” Tristan explains. “I have been immersed in this literature for years, which made it a lot easier to write from a place of familiarity.”

Tristan loved the speed of publishing. In comparison to academic journals, where publishing takes months or years, Wikipedia’s ability to reach people nearly immediately is “intoxicating”, he says. Tristan also enjoyed seeing other Wikipedia editors engage with the article he started, making edits to improve the article.

He hopes to carve out some time each week to keep editing. Initially, Tristan plans to add more wikilinks to make his article more accessible across other Wikipedia articles. Then he plans to tackle some of his other interest areas, such as translational ecology, to help bridge gaps in policy awareness.

“Being part of the Wiki Scientists course was a blast, and I am incredibly grateful to the National Science Policy Network and Wiki Education for making the opportunity possible!” Tristan says. “Through this experience I have also seen what a useful tool Wikipedia can be for honing science communication skills, and for increasing public engagement within the policy sphere by making otherwise esoteric topics tangible, relatable, and clear. Not only does writing for a broader audience help me build transferable skills of engaging across stakeholders, but it will hopefully help others adjacent or interested in my field to have a better understanding to guide their decisions, too.”

Interested in hosting a course like the NSPN course Tristan took? Visit partner.wikiedu.org.

Image credits: Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; Nebs642, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons