When it comes to experts’ understanding of climate science and the public’s understanding, there are some well-documented differences. American Physical Society members have been closing the gaps with impactful work on Wikipedia. With 18 billion page views per month, Wikipedia content has a proven track record for affecting collective behavior across a wide range of sectors. 

Since 2019, the American Physical Society (APS) has empowered 110 members—from a high school student to a Nobel Prize laureate—to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of physics and physicists. These scientists practice their science communication on a worldwide stage, write biographies of historically excluded physicists, leverage Wikidata—the open data repository behind Wikipedia—and are now correcting content gaps related to climate mitigation.

Dr. Allie Lau, the APS Public Engagement Sr. Programs Manager, has been instrumental in advancing the work.

“APS was excited about a Wikipedia training course focused on energy and climate science as this is an area of importance to the Society and its members,” Dr. Lau shared. 

The virtual courses, seven of them so far including the latest climate-focused iteration, present an opportunity for APS members to connect across disciplines and countries like never before. 

“APS recognizes the serious consequences of climate change and urges physicists to contribute to interdisciplinary climate research collaborations and efforts to design solutions to mitigate the human impact on climate,” Dr. Lau added. “The Society is committed to actions that will reduce greenhouse gas concentration and advocates for research and development of carbon-neutral and carbon-free energy technologies.”

Facilitating this chance for physicists to contribute accurate energy research to the public dialogue has been meaningful for the Society. As their Chief External Affairs Officer, Francis Slakey explains, “The Wiki Scientists course is a great tool for achieving our mission of diffusing the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity and amplifying the voice for science.” 

Correcting well-documented knowledge gaps

By adding up-to-date climate research to Wikipedia, APS Wiki Scientists supported by Wiki Education are helping correct the following gaps in public understanding: 

People misunderstand climate science and mitigation. 

The public often cites recycling and limiting trash pollution as the actions they think are most impactful for addressing climate change, whereas climate scientists focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions on a much larger scale and across all sectors of society. 

Advances in renewable energy production, like solar* and wind, are some such mitigation strategies that physicists improved on Wikipedia as Wiki Scientists. Morgaine Mandigo-Stoba, one of these physicists, expanded the Wikipedia page about thin-film solar cells, which covers a variety of established and developing thin-film photovoltaic technologies for an audience of 5,000 readers every month. She wrote about what these types of solar cells are made out of; how they work; how they’re produced and the costs of production; their advantages over first-generation silicon solar cells (including being cheaper and safer to produce); recent advancements in how efficient they are for electricity production; their durability and lifetime; how widely used they are in new utility development; and their potential role in meeting international renewable energy goals. She even included a diagram of her own design to illustrate a solar cell I-V curve. 

“Adding good data visualizations was really important to me in terms of making this page accessible to a wide audience,” Mandigo-Stoba shared. “Of course, I hope that this exposure can lead to people making more informed energy choices. One thing we talked about in the course is that people can feel a lot of anxiety around taking action against climate change and one way to alleviate that is to simply expose them to possible solutions. I hope that this page can help alleviate some of that worry that people have about finding the ‘perfect’ energy solution and help them feel empowered to explore new green energy technology.”

Another physicist improved the Wikipedia page on wind power, adding the physics at work in the power transfer from wind into energy. This page receives even more readers per month: close to 30,000! 

As Mandigo-Stoba explains, the exercise of writing a Wikipedia page is one of science translation. “Taking a topic that at its core is very technical and making it useful and interesting to a broad audience like this is a really fun challenge,” she shared.

People don’t connect the effects of climate change to their daily lives.

Many researchers have long assumed that the public doesn’t feel the urgency around mitigating climate change that scientists do. But according to new research, 61% of Americans say global climate change is affecting their local community and 70% are alarmed, concerned, or cautious. However, many still struggle to explain the connection between their lived experiences and the science behind global warming. Fewer understand how they can help. 

That’s why adding regional-specific climate information to Wikipedia pages like climate change in Illinois, as one Wiki Scientist did, is so impactful. This page now explains that, because of climate change, Illinois is likely to experience more frequent flooding, harmful algae blooms on Lake Michigan, and higher temperatures that may harm humans and agriculture. The page also illustrates local mitigation efforts, including strategies to reduce the effects of heat islands, as well as information about the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act–a job retraining program for workers impacted by the transition to renewables.

“When I came across this page for the first time, it was in bad shape,” says APS member Maggie Geppert who tackled the updates. “It was a series of long quotes from a single source from 2016, which is not appropriate for a Wikipedia page. I originally thought about simply going back to the original source and rephrasing the quotes. In that sense, my original goal was to make the page better by just bringing it to some baseline standards. However, a topic like climate change really does need current information, and a single seven-year-old article as a source is not nearly enough. I decided to update the information and expand it from projected effects to current actions people in Illinois are taking to mitigate climate change. People need to know that there is political will in the United States to fight climate change. This is not an impossible task. It’s really, really big and really, really hard, but there are people who are willing to take action now. I chose to edit the Climate Change in Illinois page because it’s about where I live. My students will be able to read it and relate to the places and climate conditions it describes.”

Contributing up-to-date information on this topic in particular counteracts much of the popular mis-narratives circulating about climate science. Wikipedia is nicknamed the “last best place on the internet”, after all.

“When it comes to climate change, there is a lot of misinformation on social media,” Geppert added. “Wikipedia stands as a beacon of truth in an area riddled with lies and misrepresentations.”

People struggle to see where they might pursue climate-related work or they may even distrust scientists.

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. It also does the important work of boosting a scientist’s credibility, changing stereotypes about who gets to be a scientist, and fostering trust in scientific research. This visibility is especially important for climate scientists, who–like other scientists in politicized fields–often encounter pushback in the public sector about how they know what they know.

Wiki Scientists in our courses are putting faces to climate work by writing biographies of scientists. The biographies for Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Hayhoe are much more comprehensive now. And Kate Marvel even has a new photo! Thousands of Wikipedia readers are being exposed to the scientific contributions of these scientists and others like them, every day.

Wiki Education kicked off our 8th APS Wiki Scientists course last week, and participating members will celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month by adding or expanding Wikipedia biographies of Hispanic and Latinx physicists. We’re thrilled at the commitment APS has made toward their mission of providing a welcome and supportive professional home for an active, engaged, and diverse membership, and we look forward to the ongoing work from their dedicated members.

The work lives on.

These are just some of the many examples of helping close the gap between expert and public understanding of climate science.

“Once you get over the fear of editing something which potentially will be read by many people, editing Wikipedia is not that difficult,” one APS Wiki Scientist shared. “Improvements can be made at all levels, from fixing grammar/readability to adding new content. And the benefit is that you are making real contributions to pages that are read by many, helping them make informed perspectives.”

For Geppert, the Wiki Scientists experience was also a new way to interact with her APS membership. “This class was an opportunity for me to mix with physicists in all different places around the world at many different stages in their career,” she added. “It was a lot of fun.”

—

* Links will direct you to Wiki Education’s Dashboard tool, which highlights the parts of Wikipedia articles that scientists in our program are responsible for writing. You also have the option in that window to navigate to the actual Wikipedia article, where you will see the same content. This tool is available to all of Wiki Education’s partners.

Wiki Education is looking to expand its impact on the public’s access to high-quality climate science. If you’re interested in getting involved, visit partner.wikiedu.org to start building your own Wikipedia Initiative with our support.

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

1. We’ve added a LOT of content to Wikipedia. In 2018, Wiki Education reached a milestone: Student editors in our Wikipedia Student Program had added as much content to English Wikipedia as was in the last print edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Since then, we’ve steadily worked to add even more content. We’ve now added almost two full Britannicas to Wikipedia.

2. The depth and breadth of content we add covers all disciplines. Because we work with nearly every academic discipline taught in higher education, we improve a wide variety of topics. Want to know more about geology? Contested monuments? Islamic art and architecture? African archaeology? Indigenous Canadians? Occupational epidemiology? Foreign literature? Latina artists? All of these are topics on Wikipedia improved by student editors through our program.

3. We helped fill content gaps in articles related to 9/11. In a collaboration with ReThink Media in the months prior to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we brought peace and security studies experts to Wikipedia to improve articles related to September 11, the War on Terror, and related topics. While Wikipedia’s extremely active WikiProject Military History had led to extensive coverage of the specifics of war in these articles, our experts were able to identify and fill content gaps related to the context of humanitarian implications of war. Articles our scholars improved received more than 7 million page views.

4. We’ve improved knowledge equity content. Some of the examples in the prior point illustrate this, but to drill down: Wiki Education has spent nearly a decade inviting instructors who teach in courses related to race, gender, and sexuality and other knowledge equity content areas to teach with Wikipedia. The result? Articles like the one on Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher, which as it was expanded caught the eye of a journalist who then wrote about Fisher, bringing him to even more prominence. Or the significant work Wiki Education does to counter the biography gender gap on Wikipedia.

5. We overhauled the 19th Amendment article. In collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration, Wiki Education hosted a series of courses bringing historians and women’s studies experts to Wikipedia prior to the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment. Over the course of several months, scholars improved articles related to suffrage, suffragists, and — in an advanced course — the article on the 19th Amendment itself. Prior to our scholars’ work, the article centered the narrative not just on white people, but also on white men — so our program participants helped shift Wikipedia’s narrative to center women as well as adding a new section about the continued disenfranchisement of women of color.

6. We’ve brought women in science to Wikipedia. Through our partnership with 500 Women Scientists, we’ve enabled 75 members of the group to add and expand biographies of women in STEMM to Wikipedia. This work is helping change the face of science on Wikipedia.

7. Our Year of Science sparked a burst of science editing. We declare 2016 to be the Year of Science, a focused campaign to bring more science editors to Wikipedia. The results exceeded our expectations — and launched our ongoing Communicating Science initiative. In 2021, five years later, we continued to add more content to more science articles than we did during the official Year of Science. In an age where providing neutral, fact-based science information is critically important, we’re both improving Wikipedia’s coverage of science — and teaching early career scientists the important skill of being able to teach science to a general audience.

8. We’re helping the world learn about the climate crisis. As part of our Communicating Science initiative, we’ve attracted several courses that specifically work to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the climate crisis. In this post, we explain how students from eight different universities helped add better scientific information related to climate change on Wikipedia.

9. We shaped Wikipedia’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many student editors in our Wikipedia Student Program have improved articles related to information about the pandemic, from articles on vaccines and diseases to effects of and impacts on COVID-19. We also ran a series of courses in our Scholars & Scientists Program where we brought subject matter experts to Wikipedia to improve articles related to local, state, and regional responses to the pandemic from a public policy perspective. All told, we’ve helped millions of people learn more about the pandemic.

10. We’ve added biographies of Nobel laureates — before they were honored. Every Nobel Prize announcement season, readers flock to Wikipedia to read more about the scientists receiving the honor. Sometimes, notably in the case of Donna Strickland, the biography is missing — but Wiki Education’s helped avoid that in other cases. In 2018, one of our Wiki Scholars participants transformed Jennifer Doudna‘s Wikipedia article — two years before she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work on CRISPR. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three laureates whose biographies were all created or expanded by student editors in our Wikipedia Student Program.

11. We taught a Nobel Laureate to edit. Our work with Nobel Laureates isn’t just limited to writing their biographies — we also taught one to edit Wikipedia! Dr. Bill Phillips, a 1997 laureate in physics, participated in our Wiki Scientists course in partnership with the American Physical Society. “Everyone who finds Wikipedia to be a good resource ought to contribute in one way or another, to the ongoing value of Wikipedia. One way of doing that, of course, is to act as an editor,” Phillips told us after the class.

12. We’ve inspired students to become editors. Dr. Phillips wasn’t the only one inspired by learning how to edit Wikipedia through our programs. “I call my senators, I vote, I donate to the ACLU, and now, I edit Wikipedia,” wrote a Rice University student. We’ve similarly inspired several other students to become Wikimedians.

13. We’ve inspired staff to edit. After six years of working for us, our Wikipedia Student Program Manager, Helaine Blumenthal, finally got the itch to edit herself. (Most of our staff also edit as volunteers.) Helaine reflected on her work creating the article on Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with disabilities. “I was both dismayed but unsurprised to find a paucity of information on the topic, but I’m hopeful that my article sparks others to think about how COVID has affected populations already at high risk for a host of physical, emotional, and socioeconomic disadvantages,” she says.

14. Our staff has also reflected on knowledge equity. Wiki Education’s staff are part of the broader Wikimedia community, and we as a movement are thinking about knowledge equity as a key pillar of our current strategy. Our Senior Wikipedia Expert, Ian Ramjohn, reflected on how to represent Indigenous knowledge in our projects. Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent wrote about diversity and how we as a community generate lists of equity topics to improve. These kinds of reflections are important not just for us but for our community at large.

15. We provide the software for global program leaders to manage their work. Wikipedia is enhanced by not only our work, but the work of program leaders all over the world. And thousands of these program leaders use Programs & Events Dashboard, available on WMF Labs, to manage, track, and report on their programs and events. The Dashboard is a software originally built for Wiki Education’s own course management; today, we’ve added popular features like authorship highlighting and other features that have made the Dashboard a key tool in the Wikmedia movement.

16. We’ve documented our work so others can learn. Our commitment to supporting other program leaders isn’t just technology. We also run a variety of programs and initiatives, and as part of our ongoing commitment to documenting what we do and what we’ve learned, we publish evaluation reports on Meta, the central organizing wiki for the Wikimedia movement. To date, we’ve published seven of these detailed reports, offering information on how others in the movement could replicate our successes and avoid our mistakes. We believe these reports are a critical part of our commitment to documentation and knowledge sharing.

17. Our research on student learning outcomes helps further other education programs. In 2016, we also commissioned Dr. Zach McDowell to do a student learning outcomes research project. His results are useful for any education program leader looking to demonstrate learning outcomes from writing Wikipedia articles. Ensuring we’re providing a positive pedagogical experience is what draws many instructors to teach with Wikipedia.

18. Our work has inspired other researchers. It’s not just the research we commission; our programs have also inspired other researchers to publish about Wikipedia. Some research is about teaching with Wikipedia. Others is about our program’s impact to articles. Others focus on our impact to scholarly references. Because our Dashboard allows researchers to download CSVs of participant Wikipedia user names (not real names), we’re often not even aware researchers are studying the impact of our programs until the research is published!

19. Our partnerships have transformed Wikipedia’s relationship with academia. A decade ago, Wikipedia was the bane of teachers’ existence. Today, thanks in part to our work, Wikipedia is embraced in the academy. This can partially be attributed to our work in fostering partnerships with academic associations who then encourage their members — professionals in that discipline — to participate in Wiki Education’s programs. Our partnerships with large associations like the American Sociological Association, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and American Anthropological Association — to name a few — have not only furthered our programmatic work in those topic areas on Wikipedia, but has also helped shape the perception of Wikipedia in academia.

20. The scale of our work has a huge impact on Wikipedia. Many other Wikimedia groups also do important work similar to us. What sets Wiki Education apart from our peers is the sheer size of our programs. In 2021, we taught 10,758 people who had never registered an account before how to edit Wikipedia. We bring so many new active editors, in fact, that 19% of English Wikipedia’s new contributors come through our programs.

21. We’re changing the face of Wikipedia. And it’s not just the scale of contributors: It’s also the diversity. While only 22% of existing contributors to Wikipedia in Northern America identify as women, Wiki Education’s programs are working to change that: 67% of our participants identify as women, and an additional 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity. Similarly, while 89% of existing U.S. editors identify as white, only 55% of Wiki Education’s program participants do. Our programs are bringing dramatically more diverse participants to Wikipedia than our current core community, which helps us to further our collective mission to collect the sum of all human knowledge by bringing in a more diverse set of people and expertise.

If you’re inspired by our work, join us! Spread the word about teaching with Wikipedia to higher education instructors you know in the U.S. and Canada. Encourage organizations you’re a member of to partner with us to offer a Wikipedia editing course. Take one of our courses yourself. And donate to Wiki Education to help us keep making these 21 ways we’ve improved Wikipedia continue into its 22nd year.

Image credit: Elya, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

We ran six courses in summer 2018 and five courses in fall 2018, all told training an additional 163 subject matter experts to contribute content to Wikipedia. Participants added 265,000 words to 572 articles, including creating 65 new articles, and demonstrated the impact that bringing academic expertise to Wikipedia can have. This program tackles article topics that are otherwise hard for existing Wikipedians — who may not have the subject matter expertise — or new academics — who may not have the Wikipedia knowledge — to improve. Examples improved through the program include:

• Feminist poetry is a new article created by a program participant. Creating a new article on a broad topic like this requires a broad understanding of the subject-matter, which is the kind of thing an expert can provide.
• The hometown association article was heavily tagged and poorly organized. It was the kind of article that accretes content over time, but lacks coherence. A program participant was able to put the pieces together and give it the coherence it was missing.
• Bette Korber‘s biography, which was created by a program participant, successfully captures her achievements and puts them in the proper context. Again, it’s easy to write a biography as a series of events that give little sense of the importance of their work. It’s harder to put that in context, and show the most important aspects of their professional achievements. It’s the kind of thing an expert, who understands the importance and can contextualize it, is better-equipped to do than someone with less breadth and depth of understanding.

That’s why we think this program is so meaningful to improving Wikipedia content — and why we hope other Wikimedia organizations will adopt similar programs in their language Wikipedias. In order to facilitate this happening, we’ve published an update to our pilot evaluation, with more details on what we learned in the next 11 cohorts, and an explanation of where we are taking the program in the future. The report was written by Program Managers Ryan McGrady and Will Kent, with input from Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn and Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson. We firmly believe detailed evaluation reports like this are an important part of participating in the Wikimedia movement, and we are committed to continually documenting our learnings for the benefit of others in the Wikimedia movement. I’ll be speaking about this program at the forthcoming Wikimedia+Education Conference in Donostia, in an effort to encourage more Wikimedia education groups to adopt our model.

Our new strategy

We announced our new strategy, which will shape our work for the next three years. We will increase knowledge equity by focusing on content and communities that are underrepresented on Wikipedia and Wikidata; provide people who seek knowledge online with accurate information in topic areas that are underdeveloped; and reach large audiences with free knowledge by making Wikipedia and Wikidata more complete.

Part of our new strategic direction also includes the development of Wikidata-focused programs. We kicked off this program development with a visit to Wayne State University, where we are beginning a collaboration with the School of Information Sciences around integrating Wikidata assignments into the curriculum. We also attended WikiCite, where we had great conversations about the amazing work that’s happening globally related to citations, open knowledge, and structured data.

Training academics to channel their expertise into Wikipedia

We were thrilled to launch our professional development program this last year, a series of courses for academics, researchers, and other scholars to learn how to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia. Our approach was featured in William Beutler’s “Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2018”. It’s a model that offers a potential solution to engaging more academics and subject-matter experts in Wikipedia editing. These professionals target highly trafficked, complex topics that student editors don’t necessarily have the skills to tackle in our Wikipedia Student Program (formerly named the Classroom Program). And so far, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from course participants about the value of the collaborative learning experience. It seems the rest of the Wikipedia community is as eager as we are to see where the venture goes.

Our Wikipedia Student Program is as booming as ever

We supported more instructors and student editors than ever before in our Wikipedia Student Program. More than 16,000 student editors added more than 13 million words to more than 16,000 articles on Wikipedia, our highest numbers to date.

Our partnership with the National Women’s Studies Association (one of the many academic associations we work with) was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education last March. The article shows the impact of our efforts so far to engage women’s and gender studies students around the country to channel their classwork into the public resource that is Wikipedia. Since 2014, the partnership has yielded more than 4.4 million words added to Wikipedia to help close the gender gap.

We also hit a major milestone last April: student editors in our Wikipedia Student Program have officially contributed more words to Wikipedia since our program’s inception in 2010 than were published in the last print edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Executive Director Frank Schulenburg wrote about the significance of this milestone in the context of encyclopedic history and conversations around open access.

Reinforcing our tools so that more people can do better work on Wikipedia, worldwide

We continually seek feedback from the thousands of people that use our Dashboard so that we can improve it to fit new and changing needs. A portion of these continual improvements are made through our tech mentorship program, which engages new coders in our open source project. An example of a great feature to come out of one of these mentorships last year is Google Summer of Code student Pratyush Singhal’s Article Finder. This is a tool on our Dashboard which will help newcomers find Wikipedia articles in need of development in an automated, straight-forward way.

We also embarked on an exciting new journey for our software development team. Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross hired Wes Reid as our new Software Developer. The expansion of our tech team will allow for more integral changes to our Dashboard in the near future, enabling the thousands who use it worldwide to learn Wikipedia editing and track their contributions with more efficiency.

Connecting with our fellow community members

We attended numerous academic conferences this year to invite instructors and researchers to join our programs. Multiple alumni from our professional development courses presented with our staff at these conferences, speaking to the skills and enthusiasm that the experience fostered. Participating instructors in our Wikipedia Student Program presented about incorporating Wikipedia editing into their curricula, as well.

We also had the privilege of attending multiple Wikipedian-centered conferences and events last year. In April, Executive Director Frank Schulenburg and Sage traveled to Berlin to participate in the annual Wikimedia Conference. It was a great opportunity to join other leaders of the global Wikimedia movement both to speak to the present and future of the global Programs & Events Dashboard that we maintain and discuss the strategic direction of the Wikimedia movement.

Then, during October, we had a wonderful opportunity to interact with the North American Wikimedia community at WikiConference North America. In attendance were several of our instructors. Both Wiki Education staff as well as instructors in our program gave presentations during the conference, making education one of the most prominent themes of this year’s gathering.

We often see visitors at our San Francisco office in the Presidio, which is a treat for us and a great way to further connect with Wikipedians, instructors, and students who we usually work with only virtually.

On the whole, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in 2018 and look forward to productive work in the coming year to make Wikipedia even more of a robust and accurate resource for everyone.

For detailed reports of programmatic activities and budgeting, see our Monthly Reports published on our blog and on Wikimedia Commons.

Header image: File:WikiConNA 18 -WikiEd Group Photo 1.jpg, Sixflashphoto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Society for Neuroscience

First, I attended the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, where attendees research varied topics such as the lower urinary tract, behavioral neuroscience, and endocrinology. In my experience, many instructors in these kinds of courses crave a writing assignment where students have to practice talking about their field for an audience outside the classroom. Not unsurprisingly, blog assignments just aren’t cutting it. In a Wikipedia assignment, however, students can be asked to research biographies of people in their field or to summarize research about under-covered issues, and in the process, write about science for a worldwide audience via Wikipedia. This form of science communication can often be interdisciplinary, allowing students to bring together their course work from a variety of perspectives.

National Communication Association

But Wiki Education is also invested in finding ways that scholars and scientists themselves can contribute. That’s why this year we developed our online professional development courses where we train subject matter experts to write articles on Wikipedia in their fields. While at the National Communication Association annual convention in Salt Lake City, I got to talk with three of our current participants. “I’ve always wanted to expand these articles on Wikipedia, but couldn’t figure out where to start. It just seemed too daunting,” Margaret D’Silva, Professor of Communication and Director at the Institute for Intercultural Communication at the University of Louisville, said to me. Luckily, that’s where our course curriculum comes in. It helps breakdown the daunting process of learning to update content on Wikipedia, all with the support of our trained Wikipedia Experts.

I also had the opportunity to join a panel discussion at NCA about the use of open educational resources. Wiki Education is no stranger to discussions of open educational practice, so we were excited to participate in that session, especially as we continue to offer free teaching tools and resources.

American Anthropological Association

My final stop in the circuit was the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. I spent most of my time talking with attendees about our upcoming professional development course in collaboration with the National Archives. The anthropologists I talked with were very excited about the opportunity to update topics about the history of women’s suffrage on Wikipedia. The course isn’t full yet though, so interested participants can apply here to join!

Take a look at all that Dr. Brandt contributed to the article. Highlighted in purple here are Dr. Brandt’s edits. Before she came in and reworked both the article’s content and organization, it contained almost no information about Atwood’s career. Nor did it outline what influence her work has had in the American cultural and political landscape.

Perhaps most notable of Dr. Brandt’s contributions is the section on Atwood and feminism. Dr. Brandt is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Cal State Dominguez Hills, positioning her perfectly to add such a perspective to a Wikipedia article about an author whose work holds such prominence in cultural discourse because of its feminist themes. Given that feminist activist groups have drawn on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale over the past two years in political debate, documenting the real-world manifestations of Atwood’s influence is an important part of painting an accurate picture of her career. In Atwood’s announcement this week that she will be writing a sequel to her influential work, she nodded to this influence, saying that in addition to wanting to respond to fans’ desire for another book: “The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”

Dr. Brandt took it upon herself to bring Atwood’s biography article up to Wikipedia’s second highest quality standard: that of Good Article. The process for designating an article of this quality requires a detailed back and forth with another editor to determine if the article meets requirements. Dr. Brandt made several more edits to the article through this rigorous feedback process and it has been accepted among the Wikipedia community as a comprehensive representation. In the last day, she has returned to the article to add information about the sequel – seven months after her course wrapped!

Atwood’s article receives a daily average of about 2,500 pageviews and has received more than 400,000 total since Dr. Brandt improved it. That’s a tangible impact that an individual has made for public knowledge. Become a Wiki Scholar yourself and learn how to edit in our unique courses. For more information about our current course offering, see bit.ly/NARAwiki.

Read about Dr. Brandt’s personal experience in our course and how she transferred her new skills to the classroom in this reflective piece.

Image: File:Margaret Atwood – Foire du Livre de Francfort (37735253561).jpg, ActuaLitté, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Just one year ago when news of Harvey Weinstein and the actions of other powerful men across industries broke, Google searches related to toxic and healthy masculinity spiked. So when a sociologist in one of our professional development courses decided to improve the Wikipedia article about masculinity as part of our course just a few months later, the article was receiving around one thousand pageviews a day. Dr. Michael Ramirez took a sociologist’s lens to his article improvements and included more information about how conceptions of masculinity have changed over time and how they differ based on cultural context. Understanding how identity forms, the pressures people feel to conform to certain definitions of identity, and how the forces influencing identity can be toxic are each important for reducing the power of toxic expressions of masculinity. And that allows for more people to live safe, healthy lives without perpetuating or experiencing violence.

“We are ‘experts’ and as such, we should use our expertise for the greater good,” writes American Sociological Association member Dr. Ramirez in a reflection about his course experience. “Sociological perspectives are far too often overlooked in the creation of knowledge and understanding of world issues. We can partly remedy this situation by actively incorporating our knowledge into public venues such as Wikipedia.”

We are currently accepting applicants for an upcoming professional development course beginning in January, which will train scholars of diverse backgrounds to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the history of women’s voting rights. For more information and to apply, visit: bit.ly/NARAwiki

Header image: File:Herakles Farnese MAN Napoli Inv6001 n01.jpg, Farnese Collection, Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.