Announcements – Wiki Education https://wikiedu.org Wiki Education engages students and academics to improve Wikipedia Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:43:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4 70449891 Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee members announced https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/03/29/humanities-social-justice-advisory-committee-members-announced/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/03/29/humanities-social-justice-advisory-committee-members-announced/#respond Fri, 29 Mar 2024 18:43:29 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=77294 Continued]]> Wiki Education is proud to welcome the seven members of the inaugural Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee, bringing together faculty from higher education institutions across the country. The group will advise and support our Wikipedia Student Program’s Knowledge Equity initiative in partnership with the Mellon Foundation.

“Wiki Education does such phenomenally important work that I always pounce on every opportunity to work with them,” said Shira Klein, associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Chapman University. “Wikipedia’s articles about history and religion have real-life impact on the world. What people read on Wikipedia shapes the opinions they form about politics, social justice, and so forth. Therefore we need to make sure Wikipedia gets it right, and this project is going to help that goal.”

All advisory committee members bring multidisciplinary experiences and professional networks to support Wiki Education’s goal to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of historically marginalized populations and subject areas. Committee members will also provide valuable feedback on the Wikipedia Student Program framework and curricular materials; each has incorporated the “Wikipedia assignment” into their own courses.

Heather J. Sharkey, professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, “jumped at the chance” to join the advisory committee, noting her rewarding experience writing for Wikipedia and working with the Wikipedia Student Program.

“Wiki Education offers user-friendly tutorials that guide students (and their teachers!) through the nuts-and-bolts of writing for Wikipedia ethically and with rigor,” said Sharkey. “Students end up thinking about the content of articles and potential biases; the quality of sources, citations, and literary style; and the nature of “content gaps,” meaning topics that are missing, but that deserve to be covered, for the sake of social equity. Students learn, and the world benefits from their scholarship!”

Advisory committee members will engage in three areas of focus: outreach and recruitment, conference participation, and review of curricular materials. Activities will include facilitating a Teaching with Wikipedia workshop at their home institutions, presenting about the program and related research at humanities conferences, and reviewing new Wiki Education resources associated with the Knowledge Equity initiative.

Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee members:

David-James Gonzales

Dr. David-James (DJ) Gonzales is an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University where he teaches and researches on race, migration, and Latino (a/x/e) politics in the US. He has been teaching with Wikipedia since 2018 and enjoys teaching students how to incorporate historical research methodology into public-facing writing projects like Wikipedia articles and op-eds as a way of using their education to “give back” to society. Collectively, his students have authored 180 articles, edited an additional 492 articles, and added approximately 8,500 references to Wikipedia. As of spring 2024, the work produced by his students on Wikipedia has garnered over 13 million views.

Shira Klein

Dr. Shira Klein is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Chapman University. Her two primary areas of expertise are Italian Jewish history and knowledge production on Wikipedia. She is co-author of “Wikipedia’s Intentional Warping of Polish-Jewish History” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Holocaust Research. Published in February 2023, this article has been viewed over 52,000 times and reported on in newspapers worldwide, including Slate Magazine, Der Spiegel (Germany), and Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland). Altmetric has ranked this article’s online visibility in the top 5 percent of 25 million research outputs, and it is under contract to be translated into Polish and Hebrew. Klein’s book Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press) was awarded finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award, and is now under contract to be translated into Hebrew. Klein has received multiple grants, including from the National Foundation for the Humanities, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Research, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the Barbieri Foundation for Modern Italian History.

Alexandria Lockett

Dr. Lockett has been editing Wikipedia for 20+ years to improve its content about marginalized persons, cultures, communities, languages, professions, texts, and disciplines. A former professor of Writing and Rhetoric for almost 20 years, she integrated Wikipedia editing into over twenty courses, as well as trained dozens of faculty how to do the same. She has presented her research about Wikipedia across several platforms including WikiCon North America, Black Lunch Table and AfroCrowd events, and publications such as Wikipedia@20: An Incomplete Revolution (MIT Press, 2020). Dr. Lockett has also organized and led several workshops and edit-a-thons in HBCU spaces. She is currently an Independent Scholar and the Director of Lateral Recruiting for a global, woman-owned legal search firm.

Tracy Perkins 

Dr. Tracy Perkins is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation Arizona State University who specializes in social inequality, social movements, and the environment. She began teaching students at Howard University to analyze the politics of knowledge creation and circulation via Wikipedia assignments in 2017, and has been teaching the assignment at ASU since 2020. She and three Howard students co-authored a paper on their experience that was published in Civic Sociology in 2024. See more of her work at tracyperkins.org.

David Sartorius 

Dr. David Sartorius is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Maryland. His book, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba, was published by Duke University Press in 2013, and examines the racial politics of colonial rule, including the support of Cubans of African descent, slave and free, for the Spanish government. Sartorius is currently the co-editor of Social Text, an assistant editor of The Americas, and a member of the organizing collective of Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.

Heather J. Sharkey

Dr. Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa.  A firm believer in digital citizenship and public scholarship, she has been partnering with Wiki Education and its Student Program since 2019.  Working in teams, her students have published many new Middle East-related articles on Wikipedia – especially biographies of women and studies of historic buildings. Her students have also added many images to Wikimedia Commons while generating public copyright licenses.  At conferences ranging from the Creative Commons Global Summit to Wikimania, Sharkey has spoken about the educational value of involving students in producing high-quality content for Wikipedia.

Delia Steverson

Delia Steverson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where she specializes in 19th and 20th Century African American Literature, Critical Disability Studies, and Southern Literature. She has been teaching with Wikipedia since 2019 in both lower and upper division undergraduate courses including Survey of African American Literature, Gender and Sexualities in African American Literature, and 21st Century Black Southern Literature. Delia has written about her experience with the Wikipedia project for Wiki Education in an article entitled “Building my Wikipedia confidence.” Her contributions seek to improve the presence of lesser known African American authors, texts, and histories.

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Mellon Foundation and Wiki Education team up to launch largest social-justice campaign in the humanities on Wikipedia https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/01/23/mellon-foundation-and-wiki-education-team-up-to-launch-largest-social-justice-campaign-in-the-humanities-on-wikipedia/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/01/23/mellon-foundation-and-wiki-education-team-up-to-launch-largest-social-justice-campaign-in-the-humanities-on-wikipedia/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:47:37 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=74560 Continued]]> Wiki Education has exciting news to ring in the New Year! We are thrilled to announce a three-year partnership with the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning program that will elevate the knowledge of 16,000 higher education students studying the humanities to represent more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience on Wikipedia. Beginning this year, this partnership will amplify our Wikipedia Student Program’s Knowledge Equity initiative that brings to light stories and perspectives that are often missing, misrepresented, or have little information written about them. This project will be the biggest social-justice campaign for the humanities in Wikipedia’s history.

Mellon Foundation logo“Our world is full of rich human stories and horizon-expanding knowledge that should be accessible to all, but that have been left out, suppressed, or otherwise hidden from public view,” says Maria Sachiko Cecire, Program Officer in Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation. “We are delighted to partner with Wiki Education in this ambitious social justice campaign to bring more information about the full range of human creation and expression to the largest and most consulted reference work on the planet. We are especially thrilled that the significant research and writing skills of humanities faculty and students at colleges and universities across the country will power this essential work.”

We define knowledge equity content as that which pertains to the narratives of women and other non-male gender identities, those with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and others whose perspectives have been historically marginalized by dominant groups. Indeed, the dominant group of Wikipedia contributors are currently well-educated white men from North America and Europe. Featured Articles on Wikipedia’s landing page are largely authored by this group and often lacking a social justice lens. 

Wikipedia editors, including new ones, tend to stick with the way things have always been written if not guided to where the gaps exist. Wiki Education’s resources and support will empower students to add content about knowledge equity, while still adhering to Wikipedia’s rigorous rules on sourcing, writing style, and layout. 

Students will specifically focus on re-shaping the landscape of humanities articles pertaining to academic disciplines such as anthropology; archaeology; arts; classics; cultural studies; disability studies; ethics; gender and sexuality studies; history (including history of science); jurisprudence; languages and literature; music; philosophy; racial and ethnic studies; religion; sociology, as well as interdisciplinary topics related to an equitable human experience, like environmental justice.

By the end of 2026, we expect more than 200 million people will have viewed these articles and increased their understanding of communities, cultures, histories, and notable figures that have not received enough media attention elsewhere.

“I’m excited about our partnership with the Mellon Foundation,” says Frank Schulenburg, Executive Director of Wiki Education. “This initiative will significantly impact the students involved and the countless Wikipedia users who will gain free access to representative and trustworthy information. Our Knowledge Equity initiative is a key aspect of our mission, and I’m especially pleased that we’re starting a large campaign to enhance content in the Humanities.”

This project will catalyze our ongoing Knowledge Equity campaign by significantly growing participation among new humanities faculty and supporting Wikipedia use in their courses. Wiki Education will activate its existing network of academic associations and partners and identify new opportunities to collaborate. Our work will be guided by a newly established Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee, composed of seven exemplary humanities scholars who have taught with Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program with a knowledge equity lens. Our program team will onboard and support 800 humanities courses that add over 11 million words, powerfully diversifying who and what you see on Wikipedia. 

Contact Kathleen Crowley, Director of Donor Relations, at kathleen@wikiedu.org if you’re interested in growing this impact. 

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org

About Wiki Education
Wiki Education is a small, high-impact nonprofit organization systematically building and expanding the content on the English Wikipedia. Our goal is to represent the sum of all human knowledge by making Wikipedia more accurate, representative, and complete through our Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program. These programs have trained students in higher education classrooms across the United States and Canada and subject matter experts from around the world how to add their knowledge to the most referenced online encyclopedia. We bring 19% of all new contributors to Wikipedia, who have written over hundred thousand articles viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Mellon Foundation logo used courtesy of Mellon Foundation, all rights reserved.

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Wiki Education awarded grant to promote digital citizenship and combat misinformation https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/01/18/wiki-education-awarded-grant-to-promote-digital-citizenship-and-combat-misinformation/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2024/01/18/wiki-education-awarded-grant-to-promote-digital-citizenship-and-combat-misinformation/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:10:09 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=74375 Continued]]> We are now in an election year when a vast range of issues, from war to healthcare, that affect Americans come to the forefront of their decision-making in the voting booth. Alarmingly, a survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that the level of trust in the media that covers these issues is so low now that about half of the American public believes national news organizations intend to deceive them. In a trend that is sure to grow, a whopping 58% of those surveyed also say that they get their information online. 

While the Internet, social media, and generative artificial intelligence tools makes information quick and easy to access, often claims are made without sources to support them, and their credibility can be tainted by biased agendas. ChatGPT can also hallucinate sources and generate content that has no basis in fact. At the same time, a recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that Americans across the political spectrum feel the country is in crisis and at risk of failing. With the rise in civil unrest and discussions of civil war, the need to spread neutrally presented information that can be trusted is all the more urgent.  

In this era where information is abundant but accuracy is often compromised, it is crucial to equip the next generation of leaders with the skills to discern reliable sources and contribute to the creation of factual knowledge. This is especially key to maintaining the integrity of Wikipedia, which consistently ranks in the top ten of all online search results and is largely trusted by the public. Indeed, Wikipedia is free from advertising or the influence of private interests that can distort other online and social media sites. 

Rapoport Foundation LogoWiki Education has partnered with the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation to foster a more informed, digitally literate citizenry who reads and edits Wikipedia and participates in civic society.

“On behalf of the Rapoport Foundation, we are pleased to support Wiki Education with a $25,000 grant for the Wikipedia Student Program, and we look forward to learning from this partnership over the course of 2024,” said Jenny Peel, Rapoport Foundation Program Officer.

Wikipedia’s rigorous rules and guidelines on writing with neutrality and citing reliable sources have been refined over two decades by the volunteer editing community. Our Wikipedia Student Program teaches students how to follow these strict policies to improve their research and digital media literacy skills. The support from the Rapoport Foundation will help us serve 800 students in 40 courses at universities and colleges across the United States as they learn to tackle misinformation on Wikipedia and hone their ability to detect it. Students will edit or create at least 670 articles that we expect to receive more than 7 million views by the general public, including policymakers, journalists, and more.

Getting information right on Wikipedia can have huge ramifications. Recent research has found articles have the power to influence our democracy and rule of law. When researchers analyzed judges’ decisions out of Ireland’s lower courts, they discovered that the cases with Wikipedia articles were 21% more likely to be cited as precedents and that lower courts drew on Wikipedia articles in framing these precedents and their meaning to make their decisions. The reliance on Wikipedia—used to shape and dictate the way of life in America and abroad—can have a reverberating impact for generations.

In collaboration with the Rapoport Foundation, Wiki Education recognizes this significance and is building a foundation of trust and accuracy in the information landscape. We are immensely grateful to the Rapoport Foundation for their timely support of this work to improve the desperate state of our democracy.

For more information, please contact:
Kathleen Crowley
Director of Donor Relations
kathleen@wikiedu.org

Rapoport Foundation logo used courtesy Rapoport Foundation, all rights reserved.

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Welcome, Megan and Melissa! https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/09/11/welcome-megan-and-melissa/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/09/11/welcome-megan-and-melissa/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2023 21:38:39 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=65268 Continued]]> Wiki Education is pleased to welcome two new staff to our team. Megan Newsome and Melissa Joseph have both recently joined us for one-year positions.

Megan Newsome in front of bookshelves
Megan Newsome

Megan Newsome joins Wiki Education as our Data Scientist for the Visualizing Impact project. Over the next year, she will develop an AI system for building lists of Wikipedia articles within a specific topic, so that we can show the aggregate impact our programs are making in topics of interest. As an astrophysics PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, Megan has been putting her data science skills to use studying black holes and supernovae. She’s also a passionate advocate for civic engagement and voting rights, and a triathlete.

Melissa Joseph outside
Melissa Joseph

Melissa Joseph is serving as our part-time Scholars & Scientists Outreach Coordinator. She’ll be working to recruit subject matter experts to take part in a series of courses on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Melissa’s honed her outreach skills in past work as a college affordability advisor for a nonprofit. When she’s not working for Wiki Education, Melissa is a professional opera singer who recently made her debut at Opera Philadelphia as Musetta in La Boheme, then went on to cover the title role of Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and was a Steans Fellow at the Ravinia Music Festival in Highland Park, IL. She has bachelor’s and master’s degree in Music from Georgia State University. Outside of singing, Melissa enjoys spending time with friends and family, discovering new food/bubble tea spots, and traveling.

Welcome, Megan and Melissa!

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Join us for “Wikipedia in a generative AI world” https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/09/05/join-us-for-wikipedia-in-a-generative-ai-world/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/09/05/join-us-for-wikipedia-in-a-generative-ai-world/#comments Tue, 05 Sep 2023 16:06:23 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=65078 Continued]]> Update: watch the recording.

Everyone’s been talking about generative AI like ChatGPT and how it will change our lives. But have you considered its impact on Wikipedia?

We’re pleased to announce the next edition of the Wiki Education Speaker Series, regular Zoom-based conversations where we bring together experts in Wikimedia and open knowledge for lively discussions of topics relevant to our communities. Our next Speaker Series is on Wikipedia in a generative AI world, and it’s sure to be a lively conversation!

Our panelists will provide a range of perspectives on what ChatGPT and other generative AI tools mean for Wikipedia and the future of free knowledge projects. They’ll opine on where the AI landscape is going from here. The discussion will be moderated by Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer, Sage Ross, and panelists will include:

  • Robert Cummings, author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, has been exploring how AI fits into writing pedagogy.
  • Stephen Harrison, journalist and columnist for Slate’s “SourceNotes”, has been on the Wikipedia and AI beat.
  • Aaron Halfaker, applied research scientist at Microsoft and developer of Wikipedia’s first machine learning systems, is keeping up with the latest developments in AI research.

“Wikipedia in a generative AI world” will take place Friday, September 15, at 10 am Pacific Time. Register today for the discussion.

You can also register for the October event in our Speaker Series, “How cultural institutions use Wikidata to share their data with the world”, as well as watch the recording from our August event, “How teaching with Wikipedia revolutionizes higher education classrooms”, at wikiedu.org/speaker-series.

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Expanding art history and architecture on Wikipedia thanks to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/05/31/expanding-art-history-and-architecture-on-wikipedia-thanks-to-the-samuel-h-kress-foundation/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/05/31/expanding-art-history-and-architecture-on-wikipedia-thanks-to-the-samuel-h-kress-foundation/#respond Wed, 31 May 2023 18:52:52 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=62035 Continued]]>

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded Wiki Education a $25,000 grant to lead a 10-week Wiki Scholars course in the upcoming year that will train scholars in pre-modern European art and architecture how to add their knowledge to a topic deeply underdeveloped on Wikipedia. The Foundation agrees it’s critical that Wikipedia provides accurate, expert, and comprehensive information on art history and architecture for the benefit of museum professionals and art history students, as well as the interested public.

This extensive course will not only disseminate research about pre-modern European art and architecture to a potential audience of millions, but will also train art historians in fundamental, valuable career skills to take forward into all they do in an increasingly digital world. We’ll collaborate with scholarly partners like the Detroit Institute of Arts and address information gaps on Wikipedia related to pre-modern European art and architecture from antiquity to 1830. The quality of these Wikipedia articles varies and there is a strong bias towards Western European work, while Central and Eastern European art and architecture are poorly covered. We aim to bring more balance and diversity to Wikipedia’s coverage in these areas.

Given Wikipedia’s global reach, art institutions are able to connect with audiences in languages and contexts they never could have imagined. Wikipedia has an unparalleled ability to reach audiences around the globe. Averaging 18 billion page views per month, the website is the 7th most visited in the world. Not only that, Wikipedia content has a measurable effect on whether or not tourists plan a visit. Wikipedia drives enjoyment of art as well as learning. And cultural institutions are taking notice.

Take the Met, for example. After adopting an Open Access licensing policy for their images and data, they began reaching 10 million more people per month through Wikipedia – 7 times the reach of their own website. The Smithsonian, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago have followed suit with Wikipedia and Wikidata initiatives of their own. All of these incredible organizations have consulted Wiki Education’s expertise and guidance at some point along their Wikipedia/Wikidata journey. Art historians are seeking the skills they need to do this important open access work, and Wiki Education has a successful track record for facilitating experts’ entry into Wikipedia’s editorial world.

We’re currently looking for additional partners to do this exciting work, so if you or your organization is interested in being involved in this initiative, please reach out to jami@wikiedu.org. We’re excited to work with new organizations in this mission and are extremely grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their generous support as we make Wikipedia better together, for all.

Thumbnail image “The School of Athens” by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, public domain.
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Underrepresented STEM leaders to shine on Wikipedia with new grant from Broadcom Foundation https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/04/27/underrepresented-stem-leaders-to-shine-on-wikipedia-with-new-grant-from-broadcom-foundation/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/04/27/underrepresented-stem-leaders-to-shine-on-wikipedia-with-new-grant-from-broadcom-foundation/#respond Thu, 27 Apr 2023 21:02:43 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=60918 Continued]]> Margaret Helen Harper was a programmer who worked with Grace Hopper to help develop one of the first computer programs. But until 2020, she didn’t have a Wikipedia biography. Thanks to a student editor currently in our program, she now does and hundreds of people have since read about her work.

With 450 million readers and 275,000 biographies of scientists, Wikipedia is an extraordinary avenue for recognizing the achievements and contributions of scientists. But women and people of color are underrepresented on the site. This lack of visibility contributes to and is reflective of systemic problems facing the STEM workforce: women and people of color often lack role models in their chosen careers and implicit bias reinforces stereotypes that they don’t belong. Women receive about half of all STEM degrees in the United States, but comprise only 30% of the STEM workforce. As compared to 11% of the overall workforce, Black Americans make up only 9% of STEM workers, while Latinos make up only 7% of STEM workers as compared to 16% overall. Young scientists need to see a greater diversity of successful STEM professionals as role models. And Wikipedia is a great place to show them.

Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation. Rights reserved.

“People find inspiration in those with whom they identify and share a sense of commonality and worldview,” says Paula Golden, the President of Broadcom Foundation. “Broadcom Foundation is excited to partner in the Wiki Education Project that will add biographies and contributions of STEM pioneers of color and gender diversity to Wikipedia, which will enable young people to find inspiration in scientists, engineers and innovators who look like them.”

Broadcom Foundation has generously provided a $150,000 grant to bring the hidden figures of notable people in STEM to light on Wikipedia. In 2022, Broadcom Foundation supported our Equity Outreach Coordinator, Andrés Vera, in recruiting more than thirty instructors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). Broadcom Foundation’s current grant supports Wiki Education’s continued recruitment efforts of faculty and onboarding for students adding these new STEM biographies of women and people of color to Wikipedia for the first time. By the end of 2023, these students will add at least 35 new heroes and heroines to Wikipedia, inspiring young people searching for role models that look like them.

By connecting higher education classrooms to the publishing power of Wikipedia, Wiki Education will help future engineers, computer scientists, and others in STEM — including thousands of women and racially diverse university students — improve biographies on Wikipedia of STEM’s hidden figures and see that they belong in the STEM careers of their choosing.

What’s different about the support Wiki Education offers through this initiative?

La’Tonya Rease Miles, a participating instructor from Santa Clara University

As part of our typical Student Program support, all instructors receive:

  • A modular online training to introduce students to Wikipedia policies and procedures;
  • Handbooks offering advice and guidelines for students and professors; and
  • Metrics about student edits, including amount of content added and page views of articles

But through this generous grant, we are able to offer additional support and a stipend for instructors joining us in this initiative, including:

  • Assignment design support and help generating lists of articles for students to create;
  • Phone, email, and video support during the term for professors and students, including regular check-ins to ensure the students are adding relevant biographies of people in technology; and
  • Stipends for instructors who successfully complete the project

Does this sound like something you want to be a part of? Email andres@wikiedu.org.

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Thank you, Nielsen Foundation, for helping us leverage Wikidata for good! https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/01/31/thank-you-nielsen-foundation-for-helping-us-leverage-wikidata-for-good/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/01/31/thank-you-nielsen-foundation-for-helping-us-leverage-wikidata-for-good/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2023 22:09:39 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=54834 Continued]]> At Wiki Education, we spend a lot of time working to make Wikipedia and Wikidata more representative of the world we live in. Many of our courses focus on content gaps about historically marginalized communities, so that our programs and the greater Wikipedia editing community can systematically tackle them at scale. Unfortunately, there have been few tools to assist in addressing this issue at scale – until now. Thanks to the Nielsen Foundation’s generous support through their 2022 Data for Good grants program, we are designing a portal focused on equity that will identify representation gaps on Wikipedia and Wikidata, and allow us to use our courses to help close them.

The instant availability of knowledge on your personal devices has revolutionized how we learn about the world around us. When you ask Google about a topic or pose a question to a virtual assistant like Alexa, the answer you get will likely come from Wikidata. That makes the open data repository an essential resource that we must make sure reflects the fullness of human knowledge. Limited coverage on Wikipedia and Wikidata of historically excluded populations and notable women has not reflected their historical importance. One of the potential causes of these gaps is that the majority of Wikipedia’s editing community are white and male. Wiki Education is committed to addressing these opportunities for growth and expanding both the editing population and coverage of historically marginalized communities on Wikidata and beyond.

Currently, groups of Wikipedia editors surface content gaps on Wikipedia manually, often through online common spaces called WikiProjects. We are inspired by the massive success of Women in Red, a WikiProject focused on expanding and adding articles about women on Wikipedia. Thanks to dedicated volunteer editors, the number of biographies about women has increased from 15% of all Wikipedia biographies to 19% since October 2014. Considering that there are almost 2 million biographies today on the English Wikipedia, 4% is quite a jump. While more progress needs to be made, the project has helped add much-needed visibility and credibility to women’s accomplishments that will inspire generations of leaders.

Using Wikidata in concert with Wikipedia provides a place to build a tool that can scale this important work further. Using Women in Red as a model, our online portal will allow the Wikipedia community to use information queried from Wikidata to tackle the gaps in knowledge in an organized way. Women in Red relies heavily on Wikidata queries to generate lists of women who do not yet have Wikipedia articles. With this approach, we will scope the queries to different demographics and create new lists of articles that do not exist on Wikipedia. We will leverage our portal to provide insights into the types of courses that we offer in our Scholars & Scientists Program.

We will also add this portal to the “Finding your article” training module on our Dashboard’s library of resources for student editors participating in our Wikipedia Student Program. This tool would guide students to edit Wikipedia articles that need the greatest amount of attention. We believe that the broad community who looks to Wiki Education for tools and resources will also benefit from this portal for their own initiatives and across languages.

Wiki Education’s new transformative portal will deepen the engagement of new and current program participants by empowering them to quickly assess the topics and communities most in need of improvement and representation on Wikipedia.

At the same time, we want to acknowledge that data about the personal identity of prominent figures is extremely sensitive and personal. We want everyone to know that in order for this kind of data to exist on Wikipedia, it must have a reliable source backing up that fact. It’s our hope that this portal will help encourage better sourcing, correcting errors, and a better ability to identify inaccurate or potentially harmful data from winding up (and staying) on Wikidata and Wikipedia.

Throughout this year, I’ll be developing a working prototype of the online portal and gathering feedback from the Wikimedia community. I’ll use Wikidata to test the functionality of the portal and add demographic properties that can be selected by Wikipedia editors to identify gaps in coverage of historically marginalized communities. We’re excited to leverage this portal to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of underrepresented groups and help volunteers provide millions of readers with more equitable information.

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Announcing our funding support from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/01/05/announcing-our-funding-support-from-the-patient-centered-outcomes-research-institute-pcori/ https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/01/05/announcing-our-funding-support-from-the-patient-centered-outcomes-research-institute-pcori/#respond Thu, 05 Jan 2023 17:08:34 +0000 https://wikiedu.org/?p=53329 Continued]]> The world uses Wikipedia to learn about every subject, and medical content is no exception. Medical content is accessed on Wikipedia more than the websites of the NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, NHS, WHO, and UpToDate. And we know from research that people make real behavioral decisions from what they read on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s wide readership, instant availability, and source verifiability makes it one of the most powerful vehicles for reaching patients, practitioners, and caregivers with medical research. That’s why the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), has offered Wiki Education funding support for our project disseminating PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews through Wikipedia.

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. They have a successful history of funding projects that help develop a community of patients and other stakeholders equipped to participate as partners in comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) and disseminate PCORI-funded study results. Through the Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities and organizations interested in and able to participate in, share, and use patient-centered CER.

Wiki Education is the only organization that has demonstrated an ability to improve medical and science content on Wikipedia in a systematic and scalable way. We have perfected programmatic work to engage subject matter experts to improve Wikipedia content over the last 12 years. We are a trusted partner for university instructors, academic associations, and the medical editing community on Wikipedia.

For this project, Wiki Education aims to improve the quality of health information available on Wikipedia about historically underrepresented topics, such as maternal and mental health. To accomplish our goal, we will train medical students in graduate-level classes to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment through our Wikipedia Student Program and partner with subject matter expert organizations to run Wiki Scientists courses that train medical experts on how to edit Wikipedia. Our existing network of medical faculty and partner organizations, including associations like the Society of Family Planning and Association for Psychological Science, will use PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews as key citations for these Wikipedia articles. In collaboration with the University of California San Francisco’s Dr. Amin Azzam, we will champion Wikipedia editing as a class assignment among medical school faculty. We will recruit new participants for both programs to cite more PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews. Wikipedia articles edited through this project are expected to receive millions of page views annually.

According to Greg Martin, PCORI’s Acting Chief Engagement and Dissemination Officer, “This project was selected for Engagement Award funding because it will involve stakeholders in actively disseminating PCORI-funded research results to those who can use this information to inform healthcare decisions. We look forward to working with Wiki Education throughout the course of their 2 year project.”

In the age of disinformation and misinformation, Wikipedia has shone as a beacon of fact-based, neutral information. Even YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites use it for their consumer-facing fact-checking links. The public trusts Wikipedia to provide them accurate information. With this project, we can ensure that important medical topics have information from and links to high-quality PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews.

For more information about PCORI’s funding to support engagement efforts, visit their website.

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