How does this work?
1. Let’s chat.
Your institution curates important high-quality knowledge—in your publications, collections, or members. We believe your research and unique perspectives belong in Wikipedia, where it will play an important role in informing people making behavioral, voting, or even policy decisions. Think about your institution’s mission and current strategy. Do any of the following align with your goals?
Reach
Connect your research, collections, or data to a worldwide audience
Equity
Change the world’s perception of historical figures, better representing the diversity of your field
Impact
Influence behavior, decision-making, policy, and future scholarship
Service
Engage members, staff, or other stakeholders in a (fun!) act of public good
2. Next, we’ll collaboratively design your Wikipedia Initiative.
Now that we’ve connected to understand each other’s goals, we’ll work together to finalize the details of your custom Wikipedia Initiative. We’ll identify your target audience and narrowly define the topic of the Wikipedia pages your program participants will work to improve. As your Wikipedia Initiative consultants, we offer ideas based on Wikipedia’s content gaps and needs as well as your individual goals. Then we’ll make it happen on your behalf.
The kick-off to your Wikipedia Initiative may take the form of a 6-week online course or an in-person workshop. We’re flexible, so long as we can bring better knowledge to the world through this project. Whichever experience we land on together, we offer a Dashboard where you can follow the progress.
3. Then, Wiki Education takes it from there.
We’re experts on facilitating Initiatives that help people share their knowledge through Wikipedia. We’ll execute your Wikipedia Initiative, and you and your team can be as involved as you’d like. Here’s what the process might look like:
When subject-matter experts share their knowledge through Wikipedia and Wikidata:
Our results suggest that increased provision of information in accessible repositories like Wikipedia is a very cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains are equity-improving, disproportionately benefiting those without traditional access to scientific information.
I have been looking for forums to share science and policy more publicly than academia’s usual route of writing for scientific audiences in journal publications, which are often limited to people who can reach behind paywalls and translate scientific jargon. Writing for Wikipedia offers a chance to share research and policy information with anyone who has access to the internet, and this truly open-source approach really drew me in!
Wikipedia is influencing both what judges cite and how they write up their decisions. Our [research] results highlight an important public policy issue. With a source that is as widely used as Wikipedia, we want to make sure we are building institutions to ensure that the information is of the highest quality. The finding that judges or their staffs are using Wikipedia is a much bigger worry if the information they find there isn’t reliable.
A core part of the American Physical Society’s vision is to foster equity and inclusion in physics, and increase diversity in all its dimensions. When our members 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. This not only recognizes their contributions to the field, but also helps expand the perception of who can be a physicist.
