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

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is coming up on February 11! This day recognizes the achievements and contributions of women in STEM fields, and the barriers that they and future women scientists face. Wiki Education holds a commitment to improving coverage of these women on Wikipedia. Visibility of their accomplishments and lives is not only well-deserved, but also inspires upcoming generations of women scientists to see what opportunities are out there for them.

We’ve written about why Wikipedia matters for women in science before. Now we reflect on how our programs have made a difference. As part of our 2016 Year of Science and our continuing Communicating Science initiatives, we’re working to address the gender bias on Wikipedia. Check out our progress already:

• Biographies of women scientists improved during the Year of Science: 150
• Percentage of student editors who were women: 68%
• Words added during YOS (2016) + Communicating Science (2017): 12.68 million

The Year of Science alone produced nearly 5 million words of content, which has been read by more than 333 million people. The initiative’s success has even inspired similar efforts, like this one in Brazil.

Partnering with academic associations to close the gender gap

Our partnerships with academic associations are a testament to Academia’s desire to expand its audience. We partner with a number of scientific academic associations, many devoted to improving Wikipedia articles on women in STEM. Our partnership with the Association for Women in Mathematics and our collaboration with the Association for Women in Science, are two such examples. And through our partnership with the American Chemical Society, students work to create and improve biographies of women chemists, who remain underrepresented on Wikipedia. The National Women’s Studies Association also continues to be an effective partner and has engaged a number of recent courses in science and women’s studies. These courses have examined topics like gender, race, and culture of science and technology; women and minorities in the geosciences; women in science and engineering; and the culture of inclusion in the field of geobiology. We continue to expand our engagement with academic associations to better represent the wealth of knowledge out there about women in STEM.

Writing women into Wikipedia: biographies about women in science

Wikipedia’s gender disparity is reflected in the available content: only 16.48% of biographies are of women. A 2016 independent study finds that Wikipedia biographies of women are more likely to mention their roles as mothers or wives. These articles are also subject to more rigorous notability processes than are articles about men, (that is, women have to accomplish more than their male counterparts to warrant their own Wikipedia article) resulting in fewer biographies on women figures.

During the Year of Science, our Classroom Program exceeded its goal of improving 100 biographies of women in science by 50 articles. It wouldn’t have been possible without a few notable courses that went above and beyond in representing women in STEM on the encyclopedia.

In Dr. Glenn Dolphin’s geology course at the University of Calgary, students improved more than 80 biography articles for women in geology and created almost 40 articles that didn’t exist before. These articles have since been viewed 340,000 times. In his reflective blog post, Glenn notes that students felt more compelled to produce quality work, since it would be seen by so many. His course was even featured in the University news when faculty learned of its great success.

Another notable course with great impact is Dr. Patricia Brook’s Introductory Psychology course at CUNY, College of Staten Island. Along with Christina Shane-Simpson, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, and Elizabeth Che, a doctoral student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, Patricia launched the WikiProject PSYCH+Feminism. In a reflective blog post, they write that WikiProject PSYCH+Feminism worked to “bring attention to more than 400 prominent women who were recipients of the most prestigious awards in Psychological Science, yet lacked commensurate recognition on Wikipedia.” Patricia has continued her work to close the gender gap on Wikipedia with her Fall 2017 course, in which students created 30 new biographies for women psychologists and improved others.

During the Year of Science, Wiki Education also worked with WikiProject Women in Red, who created and improved hundreds of articles on women scientists through a virtual edit-a-thon. Many of those articles now include Featured pictures or have been highlighted in the Did You Know section of Wikipedia’s Main Page.

Empowering women to become scientists in the future

Creating biography articles and improving existing ones can inspire students to pursue careers in scientific fields. As Educational Partnerships Manager, Jami Mathewson, wrote in the American Chemical Society’s magazine,

“Information is advocacy, and students…can play a significant part in advocating for women whose research is largely overlooked.”

Alice, a student at Caltech, vastly improved the article on Geobiology, rounding out what was previously just a stub to explain what the field is an does. Now, she’s the author of one of the top-three sources of information about Geobiology on Google.

“I first came across the Geobiology Wikipedia page about three years ago, when I was a freshman trying to decide if I should major in biology or geobiology,” she told us.

The article wasn’t much help in her decision-making, but after Alice’s intervention, she hopes it can inform future students making similar choices.

“It’s pretty exciting to know that college freshmen and maybe high schoolers might be influenced by something I wrote!”

When students have personal investment in an assignment, as they often do with the autonomy that a Wikipedia assignment offers, they can feel empowered in their work. They also practice writing for a mass audience, an opportunity to build confidence in flexing their knowledge in public. And in writing about women scientists and scientific fields in general, students are exposed to possible career trajectories.

“I found that the process of finding a voice to communicate these scientific ideas, organizing my thoughts, and deciding upon the essential information forced me to more deeply and completely understand the research that I had been doing,” said a Wiki Education student participant in an immunobiology course at Carleton College.

“The Roman philosopher Seneca famously said, ‘While we teach, we learn,’ and I think that it is that same teaching and learning philosophy that allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of scientific concepts through the process of writing. … Through our articles we took on the role of teacher.”

Combatting internalized stereotypes among women in STEM fields

When students complete a Wikipedia assignment, they participate directly in correcting gender gaps and bias on Wikipedia. Not only does our Classroom Program encourage students to make women in STEM more visible to the public, but it engages female students as producers of knowledge. As mentioned above, 68% of Wiki Education’s program participants are women — a number that sharply contrasts Wikipedia’s editor statistics. It’s estimated that about 80% of volunteers who regularly improve the site are young, Western men. Accessible knowledge changes how people think. And authorship is an important aspect of those cultural shifts.

Impacting millions: spreading knowledge for public consumption

The Visiting Scholars program also produced great work in the Year of Science. Wikipedian Barbara Page, who worked with the University of Pittsburgh, edited articles related to women’s health, creating dozens and improving hundreds more. Barbara’s impact can be seen in articles on neonatal infection, rape, breastfeeding, and STIs. Barbara’s work is key to providing well-sourced, reliable information about topics many people are seeking information on.

“In my mind, I have this image of a woman my age just receiving information from her doctor, telling her that she needs some kind of gynecological procedure that she can hardly pronounce,” Barbara told us. “Fortunately, she just bought a cell phone that has the big ‘W’ of Wikipedia listed in her apps, where she might find the information she needs to ask her physician. Younger men are still the most prolific content creators, and I don’t think they like to contemplate the health issues their grandmas might be dealing with.”

Barbara makes a good point about the importance of diverse authorship.

Communicating Science

Students have improved Wikipedia articles on a range of scientific topics like plant taxonomy, voice disorders, the evolution of sexual reproduction, hearing conservation, country-specific environmental issues, food chemistry, archaeology, sociology, linguistics, and many more!

We update our resources constantly, so that students may feel best supported in improving Wikipedia. We prepare students to specifically dive into STEM topics through our brochures on topics like Biographies, Chemistry, Ecology, Environmental Science, Genes and proteins, Species, Medicine, Linguistics, and Psychology.

To learn more about the Communicating Science initiative, see our informational page or the blog post about its impact in 2017. To learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Header image: File:Apf1-00303r.jpg, The University of Chicago Photographic Archive, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Wiki Science Competition is an international photo contest to encourage the creation and free sharing of all sorts of science-related images. It began in Estonia, then expanded to all of Europe in 2015, and this year’s event includes the rest of the world.

In November 2017, participants uploaded submissions to one of five categories. In the United States, we reviewed 818 images in the “general” category, 66 in “people in science,” 213 in “microscopy,” 47 “non-photographic,” and 36 “image sets” containing 184 images. Each country has its own jury, which selects 5 from each category to advance to the international competition. To see all of the finalists see the full results gallery here.

For the U.S. competition, we also awarded 5 “Jury’s Choice” awards of $200 each, independent of categories, generously provided by Wikimedia District of Columbia. Below are the five Jury’s Choice winners, along with quotes from the photographers.

Michael S. Adler is honored for Total Solar Eclipse, an image of the 2017 solar eclipse from outside Crowheart, Wyoming. The image was taken using exposure bracketing in seven steps from 1/2 to 1/8000 seconds to show both the Sun’s corona and the surface features of the Moon itself. Adler also contributed a collection of images of galaxies and nebulae, of which an image of the Andromeda Galaxy also advanced to the international round.

I have always been interested in astronomy and as a child had a 4″ telescope. Over the years I also developed an interest in photography mainly with a focus on travels all around the world such as recently to Nepal twice, Scotland 3 times, Iceland 3 times, New Zealand 3 times, Spitzbergen, and South America and Antarctica. About 20 years ago I acquired a high quality 6″ refractor and then after retirement from GE in 2000, I also equipped the telescope with an astronomical camera and other equipment for doing astro photography. Then in 2014 I built an observatory here in Jackson WY and added a 12.5″ and a 20″ telescope. My astronomy images can be seen at www.astrophotoworks.com.

The eclipse was a natural extension of this since Jackson was in the area of totality and represented a once in a lifetime opportunity. I ended up using the 6″ telescope with a focal reducer giving it a 900mm fl at f6. The camera was a Canon 5D Mk4 and was shot using exposure bracketing in 7 steps from 1/8000 to 1/2 a second. The images were combined in Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CC 2017 was used as the final step. I was very lucky as the weather was perfect for the eclipse.

John Bernbaum is honored for Beautiful… But Deadly, a colorized scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus particles (green), found both as extracellular particles and budding particles from a chronically-infected African green monkey kidney cell (blue), at 20,000x magnification. This image was taken in a biosafety level 4 facility, the highest level of biosafety precautions, which is used for easily transmissible agents that cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which there are no available vaccines or treatments.

I’ve been an Electron Microscopist for almost 30 years, specializing in the photography of mammalian viruses. During my career, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have worked with many accomplished scientists on the forefront of virus research, as well as with a wide variety of virus types. Nine years ago, when the opportunity arose to work with Ebola Virus and other extremely dangerous pathogens in a high containment BSL-4 facility, I eagerly accepted.

The photograph entitled “Deadly…But Beautiful” was originally taken in 2014, from the first sample of Ebola Virus I ever examined in the scanning electron microscope. The cells from that first sample were heavily infected with Ebola Virus, with more than one thousand copies of the virus replicating per each single cell. It was a sobering and intimidating view of this virus and its deadly potential, and a daunting reminder of the challenges scientists face every day as they work towards a vaccine.

My brother Mark brought the Wikipedia Science Competition to my attention in 2017 and urged me to submit an image. After looking at all the amazing images submitted, the thought of having one of mine selected for recognition never really crossed my mind. To me, this was simply a wonderful platform and opportunity to share the combination of science, art, and beauty, with people all over the world.

Jason Weingart is honored for Evolution of a Tornado, a photomontage of eight images shot in sequence as a tornado formed north of Minneola, Kansas on May 24, 2016. This prolific supercell went on to produce at least 12 tornadoes, and at times had two and even three tornadoes on the ground at once.

I am a professional photographer and storm chaser in the Austin, Texas area. Weather caught my interest at a very young age when a meteorologist visited our third-grade class and talked about tornadoes. Growing up, anytime there was a storm, I would stand outside and take it all in. Today, I specialize in leading photographic workshops and adventures.

I made this image during a storm chasing workshop on May 24, 2016. We had forecast the area around Minneola, Kansas would see big storms that day, but I could never have imagined what was about to happen. We watched the storm form from a small cluster of cumulus clouds into a prolific cyclic supercell. It produced its first tornado just north of town, the one pictured in this progression image blend. When it was all over, the storm had produced at least a dozen tornadoes, thankfully over mostly rural areas. Nobody hurt, nobody killed. That’s about the best you can hope for in a situation like that. The image is blended together from 8 single images chosen from a timelapse; the initial updraft (near the top) and seven stages of the tornado as it grew into a strong EF3.

I thought the Wiki Science Competition seemed like a good way for me to give something back to the scientific community that has tremendously shaped my life. Scientific imagery sparks people’s imagination and has the ability to changes lives. I am honored to be one of the finalists selected from the United States. The quality of the images in this competition are really top notch.

Ron Sterling is honored for Mantis Fly, a very close black-and-white film macrophotograph of a live mantisfly found in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona in August 1963. The original 12×15 black-and-white print was scanned in 2010 to produce a digital version of this photograph. Sterling also contributed a collection of wildlife photographs taken over the course of decades.

I call this one of my many miracle insect photographs taken during the years 1960 through 1966. It had to be a strange sight for others to watch me, a gangly 17 year old, leaning against a campground bathroom wall at night, inching along as slow as possible to not scare off the mantispid and holding a 35 mm SLR, with a 50 mm lens attached to a 4” extension tube with an old-style, early electronic flash system called a Strobonar Futuramic mounted sideways directly above the lens, stalking this mantispid while it stalked food, in the Santa Rita mountains of Arizona. Talk about hunting small game! When the Strobonar went off at a distance of about six inches from an insect like this mantispid, it is a bit of a shock for them to say the least, yet, this one just trucked on over about a foot away and continued to hunt. Not sure I have seen that kind of non-startle in an insect ever.

I became what I would call a die-hard “naturalist” during my sixth grade year (1957). My science teacher at that time was incredibly good at conveying the excitement of understanding how things seem to work in the animal world and my project for the year was to put together a high-quality, crafted set of six trays of pinned and mounted insect specimens. That and a friend of my dad’s who was a “certified” naturalist and published a magazine called the Naturalist (Associated Nature Clubs of America) were my inspirations. The publisher, Ernest Booth, published my first article with its photospread in 1965 called “Viewpoints on Nature.” I switched to live insect collecting by way of photographs in 1960 after getting really bored of just catching, killing, and displaying dead insects. I lived just across the street from a very prolific swampland in Southern California, so I became an expert on macrophotography of live dragon and damselflies in the field. You can call me a geek, for sure. I developed my own film and printed my own photographs in my own darkroom built inside the garage.

Finding out about the competition was purely accidental after bumping into notices about other photographic competitions at Wikipedia. I was happy to discover that not only was there a competition in the realm of science photography, but that Wikipedia would be a great place to donate many very informative and inspirational photographs that have been in storage for years but not popular subject matter for generating income. Almost all of my insect, bird, and small animals photographs were done long before digital arrived. It wasn’t until 2010 that high-end digital scanners became affordable and I started converting my film-based collection to digital images.

Dustin Johnsen is honored for The Galaxy Within, a 10x image of cultured mouse cortical neurons and astrocytes in cell culture. Neurons are stained red (MAP2 protein), while astrocytes are stained green (GFAP). Dchordpdx muses, “As the presumed seat of consciousness, the infinity of questions still surrounding the brain are as nebulous as those surrounding our infinite universe. We are but stars in the end; and in the beginning.” Dchordpdx also contributed a collection of images of neurons.

I took the photo as a neuroscience graduate student at the Vollum Institute, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon. The images were a part of a study investigating neuronal and astrocytic cell death in in vitro models of neurodegeneration. The brain is the most complicated piece of matter known to humankind, and due to significant advancements in technology, we’re just now beginning to learn how it works at the cellular and molecular level. The inordinate complexity and mystery of the brain rival that of what we see above us on a starry night. Nature often mirrors its designs across disparate disciplines, from mathematics to biology, and so images such as this one are a manifestation of nature’s self-symmetry between our Universe and our brain.

I submitted the photo to this contest because I feel science is humanity’s most important language; it’s pushed us from our ancestral doldrums of simply interacting with nature to our modern vigor of manipulating nature — right down to the molecules of the mind. Science will continue to push us towards the stars, but only if we help translate it to the public to inform policy. Science is currently under attack politically and even culturally — the greatest such threat it’s experienced in my generation. And so inspiring awe and humility in the public through scientific images is one small way I can help advocate not just for science, but also for a peaceful and advanced future of the human race.

Following my PhD dissertation and a postdoctoral fellowship (also at OHSU), I have started my own company brokering private philanthropic funds directly to high-risk, high-reward basic science research projects — the kind of ambitious projects science requires to make significant advancements, yet the type of projects that are largely being neglected by traditional government funding sources.

Note: Image descriptions and quotes first published on Wikipedia at Wikipedia:Wiki Science Competition 2017 in the United States/Results, CC BY-SA 3.0. Parts of the descriptions are taken from the file pages on Wikimedia Commons.

Vocal cord dysfunction (VCD) is something that can have a negative effect on a person’s life and well-being. People who have this disorder can have symptoms that resemble other conditions like asthma and vocal cord paralysis, which make it difficult to make a timely and accurate diagnosis. Treatments for VCD can vary and run from behavioral to medical and psychological.

Laryngitis is an inflammation of the voice box that typically lasts for a few weeks. Symptoms for this may vary in type and severity, with one of the most common symptoms being a hoarse voice. Laryngitis comes in two forms, acute and chronic. The former can be caused by viral, fungal, or bacterial infections or even trauma to the vocal cords. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “I’m going to yell myself hoarse”, this is the source of that reference. For those unfortunate enough to have chronic laryngitis, their inflammation can be caused by allergies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis. Reflux is something that may also cause chronic laryngitis, as the gastro-oesophageal reflux may irritate and inflame vocal cords, making it difficult to speak. Treatment for laryngitis depends heavily on the causes and severity, as treating the inflammation can include medication or may only require that the individual make several lifestyle changes until they’re better.

To quote the the Wikipedia article on Wikipedia, “Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet”, which makes contributions from students and educators that much more important. Want to help share knowledge with the world? Contact Wiki Education at contact@wikiedu.org to find out how you can gain access to tools, online trainings, and printed materials to help your class edit Wikipedia. Or visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image: File:Arts Building, McGill University, Montréal, East view 20170410 1.jpg, DXR, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Africa is one country that would be a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in archaeology, which makes it unsurprising that University of Wisconsin – La Crosse professor Kate Grillo chose African Archaeology as the focus for her students to edit Wikipedia. Expanding content on UNESCO World Heritage Site Gorée Island was a priority due the excavation of pre- and post- European settlement sites provided the archaeologists with invaluable information about the island’s past — something made more difficult as Gorée was now primarily a tourist destination. Much can also be learned from the breathtaking Kalambo Falls of Lake Tanganyika on the border of Zambia and Tanzania, as it is considered to be one of the most important archaeological sites in Africa. This single drop waterfall has been witness to over two hundred and fifty thousand years of human activity and may have even had people living there continuously since the Late Early Stone Age.

New additions to Wikipedia include the article Ifri Oudadane, a site located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the northeast Rif region of Morocco that holds valuable evidence that shows how North Africans moved from hunter-gatherers to food producers. The 2006 research project led by archaeologists from all over the world marked Ifri Oudadane as one of the first North African sites that investigated the the transition of humans from hunter-gatherer groups to food production. Students also added a large amount of content to and greatly overhauled the the Nok culture article.

Perhaps most impressive is the students’ work on the article for the ruins of Gedi, as they took the article from a mere stub to a lengthy article filled with so much information and images that it helped the article later pass Good Article criteria. Located in Kenya, these are the ruins of a medieval Swahili-Arab coastal settlement that in its heyday may have traded directly or indirectly with China, South Asia, and the Islamic world. Some of the buildings that still remain standing include mosques, a palace, and numerous houses.

Want to help share knowledge with the world? Contact Wiki Education at contact@wikiedu.org. Wiki Education to find out how you can gain access to tools, online trainings, and printed materials to help your class edit Wikipedia.

Image: Great Mosque of Gede, by Mgiganteus, CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When the email first appeared in my inbox with the title ‘Teaching with Wikipedia!’, I vacillated between, “that sounds really interesting” to “what kind of email spam is this?”

Fortunately, I trusted my instinct and went with the former.

I teach a graduate level required introductory course called Biogeochemical Earth for students in the Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Science and Marine Resource Management programs at Oregon State University. These students come to OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science to obtain an interdisciplinary education in order to prepare them to tackle some of the most interesting and pressing earth systems questions facing society today. Student engagement is always a challenge, and providing assignments that encourage they learn from one another has always been a priority of mine in the course. It is crucial in this ever shrinking world, of ever increasing interdisciplinary research questions to train students how to work well across those disciplinary boundaries that include cultural and language/semantics barriers. For the past two years now, I have successfully used Wikipedia projects to bridge that gap and find it to be far more engaging for the students than my previous approach of group pre-proposal projects.

The research trajectories of the students in my course include social science and marine policy, physics of the earth’s mantle, life in extreme environments, paleoclimatology, and physics, chemistry, and biology of the oceans, just to name a few. My co-instructor and I have 10 weeks to cover the fundamentals of how the biology and chemistry (with a splash of physics) of primarily the oceans work, with some specific examples of case studies ranging from the early pre-oxygen earth to changes in anchovy and sardine fisheries in the Pacific Ocean on decadal timescales. There are many topics I cannot cover, and many more we must skim over, but the Wikipedia project provides an opportunity for the students to dig deeper into a topic of their choice over the term.

Having their project as a public contribution provides two really important outcomes: First, it seems to promote a greater engagement and care in their work, and second it contributes to the largest crowdsourced information clearinghouse in the world. In an age where disinformation and information overload are increasingly important issues, it is more critical than ever to help contribute to Wikipedia, to provide greater access to the scientific works, and to ensure it is correct.

It may come as a surprise to some college professors that Wikipedia could be an integral part of college and graduate level courses, given a predisposition to dismiss information from Wikipedia as being unverifiable, especially compared to peer reviewed journals. That has certainly changed. I always approached Wikipedia with a strong skepticism, and continue to require my students to cite peer-reviewed literature for their assignments, but as participation increases, it seems Wikipedia has gotten better at self-correcting more quickly. Even more so, Wikipedia can provide an important entry point for both students and the public at large, who may not have access to scientific journals. I personally at times start at Wikipedia on topics I am unfamiliar with, if I don’t have another access point, but then again I used to read the Encyclopedia Britannicaas a kid out of sheer curiosity. I was fortunate enough to have the hard bound books in my room. Today, anyone with an internet connection can feed their curiosity with the world’s largest digital encyclopedia.

So how does one utilize Wikipedia in the classroom or as part of a course? There are many approaches to this. For me, the most important aspects is to have my students engage with one another around a topic (presumably something that they have some interest in), to explore that topic in greater detail than I can cover in class, and to teach them how to write clearly and convey information impartially to a target audience different than them. Wiki Education makes it incredibly easy to set up the project for your course, with a quick survey, they generate webpage with weekly tasks, deadlines, and discussion points to cover in class. This also includes training for student editors, and a tech support person who can help with how to questions.

While the students in the current term are still finalizing their projects, examples of their work from the previous year can be found in the blue carbon and Boring BillionWikipedia articles.

Relative to the quality of work submitted as part of the previous assignment that the Wikipedia project replaced, I was very impressed.

One of the students who developed the Boring Billion page was Brian Ahlers, a Marine Resource Management graduate student whose research is actually focused on marine fisheries and traceability.

“I learned so much about biogeochemical processes during Earth’s ancient geological history, and how to work well in groups,” Brian says. “After deploying our new Wikipedia page to production on Wikipedia for the public, we had the privilege of connecting with one of the world’s leading experts on the Boring Billion based in Tasmania. He was very excited about our new article, and had very positive feedback.”

Another graduate student in the Marine Resource Management program, Larissa Clarke, who is working on seagrass habitat use by fish and crabs, noted of her experience working on the Blue Carbon page in terms of science communication: “From the Wikipedia project, I think I most gained an appreciation/better understanding for what it means to write for a specific audience. Writing for a middle school level reader is much different than the assignments we turn in for class, obviously, but I think that was a great exercise because we are so often writing for our peers/professor and may not have the general public in mind.”

I look forward to continuing to utilize Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool to get students engaged more deeply in topics, to interact with each other, and to contribute to an important crowdsourced information depot. If you are a teacher, professor, or instructor, I hope you take a few moments to consider how you may use Wikipedia to enhance your own course and provide some unique learning opportunities to your students.

Image: OSU by air, by saml123, CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Verbesina is a genus of plants in the aster family. Of the 300 species in the genus, only 19 have Wikipedia articles, and 18 of them are very short “stubs.” The only species article that’s more than a stub is Verbesina occidentalis. That article was created by a student in Jay Bolin’s Plant Taxonomy course at Catawba College.

Juncus is another large genus of plants commonly known as rushes. Before a student created an article for Juncus dichotomus, almost all of the 66 species with articles were stubs. Rushes are one of three groups of grass-like plants commonly found in wetlands. There’s even a rhyme to tell the three apart: “Sedges have edges, rushes are round. Grasses are hollow right up from the ground.” Carex is a genus of sedge with over 2,000 species, of which 198 have articles but 147 are stubs. A student in the class helped to fill this gap as well with the creation of an article on the species Carex rosea.

Cuscuta compacta is a parasitic plant found in the eastern and southern United States and southern Canada. It has a pale yellow stem and no roots — as a parasite, instead of photosynthesizing, it draws food, water, and mineral nutrients from its host plant. Aureolaria pedicularia is a partial or hemiparasitic plant found in eastern North America. Although capable of photosynthesis, it draws water and mineral nutrients from its host. Viburnum dilatatum is a shrub native to East Asia which has been introduced to the United States as an ornamental. It is considered to be a potential invasive species in the mid-Atlantic region of the country. All of these articles, together with the article on Hydrocotyle sibthorpioides, were created by students in this class.

While students can fill gaps by creating articles where none exist, they can also fill gaps by expanding short articles that already exist. Selaginella apoda is a vascular plant that produces spores instead of seeds. Sium suave is a wetland plant in the carrot family. Mollugo verticillata is native to tropical parts of the Americas and is a common weed in eastern North America. Lactuca canadensis is a wild relative of lettuce native to North America. Pinus virginiana is a species of pine tree that ranges from southern New York through Appalachia. Boehmeria cylindrica is a common plant found in wet-to-moist habitats throughout much of the Americas. Galium obtusum is a small wildflower. Quercus stellata, commonly known as the post oak, is a widespread species of oak. These were all short articles that students in the class expanded substantially.

Species articles are fun to work on because they follow a fairly constant format; this allows you to focus more on what to say, and less on how to say it. Wiki Education has created a handout for writing species articles that outlines the process for writing species articles.

If you need help finding articles for your students to edit on Wikipedia, read more about our article finder training module. To learn more about how to get involved, send us an email at contact@wikiedu.org or visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image: Sibthorpioides 03457.jpg, by Vengolis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some of this diversity is on display in the genus Silene, a widespread genus of small wildflowers. In addition to monoecious, dioecious and gynodioecious species, Silene includes trioecious and andromonoecious species. Some even display more than one type of sex determination. If you want to know more about all of this, check out the sex determination in Silene article that a student in the class created.

When people think about sexually transmitted infections, they rarely think about plant disease, but that’s precisely how Microbotryum violaceum infection of Silene latifolia is usually classified. Silene latifolia is a small flowering plant that is native to Europe, western Asia and North Africa. It was introduced into North America and has become widespread. Microbotryum violaceum is a smut fungus, a parasitic fungus which takes over the anthers of infected plants and uses them for spore production. Pollinators visit the flowers and transmit the fungal spores instead of pollen (thus making the infection sexually transmitted). This article is also the handiwork of a student in the class.

And then there are figs. Figs have a complex reproductive cycle in which fig wasps lay their eggs in fig flowers. The wasp larvae parasitize the flowers, and female wasps emerge covered with pollen and go off to find another fig to pollinate, lay their eggs in, and die. Almost every fig species (and there are about 800 of them) is pollinated by a single species of fig wasp. Both fig and fig wasp are completely dependent on one another in order to reproduce, and unsurprisingly, pairs of fig and fig wasp species have coevolved. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out the reproductive coevolution in Ficus, which was also created by a student in the class.

While natural selection and sexual selection are thought of as the main drivers of evolutionary change, social selection has been proposed as an alternative to sexual selection. While sexual selection applies to mate choice, and puts the choice in the hands of only one gender, social selection is transactional – one individual offers something in exchange for the opportunity to reproduce. Thanks to the work of a student in this class, you can now learn more about this model of evolutionary change on Wikipedia.

To learn more about how to get involved, send us an email at contact@wikiedu.org or visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image: 20140427Silene latifolia2.jpg, by AnRo0002, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a small coastal country that is largely desert. Urban development, agriculture and wildlife habitat all compete for the country’s limited land base. The combination of increasing population, rising sea levels and increased aridity all put pressure on this limited resource. While these environmental problems exist in many parts of the world, the mainstay of the economy of the UAE, fossil fuel production, is a major factor behind many of these problems. You can now read about these issues and how they interrelate in the article on environmental issues in the United Arab Emirates, which was created by a student in this class.

Students in the class created new articles on environmental issues in Kuwait, Yemen, Israel, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Mongolia and Georgia. Others expanded existing articles on environmental issues in Pakistan, Uruguay, Haiti, and Colombia. Climate change, population growth and water pollution are problems in most of these countries. Deforestation, desertification, and mangrove loss pose major problems in only a subset of them. Thanks to the work by these student editors, the picture is far more complete.

Other students in the class focused their work on subnational geographical entities or on single problems; some created environmental impact of development in the Sundarbans and mangrove deforestation in Myanmar, while others expanded entries on deforestation in Cambodia, electronic waste in China, and the geography of Uzbekistan. Two other new articles were created by the class: climate change and indigenous persons and Emissions Trading Scheme in South Korea. Other existing articles expanded by the class include deep ecology, green development, Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas, payment for ecosystem services, the Paris Agreement, sustainable procurement, underdevelopment, criticisms of globalization, and poaching. Through their contributions to Wikipedia, these students expanded the body of knowledge readily available on important topics that have been, for the most part, poorly represented.

To learn more about how to get involved, send us an email at contact@wikiedu.org or visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image: Flooding after 1991 cyclone.jpg, by Val Gempis, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.