Three Reasons Why Earth Scientists Should Edit Wikipedia - Eos

"f you are a researcher who is looking to communicate science more broadly, an easy step involves Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a frequent first stop for researchers, students, and the public. The world’s largest free encyclopedia, Wikipedia is also one of the largest websites in terms of traffic.

Here’s the important thing: Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.

Editing Wikipedia is a way to show your notable work to more people, who, in turn, may benefit, use, or be interested in your research topic. I am not an expert Wikipedia editor, and my suggestion for researchers to edit Wikipedia is not novel [e.g., Bateman and Logan, 2010; Bond, 2011; Logan et al., 2010], but I do want to discuss the benefits and present some (personal) data to convince you of the value of editing.

Here are three reasons you should edit Wikipedia."