Five ways academics can contribute to Wikipedia – Wikimedia Foundation

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-06-03

Summary:

"In recent weeks, the world learned about Dr. Donna Strickland, only the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. It also learned that Wikipedia lacked an article on Strickland amongst its over five million articles. Wikipedia subsequently received justifiable criticism for its low percentage of female editors, its editing culture, and its replication of the world’s systemic biases.

Unfortunately, this coverage included little about more mundane problems encountered by editors who are trying to document academics and academic fields on Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and of the 130,000+ volunteers who edit the English Wikipedia on any given month, the majority are not academic experts. They lack sources to cite and photos to use for the articles they want to write, and they don’t always know where to find them.

This is where academics can step in to help and ensure there are Wikipedia articles documenting the achievements of the next generation of Donna Stricklands. Contributing to Wikipedia is rewarding, but it can be a significant commitment of time and effort.  It’s important to have Wikipedia events at your institution, but there are plenty of other ways you can help that don’t involve one-off editing events: ..."

Link:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/11/13/five-ways-academics-can-contribute-to-wikipedia/

Updated:

06/03/2019, 12:03

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.wikipedia oa.crowd oa.students oa.authors

Date tagged:

06/03/2019, 16:04

Date published:

11/13/2018, 11:03