In November 2015, Wiki Education announced a partnership with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) to bring linguistics instructors and students into our programs. The idea was to combine Wiki Education’s successful programs with LSA’s visibility among linguists, inviting their members to teach with Wikipedia or host a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar.
Since that time, we have worked with a staggering 57 linguistics courses with over 900 students who have added 804,000 words to Wikipedia. That’s nearly a million words that undergraduate and graduate students have contributed to the public scholarship of linguistics, amplifying the reach of the sources they cite.
This week, Wiki Education is at the LSA conference in Salt Lake City, where we’re looking to get even more courses involved. We’re speaking with university instructors about the power of adding content about linguistics and language to Wikipedia, where the general public gets information.
When these instructors join Wiki Education’s Classroom Program, they’ll assign students to research course-related topics, synthesize what they learn, and write a new Wikipedia article or expand an existing one. They’ll join a committed group of linguists and aspiring linguists aiming to preserve and document languages and peoples from around the world. Students have already significantly expanded Wikipedia’s coverage of topics like Blackfloot language, Abui people, Tagish language, Okinawan language, and Kutenai language. Students are also educating the masses about important linguistic concepts like fluency, variation, language immersion, and the feminization of language.
If you’re at LSA this week, stop by the exhibit hall to see us, and we can begin working out the details of your next Wikipedia assignment. You can also email us at contact@wikiedu.org.
