How we helped voters get neutral information
The 2020 elections are fast approaching in the United States, and as people prepare to vote (often from home, by mail) they’re looking for information that can help them make up their minds. At first glance that seems surprising: Surely almost everyone has made up their minds about whether they support Donald Trump or Joe … Continued
10 years of impact to Wikipedia’s content
This fall, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Wikipedia Education Program with a series of blog posts telling the story of the program in the United States and Canada. Since its inception in 2010, the program now known as the Wikipedia Student Program has added 66 million words to 90,000 articles. In 2018 the … Continued
How a Wiki Scholar improved a Nobel laureate’s biography
We awoke this morning to the exciting news that the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded today to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on CRISPR. It’s exciting to see this amazing discovery recognized, and it’s great to see the prize go to women, but I was especially pleased that a participant in one … Continued
Fulfilling your potential
In the decade since Bob Cummings asked Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?, the answer for hundreds of instructors has been a resounding “yes!” It’s easy to make a convincing case for using a Wikipedia assignment in the classroom. Writing a Wikipedia article teaches students valuable skills while offering an authentic experience. But … Continued
Scientists should write Wikipedia
Everyone uses Wikipedia. Given its ubiquity and quality, we all use it as a jumping-off point to learn about new topics, or as “external memory” to refresh about things we’re supposed to know. It’s no surprise then, that the way things are covered in Wikipedia has a profound influence on the way things are covered … Continued
Ensuring Wikipedia represents the accomplishments of women scientists
In 2012, Dr. Jennifer Doudna helped make one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in biology — the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system, which changed editing genomes from science fiction to science. Before Dr. Laura Hoopes started working to improve it as part of Wiki Education’s professional development program, Dr. Doudna’s Wikipedia biography looked pretty substantial. With over 1400 … Continued
Seeing yourself in the world
I was born in a time of revolution. But once I was old enough to understand, the failed uprising was just a story told by parents and referenced in newspaper stories; it was absent from both the books we read in school and the works of local historians I borrowed from the library. Somewhere along … Continued
Help ensure women like Donna Strickland are represented on Wikipedia
Donna Strickland was awarded a Nobel Prize this week for her work on chirped pulse amplification, the first woman to to win the award in Physics in 55 years. The announcement of a new Nobel Laureate usually drives readers to their biography on Wikipedia, but the first people who came looking for an article on Strickland were … Continued
Welcome, Elysia Webb!
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve hired Elysia Webb as Wiki Education’s newest Wikipedia Expert. Elysia joins existing Wikipedia Experts Ian Ramjohn and Shalor Toncray as they support newcomers to Wikipedia in making high-quality contributions as part of Wiki Education’s programmatic offerings. As a Wikipedia Expert, Elysia monitors and tracks contributions by program participants, answers … Continued
Student editors and Nobel Prizes
On Monday morning, news broke that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine had been awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young. Scientists are rarely well known by the public, and they had not been among the favorites to win the Nobel. Had you rushed to Wikipedia to find out who they were, … Continued