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
Plant species articles ripe for student contributions
For some classes, selecting the right article to work on can be a challenging task. For a plant taxonomy class interested in creating species articles, you’re more likely to be faced by an embarrassment of riches. Verbesina is a genus of plants in the aster family. Of the 300 species in the genus, only 19 … Continued
Sex in the Tree of Life
The demarcations of human sexuality have become a major issue in the culture wars, but for plants, sexual diversity is the norm. There are plants with “perfect” flowers that are completely hermaphroditic, with fully functional pollen and eggs produced in the same flower. There are monoecious plants, which produce both male and female flowers. There … Continued
Students expand coverage of country-specific environmental issues
If you’re interested to read a broad overview of an environmental topic, there’s a very good chance you’ll find an article about it on Wikipedia. If you want in-depth information about the topic as it pertains to a specific country, however, you’ll probably only be able to find information about a small number of developed … Continued