Last month, I was honored be part of the Contra Costa Community College District’s Civic Engagement Speaker Series, with the provocative title “Fake news: A threat to our society?” The event was moderated by Diablo Valley College Journalism Department Chair Mary Mazzoco. Joining me on the panel were East Bay Times education reporter Sam Richards, … Continued
In 2016, Wiki Education kicked off the largest targeted content initiative ever undertaken in the Wikimedia world: the Wikipedia Year of Science. When the year wrapped up in December, our programs for the initiative had added nearly 5 million words of content to the English Wikipedia. More than 6,300 students edited more than 5,700 articles on … Continued
At the end of April, Wiki Education staff traveled to Toronto, Canada, to participate in two conferences with open education themes: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Annual OER Meeting and the Creative Commons Global Summit. Both conferences confirmed the work Wiki Education is engaged in is crucial to the future of open education, especially … Continued
Wiki Education runs programs connecting Wikipedia to higher education in the United States and Canada — but the world is larger than just the boundaries of our programs. There are many organizations and individual volunteers around the world who, like Wiki Education, also run programs to form relationships between Wikipedia and educational institutions, associations, and … Continued
International Fact Checking Day is April 2, 2017 — and we at Wiki Education have joined the initiative! We encourage you to participate by helping check facts on Wikipedia. Participating is easy: 1. Log in to your Wikipedia account. 2. Go to the Citation Hunt tool. This will give you a sentence from a Wikipedia … Continued
Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to São Paulo, Brazil, giving two presentations at the University of São Paulo (USP), meeting with the Grupo de Usuários Wikimedia no Brasil (Wikimedia Brasil User Group), and attending a neuroscience and mathematics edit-a-thon for the Portuguese Wikipedia. The group in Brazil is already having an incredible … Continued
Topics in the news and pop culture are usually overrepresented in the list of the top 25 most read articles on Wikipedia each week. I use Wikipedia to learn about those subjects, too. But for me, the brilliance of Wikipedia isn’t in its ability to provide information about the latest box office smash or a … Continued
The rapid expansion of fake news sites made real news headlines last week. The sheer prevalence of the viral stories has forced tech giants like Google and Facebook to think about how they handle fake news websites. Whether you think these sites are insidious attempts to sway elections or simply click bait to generate ad … Continued
Are you one of the many people celebrating Halloween with a horror movie night? A lot of our favorite creepy suspense films feature unnatural deaths — but how much do you know about the science behind the thrills? Dr. Katie McEwen’s Autopsy class at Michigan State University set out to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of articles … Continued
