Support free and universal access to information this #GivingTuesday
Now that we’re in December looking back, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on the amazing work that our program participants have accomplished this year. The support of our community is vital in making their success possible. If you’re able to support a cause this Giving Tuesday, consider supporting free and universal access … Continued
Meeting your patients where they are: on Wikipedia
“Our patients are using Wikipedia for their health questions, so the more health professionals we have editing, the better and safer information they get.”* What would the world look like if everyone had unfettered access to knowledge? Free knowledge resources like Wikipedia provide an opportunity to put power into the hands of everyone. The Society … Continued
Ugandans writing their own story of family planning
Wikipedia aspires to collect and distribute the sum of human knowledge, but systemic barriers prevent the realization of this goal. Barriers to editing Wikipedia are highest in the Global South, where internet access can be sporadic or nonexistent, and people have less leisure time to contribute as unpaid labor. The entire continent of Africa (1.2 … Continued
Writing Latina artists into Wikipedia
What if students could help raise the visibility of artists of color across decades through a single assignment? In the case of Dr. Nicole Strathman’s students at UCLA, learning how to write Wikipedia biographies for Latina artists is accomplishing just that. “In exploring the diverse artistic contributions, interventions, and aesthetic experiments by women in Latin … Continued
Wikipedia as an avenue for motivating staff to enact change
When you search for scientists online, Wikipedia is probably the first result. But did you know that 82% of Wikipedia biographies are about men? There’s a lot of work to be done to create pages for people who identify as women, African-American, Asian, Asian-American, Latinx, indigenous, and LGBTQ+. On Ada Lovelace Day this year, engineers, … Continued
An Audience of 500 Million: Editing Wikipedia as a Writing Assignment
Dr. Alexandra Edwards is a 2nd Year Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech. This is a republishing of her reflection that appeared in Tech Style this last September. How can we help our students feel that their work in the writing classroom matters? Students struggle to see the point of crafting meticulous assignments when their work … Continued
Students and professionals make Wikipedia more inclusive of women in STEM
What does it mean to have scientists of diverse identities represented in the largest, most-accessed encyclopedia worldwide? It means… scientists besides white men are historically recognized for their role in the advancement of STEM fields. correcting the stereotype of “what a scientist looks like” (did you think man with a lab coat when I said … Continued
Writing women back into tech history
Have you heard about Virginia Tucker? She was one of the first “human computers” in space engineering history. What about Katheryn Emanuel Lawson? She was one of the first female African American chemists who worked in Sandia National Laboratories. Or how about Margaret Hilda Harper? She was “one of the two physicians who described that coeliac disease in the pancreas and … Continued
Are the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant winners represented on Wikipedia?
On Wednesday, the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grants were announced for 2019. The Wikipedian part of my brain, the part that I can’t turn off anymore, immediately wanted to update the Wikipedia article for the Fellowship with the most recent awardees, linking to the biographies that already existed and highlighting which still needed to be created. I already … Continued
Dashboard wins Coolest Tool Award
“Tools” — the various pieces of technology that work with Wikipedia but aren’t part of the core wiki software, most of them created and maintained by volunteers — are a huge part of the technology story for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year’s Wikimania conference included the first ever “Coolest Tool Award” ceremony to … Continued