New brochure explains how to edit political science articles
When you contribute to an article on Wikipedia, there are best practices to consider regardless of what subject you work on, but there can also be particularities to different topic areas. For that reason, Wiki Ed works with instructors, organizations, and the Wikipedia community to develop subject-specific editing brochures to supplement our other training materials. … Continued
Five reasons you should donate to Wiki Ed on Giving Tuesday
Today is Giving Tuesday, a U.S. holiday to encourage donations to worthy nonprofits. If you’re planning to make financial contributions this year, we hope you’ll consider supporting the Wiki Education Foundation. Here’s why: 1. We’re dramatically improving the availability and accuracy of information available on Wikipedia. Since 2010, students in our program have added 25 … Continued
Blurry on copyright? Three tips for students and educators
Subhashish Panigrahi (@subhapa) is an India-based educator, author, blogger, Wikimedian, language activist and free knowledge evangelist, currently at the Centre for Internet and Society‘s Access To Knowledge program. In this guest post, he covers some guidelines about copyright that will be useful to students and educators working on Wikipedia assignments. Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when … Continued
Join our webinar on unlocking scientific knowledge on Wikipedia
The public is yearning for scientific knowledge, and scientists wish to make their findings and expertise available to the world at large. Despite these intersecting goals, the public often struggles to find clear, comprehensible scientific information. Meanwhile, the scientific community often finds its work tightly guarded behind paywalls, or drowned in the sea of media … Continued
Speak Wikipedia’s language with our new Linguistics guide for student editors
Wikipedia has about 4,668 articles it considers to be “highest quality.” Of these, only 12 relate to languages or linguistics. That means that many linguists, theorists, and theories aren’t well-documented on Wikipedia, and may even be missing completely. Likewise, many dialects and languages have articles that could be improved. That’s part of what drove Wiki … Continued
One thing everyone gets wrong about Wikipedia in classrooms
Wiki Ed staff travel around the United States and Canada to present our model to universities, colleges, and academic conferences. Time and time again, we’re asked: “You know Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, right?” That’s perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about Wikipedia assignments. Nobody should cite Wikipedia in an academic paper. Our approach to Wikipedia is … Continued
For our new tool for students, Wiki Ed goes analog
Sometimes, students can be a bit intimidated by Wikipedia. Writing for Wikipedia is as challenging and rigorous as typical academic work, and there’s no reason that unfamiliarity with the Wikipedia writing process should stand in anyone’s way. That’s why we’re building so many tools to help students write for Wikipedia. Last term, we debuted our online … Continued
Making the Dashboard global
The Dashboard software that fuels Wiki Ed’s programs is now available for use across the whole range of Wikimedia projects and languages, from Arabic Wikibooks to Zulu Wiktionary. In partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve been working to complete an “alpha” version of the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard — an instance of the Wiki … Continued
Announcing our environmental sciences guide for student editors!
The Gulf of Maine has been a major fishing area in the Northeast Atlantic region of the US since the 1700s. It’s also warming faster than almost any other ocean on Earth. That’s having significant impacts on wildlife and New England’s fishing industry. Decreasing stocks of Atlantic cod, pollock, and haddock led to the creation … Continued
What can Wikipedia assignments do that this adorable pygmy goat can’t?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But reptiles are, for most beholders, not quite as cute as a pygmy goat. This human gravitation toward fuzzy, baby-eyed animals is actually a big problem for environmentalists struggling to preserve endangered and threatened species. Call it the “tyranny of the cute.” When it comes to conservation … Continued