Closing the gender gap in STEM
The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is coming up on February 11! This day recognizes the achievements and contributions of women in STEM fields, and the barriers that they and future women scientists face. Wiki Education holds a commitment to improving coverage of these women on Wikipedia. Visibility of their accomplishments and lives … Continued
Presenting the winners of the U.S. Wiki Science Competition
At Wiki Education, we get pretty excited about initiatives which improve science content on Wikimedia projects. It’s why we ran the Year of Science in 2016, and why we continue that emphasis through Communicating Science. So Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Content Expert in the Sciences, Ian Ramjohn, and I jumped at the chance when invited to be part of … Continued
Everyone has a voice…
The human voice is an amazing thing. It’s capable of making us laugh, cry, and feel a broad range of emotions. While it’s far from the only way to impart messages or portray emotions, our lives would be lacking if every person were to fall eternally silent. This makes the study of Voice Disorders so vital, as … Continued
Roundup: African Archaeology
For all of his swagger and bravado, Indiana Jones makes a terrible archaeologist. With all due apologies to Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg, Indiana was always slightly more interested in the treasure and his fetching female companions than he was with the “who, what, when, where, how, and why” of the historical sites he visited … Continued
Engaging students in interdisciplinary science communication
George Waldbusser is Associate Professor of Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry at Oregon State University. He’s integrated Wikipedia editing into his Biogeochemical Earth class several times. When the email first appeared in my inbox with the title ‘Teaching with Wikipedia!’, I vacillated between, “that sounds really interesting” to “what kind of email spam is this?” Fortunately, I trusted … 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
Successes and learnings from the Year of Science
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
Women Scientists in Blue During the Year of Science
Last year, one of the goals we set for the Year of Science campaign was to foster the development of biographies of women scientists on Wikipedia. Throughout the year we saw great work from students and Visiting Scholars, but in this post I’d like to highlight the the results of a Year of Science “virtual … Continued