Entomopathogenic fungi are found in several distinct lineages within the fungi (and in the Oomycetes, a group of organisms that were formerly included in the fungal kingdom). They have a range of life cycles, but typically use enzymes to bore a hole in the insect’s exoskeleton and infect the host. They can be useful in the biological control of certain insect pests, and some species are also useful in bioremediation, because they can produce enzymes able to break down certain harmful synthetic compounds.

Although the Wikipedia article on entomopathogenic fungi has existed since 2006, the article remained fairly short and undeveloped until the Fall 2024 term when a student in Kasey Fowler-Finn’s Advanced Evolution class started working to expand the article. 

The student editor reworked the article from top to bottom, more than tripling its size and adding 29 new references to the scholarly literature. The article now does a much better job of capturing the diversity of life cycles exhibited by entomopathogenic fungi, and includes details about the many different phyla of fungi that exhibit this type of activity. 

In addition to this, they also added a section about the evolutionary history of entomopathogenicity, noting that the ability to infect insects had evolved many times in different fungal lineages. The ability to infect insects has also been lost many times across different lineages, creating an even more complicated picture. 

And importantly for people who don’t love fungi for their own sake, the article now includes information of their use in the biological control of several insect pests, and their use in bioremediation. 

When you edit an article on Wikipedia, you’re adding to the knowledge that’s accessible to the public at large. Will an expanded article about entomopathogenic fungi change the world? Maybe. Perhaps someone will stumble upon it and it will pique their interest in a new field and they will discover a new way to break down toxic chemicals. Or someone will read it and make some new connections about something in their own field. Or maybe someone will find “entomopathogenic” to be a fascinating word that draws their interest toward linguistics. 

There’s no guarantee that expanding a Wikipedia article will change the world, but there’s always a chance you’ll change someone’s world. After all, even an article about a topic as obscure as this one has received over 9,000 page views since a student editor started working on it.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

“Each of the articles that my classmates and I worked on were all lacking information,” explained Fulton, a sophomore. “Our goal was to improve and transform these ‘stub’ articles. I chose to work on the article Oemleria cerasiformis, which is a plant that is native to the Pacific Northwest, and it’s also growing in my yard at home!” 

Fully embracing the challenge to transform the article, Fulton expanded the lead and added new sections on the plant’s taxonomy, description, phenology, and habitat, as well as several subsections throughout the text. She also significantly improved the article’s existing content, including information about the plant’s fossil record and the uses of its wood and fruit, which is the source of its common name osoberry. 

To reshape and radically expand the article, Fulton drew from a variety of scientific research publications, including journals and books that explore botany, ecology, and biology. 

“As I worked on this article, I learned lots of new information on this plant – that I see very often – that I did not know beforehand,” shared Fulton. “I also learned how to edit a Wikipedia article for the first time. Working on this article helped introduce me to professional writing on a scientific subject for a wide audience, a skill that will help me in school and in my future career.”

Fulton was not alone in her editing efforts, nor in the considerable impact she made on Wikipedia’s coverage of plants. Thanks to the work of her fellow classmates, the Wikipedia articles about species like Abelmoschus ficulneus (or white wild musk mallow) and Artemisia abrotanum (the southern wormwood), both flowering plants used medicinally, are now considerably more informative for readers.

And unlike Fulton, some students in the course looked far beyond their own backyards as they chose a species to research.

One student contributed more than 1,300 words and 26 citations to enhance the content of plants like Angelica glauca, which grows at high altitudes in areas from eastern Afghanistan through the western Himalayas and Tibet. Another student editor created a new article about an endangered variety of conifer endemic to Taiwan, Cephalotaxus harringtonii var. wilsoniana (commonly known as the Taiwan plum yew).   

Collectively, Fulton and her classmates brought an impressive 23,000 new words and 328 citations to Wikipedia’s coverage of plant species – and have since inspired other Wikipedia editors to engage with the content and make their own contributions, as well.  

Hero image of Oemleria cerasiformis by Michael Wolf, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Our support for STEM classes like Jenny Fulton’s is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

As the world grows more urbanized, urban and suburban areas provide a barrier to wildlife reliant on increasingly fragmented natural habitats while also providing new opportunities for species that can tolerate close association with humans. This fall, Brooklyn College students in Tony Wilson’s Principles of Ecology course brought their classroom content to Wikipedia to improve how the encyclopedia covers both of these interconnected topics.

“While the internet is a rich source of information, primary scientific sources are typically very dense and written in jargon that is difficult for the public to understand,” explained Wilson. “At the same time, many of the webpages, blogs and tweets that the public see on the internet are provided without attribution, creating potential confusion and discord. Wikipedia has built a unique brand associated with ‘knowledge integrity’, with an integrated network of writers and editors working to ensure that the information provided is truthful and provided without bias. ” 

At its best, Wilson explained, Wikipedia offers an invaluable service in providing accessible, user-friendly and accurate information in ecology, environmental science, and a range of other fields. 

Working as individuals and in groups, Wilson’s 21 students contributed nearly 31,000 words and more than 200 references to Wikipedia, helping raise public awareness of correlated topics such as wildlife species and their habitats, climate change, and ecological conservation. 

One trio of student editors focused their efforts on the urban evolution article, completely transforming nearly every section to outline the complex effects of factors like urban pollution, urban habitat fragmentation, and resource availability on urban evolution. 

For some species, urban environments offer a space to thrive with few predators and a ready source of food. For others, urban environments are habitats rich in prey species, with few other competitors. But urban environments are always challenging places to live, with higher temperatures (due to the urban heat island effect), higher levels of air, water and noise pollution, and greater oxidative stress. These factors create an environment where species are subject to very intense selective pressures, driving evolution in species populations that inhabit urban environments. 

As the three student editors expanded the article, they added detailed explanations of these selective pressures and highlighted examples of how species have evolved in response to them. Readers can now learn about how white-footed mice’s teeth have changed to handle the available food sources in New York City, and how raccoons have demonstrated increased behavioral flexibility and learning abilities by adapting to their urban environments. The student editors also discussed non-adaptive genetic changes in urban populations (like genetic drift) as a result of isolation and habitat fragmentation.

While some urban wildlife can use buildings, small parks, and backyards as habitat, other species depend on larger and more specialized areas. Coney Island Creek in Brooklyn is an important patch of habitat for many wildlife species that depend on wetlands. It also represents a heavily impacted and polluted area, illustrating how even wildlife habitat in cities can differ sharply from non-urban habitat.

This urban waterway is the product of centuries of human manipulation of a coastal wetland, coupled with recent efforts to restore parts of it. Three classmates, including biology major Arianna Arregui, added 4,400 words and 41 references to the Coney Island Creek Wikipedia article to enhance the coverage of its wildlife habitat, along with several of the aquatic and terrestrial species which depend on the area. Arregui’s group also added valuable information about the impacts of restoration projects, the limits of these efforts, and the many needs that still remain.

“Coney Island Creek holds significant historical and ecological value that often goes unnoticed,” explained Arregui. “With proper advocacy, meaningful changes can be made to support its restoration and inspire future ecological projects. As a native New Yorker, I’ve often felt that connecting with nature in an urban setting can be challenging, which is why Coney Island Creek resonated with my interests in urban ecology and environmental protection.” 

While urban habitat provides opportunities for some species, for most species it represents a loss of habitat and a barrier that fragments them into smaller populations with higher risks of extinction. Rapid development in Florida resulted in the loss of wildlife habitat, and fragmented what was left into smaller patches that are capable of supporting fewer species. Species in habitat fragments are more prone to extinction, and if they go extinct locally, it’s very difficult for others to recolonize these now-vacant patches of suitable habitat. The role of the Florida Wildlife Corridor – whose Wikipedia article was transformed by another group of students in Wilson’s course – is to improve the connection between Florida’s state parks, national forests, and wildlife management areas.

By expanding information about the bipartisan legislative efforts that created these corridors and the conservation benefits that they provided, the students provided readers with a more complete understanding of their history and ecological role. The student editors also highlighted the challenges faced by the network and the ways in which these kinds of networks hurt wildlife by allowing invasive species to spread between protected areas.

Thanks to the work of Wilson’s students this semester, Wikipedia now gives readers a more nuanced understanding of the way wildlife interacts with expanding urbanization – and provides critical insights into what the future may look like in a warmer and increasingly urbanized world.

Wiki Education thanks the Horne Family Foundation for their support of this work to improve Wikipedia content related to species habitat, wildlife populations, and the impact of climate change.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

But thanks to the support of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation, postsecondary students across the U.S. and Canada have been busy combating misinformation head on by improving the world’s go-to source of information – Wikipedia!

By filling in gaps in the online encyclopedia through their Wikipedia assignments, student editors ensure that readers have access to more complete, reliable, and high-quality information online. From historic court cases to climate change, birthright citizenship, and more, students brought nearly 10,000 new references and almost one million words to more than 1,200 Wikipedia articles with the support of the Rapoport Foundation this year.

As an easily accessible and trusted source of information, there’s no doubt that Wikipedia helps counteract false narratives and inform decision-making. But on the flipside, when a topic’s Wikipedia article is underdeveloped or simply doesn’t exist, a reader can make inferences based on their preconceptions and inherent biases.

For example, are you familiar with community policing? If not, you’d probably make some inferences about it simply based on its name. Essentially, it’s a model of law enforcement collaborating with community groups and citizens to produce safer and more secure communities – the theory is that it makes citizens more likely to cooperate with the police by improving their perceptions of the police, while also improving the attitudes and accountability of the officers. 

While community policing is generally portrayed as an effective alternative to more adversarial models like “broken windows theory”, scholars have raised concerns about both its ethics and efficacy. Thanks to the work of a student in the Criminal Justice Reform course at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth this fall, much of this critique is now reflected in the Community policing Wikipedia article. By adding this missing perspective, the student editor was able to give readers a broader and more balanced body of information from which to draw their own conclusions about the practice.

The impact of this critical student work on Wikipedia isn’t limited to the content improved; the digital media literacy and research skills developed by the student editors will continue to serve them as they move forward as engaged citizens. Through the process, students learn to identify gaps and misrepresentations in content, explore vast collections of research to accurately summarize topics for the public, and recognize the quality of the sources they find. 

“This project demands that students develop critical thinking, digital discernment, and distributed work environment skills through the process of creating knowledge for a global audience,” explained one professor this term.

Echoing this reflection, other fall term instructors explained how the Wikipedia assignment was “an authentic way for students to understand the value of research and use of credible, non-biased sources” and how it “help[s] students distinguish unbiased from biased material, neutral vs promotional material.”

Wiki Education expresses our sincere gratitude to the Rapoport Foundation for their support of this impactful work to combat misinformation and improve public access to accurate and more complete information online.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) is an ancient artificially-fed endorheic lake in the northwest of the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt. In prehistory, it was a freshwater lake, with an area estimated to vary between 1,270 km2 (490 sq mi) and 1,700 km2 (660 sq mi).

If you came across that article today, after a student in Christine Johnson’s History of Ancient Egypt class at Western Washington University worked on the article, you would see something a little different. (The Dashboard’s article highlighting tool depicted here shows us what the student wrote.)

Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) was an ancient endorheic freshwater lake located in the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt, which persists today at a fraction of its former size as thehypersaline Lake Qarun (Arabic: بركة قارون).

If you’re anything like me, the phrase “persists today at a fraction of its former size” will catch your attention. What happened? And when?

Before the student expanded it, the Lake Moeris article was limited – a historical artifact, yet another snapshot of Ancient Egypt’s grandeur that could easily be lost amongst far grander accomplishments. The current article doesn’t just give readers a much more compelling history, it also lets them make inferences about the future. 

The depth of history in the Nile Valley warrants the adjective “mind-boggling”. The scope of environmental change in the area is vast. Where else do you start an article by talking about the Messinian Salinity Crisis (a period 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago when the Mediterranean Sea dried up)? 

During the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the late Miocene, the Nile flowed past the empty Faiyum basin at the bottom of a large canyon which reached some 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) deep where the city of Cairo now sits.[11] Although the mechanism of the Faiyum basin’s creation was subject to some scholarly debate among geologists in the early 20th century, the consensus view remains that the basin itself emerged primarily as a consequence of wind erosion.[2][12] After the Mediterranean re-flooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon becamea gulf of the sea which extended inland to the site of present-day Kom Ombo.[13] Over the course of geological time this inlet of the Mediterranean gradually filled with silt and became the Nile valley.

The article goes on to discuss human settlement from the Neolithic through the Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms into Ptolomeic and Roman times. How the Egyptians built a city there, reclaimed land around the lake, and constructed a channel connecting it to the Nile, turning it into a major agricultural site. Eventually, civil war during the Crisis of the Third Century saw the irrigation works collapse and the loss of a connection to the Nile. Lake Moeris shrank into Lake Qarun, a hypersaline lake that occupies just a corner of its former extent.

You can see these additions by the student editor, in addition to a section they added about the ecology and fisheries of the lake, using the article viewer on Wiki Education’s Dashboard. (If you’re reading this some time in the future, after the article has undergone additional development, you might need to click on the “show last edited version” at the bottom of the page to see the student’s work.)

The Ancient Egyptians lived in a time when the Sahara was becoming drier, and they went to great lengths to adapt to those environmental changes that happened over the course of centuries. Today we face similar challenges in a world that’s warming much more quickly. By telling a more complete story about the past, this student’s work gives readers context to think about our future.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. 

Most trees produce their fruit in response to seasonal cues like spring, or the start or end of the wet season. Fig trees are unusual—they stagger their fruit production throughout the year. Animals that rely on fruit like birds, primates, and certain bats, depend on an adequate food supply all through the year. When fruit is in short supply, fruit-eating animals can still find food if they can find a fig tree. Surviving the lean times sets a cap on the population frugivores a forest can support, which means that figs play a critical role in sustaining tropical biodiversity.

But the ability of fig trees to support all this diversity hinges on tiny wasps less than 2 mm long: fig wasps.

Hundreds of species of fig trees and hundreds of species of wasps have tied their evolutionary fate to one another—each pair of species is totally dependent on one another for their reproduction. Fig wasps must lay their eggs in the flowers of the particular species of fig they’re tied to, and most fig species are dependent on that single species of wasp for pollination. 

But despite the importance of fig wasps, Wikipedia has very little to say about them. Out of 600 or so fig wasp species, there are eight genus articles and 24 species articles. And the majority of them are just short stubs that I created in a burst of editing back in 2008. Since then, the articles have received a slow stream of edits, but none of them have gotten any longer or gained more references. None, that is, until Shivani Green, a student in Kasey Fowler-Finn and Noah Leith’s Advanced Sex, Evolution and Behavior class, began working on the Pegoscapus article.

Pegoscapus is a genus of fig wasps. Species in this genus pollinate figs native to the Americas, like the Florida strangler fig (Ficus aurea), and the West Indian laurel fig (Ficus americana). 

When it came time to pick an article to improve, Greene said, “I chose to work on the Pegoscapus article as I learned about their unique reproductive style in a Plants and Fungi class. As I researched for this article, I saw the limited information available and wanted to create an easily accessible hub for myself, students, and the public to learn more about these vital wasps.”

Between the end of my contributions to the article in 2008 and the time when Greene started editing, the Pegoscapus article had received 44 edits from 31 different Wikipedians, but from a reader’s perspective the article was completely unchanged: it was just 87 words long with two references. 

Today, thanks to Greene, a biology major at Saint Louis University, the article is over 2,500 words long with 20 references, and gives an excellent overview of the genus, its biology, and its ecological importance.

Reflecting on her goals for the article’s readers, Greene wrote: “I hope they are able to get answers to questions they have about Pegoscapus as the limited research/discussions causes it to be difficult to draw conclusions. I hope they can be in awe of Pegoscapus‘s uniqueness and vitality to fig trees and their ecosystem. Lastly, I want them to be able to understand their complex life cycle.”

But why does it matter whether or not an obscure genus of fig wasps has an informative article? Because Wikipedia matters. In the nine years before the student started editing, the article received an average of one page view per day. Since then, it has averaged 4 views a day. This may not sound like a lot, but it’s four times the readership it received previously. 

Search engines rely heavily on Wikipedia, and most AI tools are trained on its content. Topics that are absent from Wikipedia are less visible to search engines, while AI tools may just “hallucinate” answers for them. 

From a conservation perspective, fig wasps matter. They are, quite literally, the small things that run the world. And like so many other small organisms that ecosystems depend on, fig wasps are at risk in a rapidly warming climate. As Greene wrote in the Pesoscapus article:

Fig wasp life span is significantly reduced with temperature increases predicted to occur by the end of the 21st century. If Pegoscapus cannot adapt to the increasing mean daytime temperature, then their shortened lifespan will reduce the dispersion of pollination among flowering fig trees, heavily impacting the tropical forest ecosystem.

Without representation in the sort of readily available information that Wikipedia provides, the fate of Pesoscapus wasps may go unnoticed by most of the world until it’s too late. And since each fig species’ ability to produce fruit depends entirely on their pollinator species, declines in fig wasp populations pose a threat to the many bird, primate, and bat species that depend on them.

And for student editors who have an opportunity to contribute to knowledge creation, the Wikipedia assignment matters. As Greene notes about her experience with the class, “Wikipedia allows students to gain confidence in their research and writing skills, helping them realize they can make a difference in the scientific community as well as the general public. It allows for there to be an easily accessible resource for the public to start with when trying to understand a topic. Giving them an aggregation of research on complex and niche topics allows for there to be more discussion, awareness, and hopefully, research.”

Wiki Education thanks the Horne Family Foundation for their support of this work to improve Wikipedia content related to species habitat, wildlife populations, and the impact of climate change.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Apply by December 1, 2024 for priority consideration for spring 2025.

Over the past decade, Kate Grillo’s classes have worked to fix that problem, at least on Wikipedia. Initially at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and now at the University of Florida, Dr. Grillo’s classes, supported by Wiki Education’s Student Program, have added almost 200,000 words to Wikipedia’s coverage of African archaeology. Student editors in the latest iteration of her class, Introduction to African Archaeology, created four new articles about archaeological sites – Takarkori in Libya, al-Khiday in Sudan, the Jarigole pillar site in Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria. In addition to creating these new articles, the class also made improvements to another 20 articles.

Takarkori is an archaeological site in southern Libya, near the border with Algeria. Evidence of human habitation dates back over 10,000 years to a period when this area, now deep in the Sahara, was much wetter and supported lakes, wetlands, and flowing streams. 

The article provides readers with a sense of the depth of history of the site and manages to meet a reader’s need for background information without delving too deeply into tangential topics. 

A good Wikipedia article needs to strike a careful balance between providing the reader with enough information to keep reading without adding so much background that it ends up duplicating information that should be in a separate article dedicated to the topic. When writing in an underdeveloped area of Wikipedia like this one, getting that balance right can sometimes be a challenge.

Al-Khiday is a group of five sites on the western bank of the Nile in Sudan that were discovered in 2004. The best-studied of these sites, al-Khiday 2, was occupied at least four separate times between the pre-Mesolithic and the Late Meroitic (a time period that relates to the city of Meroë, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush).

This article provides a glimpse at life in the Upper Nile Valley at various points in time over the course of thousands of years. It also lifts the curtain as to how archaeologists learn about life in ancient times through clues like charring in food remains, starch grain sizes, and the imprints of bacteria on prostate stones. 

Jarigole pillar site, a communal burial site in northern Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria, the capital city of the Oyo Empire which was abandoned in 1835 after Fulani attacks, round out the set of articles created by student editors in this iteration of Dr. Grillo’s class. Together, these articles help fill gaps in an area of Wikipedia where significant absences abound.

Popular – and sometimes scholarly – knowledge is shaped by the information that’s available. Wikipedia’s existence has put an incredible amount of information at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection (and a decent command of English or one of the other major language Wikipedias). But the information on Wikipedia tends to reflect the biases in popular content. By adding specific scholarly content in an area that’s less visible in the public imagining of the ancient world, student editors like those in Dr. Grillo’s classes can help chip away at systemic issues in the representation of human knowledge. 

Just by doing a class assignment, they can start to change the world.

Interested in learning more about teaching with Wikipedia and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

Hero image by Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

These student editors may have channeled their research on birth control into unexpected areas of Wikipedia, but they weren’t the only students in Chris Babits’ History of Sexuality class who focused on adding information related to contraception to the online encyclopedia. Classmates also enhanced related pages including the Cornstock laws and Family planning in the United States. And until one Utah student jumped in, the Views on birth control in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints page was missing arguably the most relevant view: the church’s current stance on contraception. 

Just as real-world events can lead to spikes in readership of related Wikipedia articles, student editors can be motivated to work on topics that experience a peaked level of public interest, wanting to add information to the in-demand area of knowledge.

Babits’ students’ decision to explore the topic of contraception may have been influenced by the real-world interest in the information following a milestone decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court officially ruled to reverse Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. The decision undoubtedly drew attention to Wikipedia’s abortion article, which noted a significant jump in page views the following day, as well as to Wikipedia’s article on birth control, which nearly quadrupled in daily readership by June 25. 

So it should come as no surprise that Babits’ class, who’s collective edits on Wikipedia articles have been viewed nearly one million times, isn’t the only recent class in our Wikipedia Student Program to address knowledge gaps related to contraception. 

In fall 2023, three of Caroline Smith’s students at The George Washington University collaborated to create a new article on emergency contraceptives on college campuses, exploring the history, accessibility, and legislation of access at colleges and universities across the country. Their article explores the first time morning-after pills were sold in vending machines on a college campus at The Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, the spread of the concept to other institutions, and the related legislation.

This spring term, four of Smith’s students also worked together to create another new Wikipedia article to share the history of Julie, a healthcare company that markets a non-prescription emergency contraceptive pill. Julie launched their product in September 2022 in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade with a mission of removing stigmas around emergency contraception and increasing access for marginalized communities.

By filling in missing information for topics of public interest and need, student editors like Babits’ and Smiths’ can make tremendous impact through the Wikipedia assignment. Interested in learning more and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

The Wikipedia assignment is giving students career skills that allow them to address misinformation, to correct the historical record in racially marginalized communities, and to discover that personally, they are a crucial part of the solution.

I recently visited students at Denmark Technical College, a historically Black college in South Carolina, to share about Wiki Education’s efforts to diversify Wikipedia’s content and contributors. While reviewing the Wikipedia assignment, I showed them a picture of a recent conference of Wikipedians–the people who write what we could call our living history. And the students noticed something immediately. “Where’s the spice?” they joked, pointing out that the majority of the faces were white.

It’s true. Out of thousands of Wikipedians in the US, 89% identify as white and 85% as male. So we have this incredible resource–Wikipedia–that is mostly curated by white men. The students understood the problem with just one photo. Without a diversity of contributors, how can we expect Wikipedia to reflect the perspectives and experiences of all people? Of the students in that room?

So far, Wiki Education has helped Wikipedia make some progress. Only 55% of people in our programs identify as white, as opposed to 85% in the larger Wikipedian community. 69% identify as women or nonbinary, in contrast to roughly 15% of Wikipedians. And Wiki Education is responsible for bringing 19% of new editors to English Wikipedia each year.

My job at Wiki Education is to continue to increase the diversity of content and contributors on Wikipedia. One of the ways I do that is by inviting instructors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) to lead Wikipedia assignments. My dream is that one day, there will be more students of color editing Wikipedia than represented in the population of the US. It’s a personal dream, a personal goal, that powers my work every day. Here is how Wiki Education programs are doing so far:

I have a lot of conversations with instructors at HBCUs, HSIs, and TCUs about how a Wikipedia assignment does or does not meet their course objectives. And I find we usually circle back to the same core things that we both wish for students. We want them to:

1) see themselves in our culture and history

2) feel inspired by their schoolwork

3) have the skills to weed out misinformation in their life, and ultimately

4) influence the world around them, change the narrative.

I’d like to share some student work from HBCUs over the years that I think are particularly powerful examples of students filling important knowledge gaps on Wikipedia while choosing topics that are meaningful to them. Writing on such a public stage is a pretty powerful motivator for students, who take extra care to get it right and feel proud of their work.

Students identify biases and gaps, and change the narrative

A student at Kentucky State University noticed that Alice Walker’s Wikipedia biography spoke of her ‘feminism’ rather than her ‘womanism,’ the term Walker coined for her work. In fact, Walker did not feel represented within the mostly white feminist movement of the time. Understanding this nuance, the student changed the section title from “Feminism” to “Womanism” to better reflect Walker’s work and legacy, and expanded the section to briefly describe the difference between feminist movements. Since they made this correction in 2018, 2.2 million readers have visited the page and benefitted from the addition.

Alice Walker isn’t the only pioneering Black woman whose biography contained biases that students at HBCUs have fixed. Did you know that Hattie McDaniel–the first Black woman to win an Oscar–wasn’t allowed to attend the premiere of the movie she won it for because of her race? A student added this information to her Wikipedia biography, which has reached 2.1 million readers in the last three years. And what about Elaine Brown, the first and only woman to lead the Black Panther Party? Even with her impressive leadership position, she still experienced sexism within her career. A student from Spelman College added that information to her biography, which has been viewed 117K times since. Another student at Spelman College wrote about how McCarthyism affected jazz musician Hazel Scott’s career, for the benefit of 276K readers.

When we remember history, there’s a risk of downplaying the barriers that pioneers faced in favor of a whitewashed or milder narrative. Students can play an active role in telling the full story of our history, understanding that these nuanced perspectives matter and belong in places like Wikipedia.

Students document discrimination, possibly enacting change

Information is power and Wikipedia has the power to affect behavior. So when students document marginalization in various fields, they could very possibly enact positive change.

A few of Tanya Allen’s music students at Texas Southern University looked for information gaps in Wikipedia’s page about classroom management. One notable gap that a student filled was that Black boys are subjected to punishment more than white peers. 743K readers have visited the page since the student cited this research back in December 2017. Presumably some of these Wikipedia readers were teachers themselves, learning from and being made aware of these disparities and discriminatory classroom methods, and hopefully avoiding them in their own teaching.

Another student at Xavier University of Louisiana explained how colorism factors into the history of racial discrimination in the US, informing 970K readers since 2017. Another student from the same course wrote about how Black women face an increased risk of health problems in the United States for the benefit of 185K readers.

This process of identifying gaps in information sources that we may take for granted gives students the chance to discern fact from fiction as they build media literacy skills and correct the public narrative.

Students see themselves in our culture and history

Because students and instructors can choose the topics they edit, they can create awareness about a wide range of topics that they’re personally invested in. One instructor I spoke with recently is passionate about first generation college students seeing themselves represented more widely in our society. Wikipedia is potentially one avenue for accomplishing that. Many students report that this kind of personal investment in their learning is quite the motivator. It’s a chance to make their school work their own.

A Wikipedia assignment is also a chance to look at personal interests through an academic lens and inform many others about the connections between the two. Msia Kibona Clark’s student at Howard University, for example, wrote about hip-hop on the Black feminism page, which has already received 30K page visits since November. Another student from the course wrote about the “video vixen” or models that appear in hip-hop music videos and how the trope has affected the hyper-sexualization of Black women, informing 35K readers so far in just a few months.

Inspiring confidence and creating a passion for learning

In addition to being the Equity Outreach Coordinator at Wiki Education, I am a professional cellist and music teacher who’s performed on hundreds of stages across the world. And you might ask, “why does he work for Wiki Education?” There is a throughline. Our society simultaneously inspires a love of art and learning and, sadly, also works against it. When it’s hard to determine fact from fiction on the internet, when discrimination and racial disparities affect our communities, how can we expect students of color to enjoy the arts? When many student populations just need to put food on the table, how is there time to feel inspired by schoolwork or go to concerts? The Wikipedia assignment is giving students career skills that allow them to address misinformation, to correct the historical record in racially marginalized communities, and to discover that personally, they are a crucial part of the solution. These skills will help them feel more confident in their abilities, and hopefully, not fear getting out into the world and proving themselves capable of much more than they imagined. And maybe, just for a moment, that confidence will allow them and future generations to enjoy the wonder of art and music.

As part of my work at Wiki Education, I learn from instructors all over the United States and Canada as they grapple with these questions too. I truly believe that inviting students to write Wikipedia content as coursework is a powerful way to empower students and lift them up in our society. They can think critically about bias in information. They can practice determining fact from fiction and trustworthy information from untrustworthy. From there, they can make educated judgments about these questions in their own life. And they can take part in writing our living history.