Joined virtually by attendees from across the globe, our panelists explored how the public and healthcare professionals alike turn to Wikipedia for reliable information, the impact of Wikipedia content on patient-physician communications, and the critical need for ongoing improvement of healthcare topics on the encyclopedia.

Whether our search for information is sparked by something we read in a book, watch on the news, or learn from a medical diagnosis, Wikipedia is the first stop we make online, emphasized panelist Maureen Richards, assistant professor and assistant dean at University of Illinois College of Medicine.

“Patients get a diagnosis, they receive a test result, and they Google it,” explained Richards. “If they have been using Wikipedia in all other facets of their life…they’re going to click on it and believe what it says – which means that those of us who have had the opportunity to study [healthcare] have a responsibility to ensure that information on Wikipedia is accurate and well-founded in scientific research.”

Richards, who first incorporated a Wikipedia assignment into her courses in 2020, noted her appreciation for how the project provides her medical students with the opportunity to practice the language of research and to learn how to synthesize primary literature for a greater audience. 

Like Richards, professor Amin Azzam assigns coursework on Wikipedia to his own medical students. Azzam underscores the critical, real-world nature of the work to his classes by encouraging them to explore the readership trend on any health-related Wikipedia article.

“When you look at article traffic statistics, there’s always a five peaks and two valleys pattern that reoccurs,” noted Azzam, who challenges his students to explain this pattern. “It’s weekdays and weekends, because exactly as Maureen said, people get diagnoses, and then they go home and read about them on Wikipedia. It really is incumbent upon us to make it as accurate as possible.”

Lending her perspective as a new Wikipedia editor herself, physician and policy researcher Gabriela Alvarado echoed the assertions made by her fellow panelists. As Alvarado explained, the platform’s accessible nature is a significant draw for those seeking answers to healthcare questions. She noted Wikipedia’s understandable language, clear visual formatting, and of course, one very simple but powerful characteristic of accessibility – it’s free to read.

“My family members will search for something and a paywall comes up on a journal,” shared Alvarado, who participated in a Wiki Scientists course focused on improving reproductive and women’s healthcare content. “The average person who isn’t affiliated with a school library can’t pay $50 for each academic journal they want to read. It’s a recurring conversation that academics have with themselves – are we screaming into this echo chamber? Why are we doing the work that we’re doing, who’s actually reading it, and who are we serving with our research?”

Just like Alvarado, health researcher Izidora Skracic was compelled to join the Wiki Scientists editing course to help improve public access to critical healthcare information. While Alvarado created a new Wikipedia article on breastmilk storage and handling, Skracic lent her efforts to enhancing high-traffic articles including Unintended pregnancy, Intrauterine device, and Contraceptive implant.

When asked for her best advice for new editors, Skracic recommended newcomers start small and work their way up to large-scale editing.

“In order to start, pick one sentence somewhere on any Wikipedia article that you’re reading, and just say, I’m going to make this sentence better – whether that means adding a citation, adding a second part of a sentence, or just adding more updated information,” said Skracic. “And as you build confidence, go bigger.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “The Experts Behind the Edits: Expanding public understanding of healthcare,” and join us for our next webinar tomorrow, February 18!

Beyond the Classroom: Student editors improve Wikipedia
Tuesday, February 18 (10 am PST / 1 pm EST)
REGISTER NOW

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. 

Even if you haven’t yet taught with a Wikipedia assignment, enrolled in a Wiki Scholars & Scientists editing course, or engaged with other efforts to improve the world’s go-to online encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s persisting gender gap probably comes as no surprise to you – a gap that extends from its content across disciplines to its content contributors themselves. Over the years, Wiki Education’s programs and resources have empowered academics, students, and subject matter experts to move the needle on this imbalance, and today we’re reflecting on just a snapshot of their work to expand the coverage of women in science.

One of the most straightforward and impactful ways to enhance Wikipedia’s coverage of underrepresented notable figures is to create new biographies for those who lack their own articles or to improve existing biographies. And year after year, professors like Glenn Dolphin at the University of Calgary empower their students to do just this.

Last term, Dolphin incorporated his eighth Wikipedia assignment into his annual Introduction to Geology course, charging his students with the mission of creating new Wikipedia articles and improving existing content about famous women geologists and other underrepresented people in the field. In his most recent course alone, Dolphin’s students improved or created articles for 37 women scientists, including geologist, politician, and diplomat Judi Wakhungu and micropaleontologist Helen Jeanne Skewes Plummer. Over the years since he first taught with Wikipedia, Dolphin’s students have added more than 350K words and 3,330 references to Wikipedia, creating content that has been viewed 2.63 million times.

Unlike Dolphin, biologist Emily Sylwestrak at the University of Oregon was new to incorporating the Wikipedia assignment into her pedagogy last term, but she too tasked her students with the mission to create new biographies of women in the sciences. Thanks to the efforts of Sylwestrak’s class, we can now learn about prominent female figures in fields such as marine biology (Natalya Gallo, Ana K. Spalding) and chemistry (Sibrina Collins, Cynthia Chapple).

And as Wiki Education’s curriculum emphasizes, improving representation is not just about creating articles or adding new sections to existing articles. By citing more sources authored by female scientists, taking a critical eye to the weight of existing sections, adding links to other related articles, and considering the role of images on Wikipedia, editors can also make significant impact on this topic area through smaller edits.

While Wiki Education supports hundreds of faculty each term to assign their students Wikipedia coursework, faculty and other subject area experts across the world also enroll in our professional development courses to improve content through their own contributions. 

Thanks to support from the American Physical Society, we’ve offered 10 courses since 2019 to teach scientists how to add their expertise to Wikipedia, many of whom have focused their efforts on enhancing the coverage of women in sciences. 

Prior to the work of the course participants, prominent female scientists including Leticia del Rosario, the first Puerto Rican woman to earn a PhD in physics, and Silke Bühler-Paschen, a solid-state physicist, were absent from Wikipedia, and the content of others with existing articles was limited. Throughout the courses, participants transformed Wikipedia’s existing coverage of figures like chemist Ka Yee Christina Lee, materials scientist Julia R. Greer, and astronomical sciences professor Gillian Knapp, and so many others, expanding the world’s understanding of women’s contributions to the sciences.

Today, we celebrate the efforts of all who have worked to improve representation of women in science  – and all who will read their stories on Wikipedia and be inspired to follow their own professional dreams. 

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 is that content on Wikipedia up to date with the current medical understanding of a topic? The answer is a solid “maybe”. That’s why Wiki Education works with a variety of organizations in the medical space to ensure Wikipedia’s coverage of medicine is as high quality as possible.

One such initiative we’ve been running for the last two years focuses on ensuring Wikipedia articles have patient-centered outcomes at their forefront. When a medical practitioner has a number of options for treatment, it’s important for patients, caregivers, and the clinicians themselves to base their treatments on research to be the most effective for patients. The gold standard for citing medical information on Wikipedia is Systematic Reviews. They look at a corpus of primary research studies on a particular topic and the consensus among a variety of studies, rather than relying on a one-off study whose findings may not be replicable.

The Patient-Centered Research Outcomes Institute (PCORI) is one publisher of systematic reviews in the medical field, with reviews addressing important topics like infantile epilepsy, cervical ripening, atrial fibrillation & stroke prevention, and early rheumatoid arthritis, among others. Over the last two years, thanks to a project funded by PCORI, Wiki Education has added information from these high-quality systematic reviews to Wikipedia.

We’ve taken a two-pronged approach: In our Wikipedia Student Program, we’ve empowered health professions instructors to assign their students to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of medical topics as a class assignment, including at institutions such as the University of Central Florida School of Medicine or Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. In our Wiki Scientists Program, we’ve engaged subject matter experts to directly improve content, running four six-week courses on how to edit Wikipedia.

Through both programs, we improved more than 40 medical articles on Wikipedia, adding critical information about patient-centered outcomes. Since our program participants added this information, these articles have been viewed more than 11 million times, demonstrating the power of Wikipedia as a vehicle for information dissemination. This better information helps patients, caregivers, clinicians, policymakers, and other important stakeholders have access to patient-centered outcomes research.

While our current two-year project with PCORI is wrapping up, we will continue to support health professions instructors who are interested in supporting students to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of medical topics. We encourage any interested instructor to visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more.

Wiki Education expresses its thanks for the support of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award (EADI #26698).

Motivated by her lifelong interest and focus on reproductive health and justice, course participant Paula A. Hillard, MD valued the unique learning opportunity to bring her knowledge to the public through the open-access encyclopedia.

“I loved the encouragement and support in my ventures into editing Wikipedia,” said Hillard, a pediatric and adolescent gynecology specialist at Stanford Children’s Health and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. “In the medical field in particular, many Wikipedia articles need updating. As a physician, I know that many individuals use Wikipedia as one of their online sources of medical information, so the articles must be medically accurate as well as inclusive.”

While previously unfamiliar with the WITH Foundation, Hillard immediately connected with the goals of the organization and eagerly jumped into editing.

“When I read what the [WITH] acronym stands for, ‘Working for Inclusive and Transformative Healthcare’, I was hooked, and wanted the chance to help further that mission,” explained Hillard.  

Fellow course participant Juanita Panlener discovered the learning opportunity through her organization’s ongoing collaboration with the WITH Foundation. As the manager of the National Resource Center of the Spina Bifida Association, Panlener provides information about living with Spina Bifida to family members, individuals, social professionals, and more.

“Once I realized the value of learning how to be a responsible contributor to Wikipedia, and once I realized that we could play a part in updating content about Spina Bifida and topics related to Spina Bifida, I was in!” Panlener emphasized. 

Course participants made high-quality improvements to a variety of Wikipedia articles focused on disability healthcare, including Down syndrome, Disability sport classification, De Barsy syndrome, Evidence-based medicine, Disability treatments in the United States, Curb cut effect, and Ableism.

Curious about the editing process and motivated by the chance to dedicate time to improving Wikipedia by researching a topic aligned with her interests, Arizona State University professor Kenicia Wright joined the course with limited prior knowledge of the site.

“I was surprised by the increase in experts contributing to information on Wikipedia, the sources that are added to support the information being uploaded on different topics, and the goal/number of academic scholars contributing to Wikipedia articles on certain topics,” said Wright.

Like Wright, many participants were surprised by the course content, including the exploration of Wikipedia’s robust editing policies and guidelines in place to safeguard article quality.

“Prior to the course, I was unaware of the extensive behind-the-scenes work involved in creating Wikipedia articles,” said Rachel Lawerh, Population Student Health PhD student at the University of Ottawa. “It was fascinating to see editors collaborating on various topics, guidelines, and measures that are put in place to minimize the spread of misinformation on the platform.”

For instructor Will Kent, Scholars & Scientists Program Manager at Wiki Education, the WITH courses provided the ideal space for experts to gather and share their deep subject-area knowledge acquired from lived experience.

“An important element to these courses is the connection between people’s personal motivations to edit articles in the area of disabilities,” said Kent. “It was especially rewarding for me as an instructor to work with new editors who brought both personal and professional experiences to their writing. In addition to being meaningful to the course participants, it’s important for people writing about the community they represent to be part of that community. This really shines through in their work.”

Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

Explore related articles:

• Edits close to home: ophthalmologist lends expertise to Down syndrome article
• 800K views and counting: professor improves healthcare content on Wikipedia

But it was a personal connection to the course’s focus on adult disabilities that propelled his work on Wikipedia – and led him to make substantive additions to an already well-developed, well-regarded article on the site.

“My sister has Down syndrome and I am involved in assisting with her medical care,” said Barbera. “I was interested and motivated to share what I knew through Wikipedia.”

Barbera added a new, robust section on ocular findings to the Down syndrome article, including information related to clinical signs of Down syndrome in an infant at birth, and the greater frequency of vision disorders such as congenital cataracts, strabismus, nystagmus, nasolacrimal duct obstruction, and refractive error among individuals with Down syndrome. 

“Wikipedia is one of the best examples of the realization of the original promise of the internet – constructive collaboration and dissemination of knowledge,” explained the ophthalmologist when reflecting on the power of Wikipedia to shape awareness and understanding of topics like disabilities. 

Throughout the course, Barbera also made enhancements to other eye-related articles, including Pseudostrabismus, which could lead to the incorrect diagnosis of strabismus. Pseudostrabismus, the false impression that the eyes are misaligned, generally occurs in infants and very young children, whose facial features are not yet fully developed.

“It was quite rewarding to look at the page view statistics with [our instructor] at the end of the course,” said Barbera. “It’s amazing how many views there were of the work in just a few weeks!  It helps me understand how significant the contribution can be, and I am sure others would share that sense of satisfaction.”

Praising his WITH course and its instructor, Wiki Education’s Will Kent, Barbera underscored the quality of his learning experience, the value of Kent’s encouragement and feedback, and his thanks to the WITH Foundation for supporting healthcare for those with disabilities. 

“One of the benefits of these courses is the fact that participants have an opportunity to learn from each other,” said Kent. “User Nabor Barbera led and fostered several useful conversations about disability topics, understanding the Wikipedia community, and exploring the useful (and sometimes baffling) user interface. These kinds of conversations embody the kind of drive, agency, and curiosity that make an engaged Wikipedian.”

While his course has officially ended, Barbera continues to review and edit Wikipedia articles, encouraging others to lend their own knowledge to improve the site for all.

Interested in learning how to add your expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

Having attended four Wiki Scientists courses over the past year, three of which were sponsored by the WITH Foundation, McEwen remains dedicated to enhancing healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia, underscoring the crucial role Wikipedia plays in increasing equity in public health.

“Quality information is important to patients and families,” said McEwen. “Wikipedia articles are a resource patients can discuss with their health care team to improve patient outcomes.”

Noting the initial challenge of selecting an article to enhance, McEwen focused her search on finding articles missing citations or large sections of critical information. 

Ultimately, she discovered Wikipedia articles at the intersection of the course themes and her own personal interests, adding content and citations to articles including De Barsy syndrome, jellyfish dermatitis, evidence-based medicine, tetracycline, congenital rubella syndrome, Alagille syndrome, and Reye syndrome.

McEwen, who particularly enjoyed the creative process of adding content and the chance to expand her biomedical knowledge, was surprised to discover a broad network of scholars actively contributing to Wikipedia.

“I was not aware of the complexity of the behind-the-scenes at Wikipedia,” McEwen explained. “I have also been impressed with the effort to involve scientists and students in improving Wikipedia articles.”

As associate professor of both Family and Community Medicine and Pharmacy Practice at Northeast Ohio Medical University, McEwen co-leads and teaches in the evidence-based medicine thread for first year and second-year medical students. She also serves as the Curriculum Mapper for the university. McEwen credits the WITH Wiki Scientists courses with keeping her on task and on track toward her goals of improving articles amidst her extensive professional responsibilities.  

“I think [editing] is a great way for scientists, health care professionals, librarians, and students to ensure quality information is available to anyone able to access Wikipedia,” said McEwen. “Your work can be seen by a larger population than traditional academic publishing.”

To connect with McEwen on Wikipedia, find her editing under the username EBMLibrarian.

Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

A 2015 study concluded that “Wikipedia appeared to be the most utilized online healthcare information resource” in the world. And yet, there are only about 100 articles (out of 6.6 million) that cover developmental disabilities. Thanks to a $55,000 grant from the WITH Foundation, we plan to work with a passionate group of experts to change that.

We’re thrilled to announce that the WITH Foundation has not only renewed–but generously increased–their support of our initiative to improve healthcare and disability-related articles on Wikipedia, ensuring that the world’s largest free information resource is as equitable and accurate as possible. 

“We are pleased to continue our support for this project. We appreciate the partnership with Wiki Education as they work with self-advocates and disability healthcare professionals to enhance healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia.” – Ryan Eastery, Executive Director of WITH Foundation

In three WITH-sponsored Wiki Scientists courses, we will support 45 experts, including more self-advocates (adults with lived experience of I/DD), as they expand between 30 and 40 high-value Wikipedia articles about disability healthcare. Nearly all of the existing Wikipedia articles about adult developmental disabilities are rated as a “start” or “stub” class, meaning the article has a lot of room for improvement in quality and depth of information. 

There’s plenty of work to be done, but thankfully this cohort of experts will be building upon previous iterations of these courses. The WITH Foundation funded a similar project in 2019. The highest rated Wikipedia article in this topic area, Developmental disability, was expanded by experts previously enrolled in WITH Foundation-supported Wiki Scientists courses. Three of the top Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities have received over 170,000 pageviews to date in 2022 alone, indicating strong public demand for helpful resources on related topics.

We’ve also seen a strong demand among disability healthcare professionals, experts, and self-advocates to be part of this initiative. In 2019, we received almost twice as many applications than there were seats available for the two Wiki Scientists courses. In total, 31 experts improved 43 Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities and related topics. All work from these courses are available on Wiki Education’s online Dashboard.

Join us!

We are now seeking participants in these courses who can add accurate, reliable information about developmental disabilities to Wikipedia. We welcome individuals with developmental disabilities to participate, either as course participants if they are academic experts, or by recommending the course to people in their networks. In addition to working with some of our existing partners, we’d love to connect with organizations we haven’t yet collaborated with, especially healthcare and disability studies groups.

If you or your organization is interested in participating in any capacity, please email Jami Mathewson, our Director of Partnerships, at jami@wikiedu.org.

Let’s make a lasting impact

As a recent study has shown, Wikipedia articles have the power to influence hundreds of scientific articles and become highly cited in scientific literature. Researchers have also found that when groups of Wikipedia editors improve a specific content area, the pageviews of those articles and other linked ones increase by 12%. The work from our Wiki Scientists courses will remain accessible on Wikipedia going forward, impacting the public’s understanding of important healthcare and developmental disability studies topics and creating a snowball effect on the amount of healthcare resources available in the future.

What if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual but in your ability to be part of a collective? You can’t solve the climate crisis alone, but it’s even more true that we can’t solve it without you. – Mary Annaïse Heglar

When people first learned about Wikipedia in 2001, they couldn’t fathom its eventual success. Building a massive online encyclopedia that relies on individual contributions to share knowledge? This is a lost cause! 22 years later, Wikipedia has proven that we can imagine a better world and collectively work to create it. Small contributions from people all over the globe working together and on their own to make something influential for the good of humankind. This sounds a lot like what we need to do in order to mitigate climate change.

Wikipedia gets billions of visitors every month and actually affects peoples’ behavior, so representing topics well on the site has a wide-reaching impact. That’s why it’s vital that Wikipedia represents the latest in climate science and solutions.

We’re thrilled to be doing just that in our latest Wiki Scientists course sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS). One of the central components of the APS mission is to share physics knowledge. Since 2019, the association has fulfilled this promise by partnering with Wiki Education to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of physics and physicists. APS has given 93 members—from a high school student to a Nobel Prize laureate—the opportunity to practice their science communication on a worldwide stage, write biographies of historically excluded physicists, and leverage Wikidata—the open data repository behind Wikipedia–for research, dissemination, and teaching. APS members in this Initiative have reached 31.1 million Wikipedia readers with their work in only three years.

“If other associations have the goals of fostering equity, inclusion, and diversity in their field, as well as increasing access to their discipline’s knowledge, Wikipedia is a great avenue to explore,” says Allie Lau, Public Engagement Programs Manager at APS.

Communicating new discoveries as they happen is one great way experts can elevate their field through Wikipedia. An APS Wiki Scientist from MIT added a recent notable demonstration of quantum supremacy to the quantum computing article, which received 1.8 million views in 2021 and 2022 after they made these changes. We’re excited to have that kind of impact come from our current course with APS, which is working on energy and climate science, especially as advances in mitigation strategies and technologies become newly available. We’re particularly thrilled to be working with the American Physical Society in this mission because they have long urged members and the surrounding academic community to research and understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to develop the technological solutions for the near and longer term.

Disseminating physics research through a popular open access tool like Wikipedia is important for advancing science. Research shows that journal articles cited in science-related Wikipedia articles receive a boost in citations; language in those Wikipedia articles affects future scientific literature; and traffic to knowledge institution websites (like those of academic journals) increases. Thus, this project helps fulfill the mission to share science with the public, and the work the APS Wiki Scientists do will help people make decisions informed by science.

APS members in our most recent Wiki Scientists course offer a diverse range of expertise including:

• Studio physics
• Thermoelectricity
• Extreme condition physics
• Nanophysics
• Particle physics
• History and philosophy of physics
• Technical writing for congress
• Instructional design, and more.

They will gather with our Wikipedia experts each week over Zoom. There, they will bring their expertise as physicists to address content gaps on Wikipedia related to energy and the climate. Together, they represent a cohort of scientists who are approaching climate science from many angles. We’re thrilled to see what they will do, both as individual contributors to Wikipedia and as a collective force for climate communication.

Sign up to be part of an upcoming course focused on climate solutions. Or visit partner.wikiedu.org to start building your own Wikipedia Initiative with our support.

On November 21, 2022, Google’s Doodle of the day featured Marie Tharp, whose discovery led to the acceptance of continental drift theory. Tharp’s impressive career as an oceanographic cartographer was on full display that day as more than a hundred thousand internet users swarmed to her Wikipedia biography. Thankfully, the biography was robust—touting her contributions to her field and the barriers she overcame as a woman geologist in the ’40s and ’50s. Not all women on Wikipedia are as lucky. Only 19% of the biographies on the site are even about women. When they do have a page, bias mirroring gender inequities in STEM and journalism can creep up in the content. Today, Marie Tharp’s biography is comprehensive and an excellent summary of her contributions to science. But just 6 years ago, it told a very different story.

If you read Tharp’s Wikipedia article in 2017, it might escape you that the Library of Congress considers her one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century. The page focused more on the work of her colleague Bruce Heezen than it did on her, painting him as the more experienced scientist, rather than her collaborator. At the time, women weren’t allowed on board research vessels, so Tharp relied on Heezen’s sonar data to create her maps of the seafloor. This earlier version of Tharp’s biography contextualized her discovery of an oceanic rift valley in terms of what Heezen thought about it. He was skeptical, calling her theory “girl talk” and even going so far as to erase her work. Once he was convinced she was right, Heezen took credit for Tharp’s discovery for more than 10 years until her contribution was finally acknowledged. The 2017 version of Tharp’s Wikipedia biography hinted at the injustice, noting that her name was mysteriously missing from publications, but it didn’t explain why. A reader might assume Heezen simply did more of the work.

It was a group effort through Wiki Education’s programs, spanning years, that corrected the narrative.

First, in 2017 an undergraduate student completing a Wikipedia assignment in a Wiki Education-supported course added the barriers that Tharp overcame in pursuing geology, namely that only 4% of all earth sciences doctorates at the time were obtained by women. The student also noted the Library of Congress’ honoring of Tharp’s legacy.

Then, in 2018 a geoscience graduate student trained as a Wiki Scientist came along and detailed how Tharp’s discovery of a rift valley supported the theory of continental drift, which was new and controversial at the time. By adding this point, the Wiki Scientist focused the biography more on Tharp’s findings than on Heezen’s skepticism. They also added the reason Heezen finally came around—a male colleague confirmed Tharp’s work. Perhaps most poignantly, the Wiki Scientist replaced the page’s photograph with one of Tharp herself, rather than one of Heezen “showing” her a map of her own creation.

In 2019, another undergraduate student in a Wiki Education-supported geology course gave more context about Tharp’s map of the ocean floor in the introductory section, adding that it specifically charted the ocean’s topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape. The student found a preliminary manuscript sketch that Tharp and Heezen made and included that too. The student added an award that Tharp received in 2001 and also updated the section about Tharp’s early life, noting that joining her father in his field work as a soil surveyor sparked her initial interest in cartography. Considering that narratives about women scientists (on Wikipedia and off) are more likely than a man’s to focus on their personal life over their career accomplishments, including the origin of Tharp’s passion for science is a great addition to the information about her upbringing.

Where before, the biography passively mentioned that Tharp’s name wasn’t included in publications of her work, this student made the language more active, noting that it was Heezen who took the credit for Tharp’s discovery in 1956 and that the discovery was not attributed to her for more than a decade. There are plenty of historical instances where discoveries made by women were credited to men at first: from the existence of dark matter to the invention of wireless communication and the first computer language compiler tools. Women scientists are still less likely to be credited for their work than men. Given the persistent barriers women face to being recognized, it’s important to accurately document the contributions from women scientists and Wikipedia is a great place to tell the real story in real time.

When we don’t tell the full story of women scientists’ achievements, we miss the opportunity to positively influence future generations of scientists. Instead, young people may be exposed to pervasive negative stereotypes suggesting that they don’t belong in STEM, which change the way they talk about their dreams and negatively affect confidence and test performance. Sustained over time, this undermining of confidence can lead to women abandoning careers that don’t align with expectations of their gender, race, or class.

We have the chance to change the story–not only for pioneers like Tharp, but for scientists working now. A Wikipedia biography recognizes a scientist’s contributions in real time. It surfaces her expertise to journalists and panel organizers, humanizes her beyond her CV or university profile, and shows young people interested in STEM what career paths are possible for them. Considering women and people of color are chosen less often for speaking opportunities, are contacted less often by journalists, and aren’t recognized for their work in equal measure to white male peers, exposure on Wikipedia can help turn the tides.

We’re proud to see that the work of students and scientists in our programs lives on, and this process worked exactly as Wikipedia was designed to: building upon itself over time as contributors uncovered more of the real story. Together, we’re helping correct the narrative of women’s place in the advancement of STEM, and there’s one thing we know for sure: a woman’s place is in Wikipedia.