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.

As an Earth and Planetary Sciences major, Tessa used her existing knowledge of the field to identify gaps in the article’s coverage. These gaps included content related to the hazards associated with stratovolcanoes, an area she felt would be important to readers.  

With the goal to improve the quality of publicly available information about stratovolcanoes, Tessa significantly expanded the article by adding information about hazards like volcanic ash, lava, volcanic bombs, lahars, and volcanic gases.

“I hope [readers] can understand how a stratovolcano forms and erupts, as well as the hazards associated with stratovolcanoes,” reflected Tessa.

But the benefits of Tessa’s work weren’t limited to helping others. Undertaking the assignment also improved her own scientific knowledge, as well as her writing skills. 

“I learned many new things about my subject while reading through papers to properly cite the article,” she explained.

Have you ever seen a cross-section model of a fault line, or of a volcano, or of the Earth itself, and wondered “how do they know that?” A geologist isn’t going to dig a 10-kilometer deep trench to document the geology of Mount Rainier. So where does this information come from?

One of the tools that scientists use to learn about these structures is something called seismic tomography. As Tessa worked on the stratovolcano article, one of her classmates expanded the article about that measurement technique, rewriting the lead section and expanding the articles’ coverage of things like the history of its use, the theory behind it, and its application in studying seismic hazards. 

Other students in the class expanded other articles, or created new ones that were missing from Wikipedia, like serial magmatism, a process often discussed when studying the moon’s crust, and a lunar mineral called ferroan anorthosite, which provides insights into the evolution of the early lunar crust.  

University of New Mexico Distinguished Professor Tobias Fischer has taught volcanology with Wikipedia since 2021, and his students, including Tessa and her classmates, have added almost 100,000 words and over 1,000 references to the articles they’ve worked on. 

“Students realize that what they write matters and has an impact because they see that it is read by many people,” he noted. “This experience empowers them and increases their confidence in being able to make an impact beyond their circle of academic colleagues and classmates.” 

When reflecting on his experience incorporating the assignment into his courses, Fischer underscored the satisfaction of watching his students become experts in the content they contribute to Wikipedia.

“My favorite part is to see how some students really immerse themselves in the topic they chose,” said Fischer. “They go beyond the assignment and it becomes part of their missions as educators.”

Our support for STEM classes like Professor Fischer’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.

Image credit: Caleb Riston, CCO, via Wikimedia Commons

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

In Spring 2022, students in Edmund Palermo’s Biology in Materials Science class returned to the subject area for the fourth time, building on contributions by prior classes in 2017, 2018, and 2020.

Biofoams are a broad class of biologically-derived foams that now have a Wikipedia article, thanks to these students. Biofoams can include natural compounds like antlers, horseshoe crab shells and toucan beaks, but can also include synthetic compounds that serve as alternatives to petroleum-based products in areas like packaging or flip-flops. The article created by Professor Palermo’s students serves as an overview of many individual materials that previous incarnates of the class created or expanded Wikipedia articles for.

And speaking of new articles, one group of students created one on the toco toucan beak. While the beak of a single species of bird might seem like too narrow topic for its own page, the amount of research about it is enough to meet Wikipedia’s notability status. The inclusion of extensive information on the beak from the a biomaterials perspective, and its role as in biomimetic design — where it serves as a model for manmade systems — makes this article more than just one about a bird’s body part.

Fungal mycelium, the basic body tissue of most fungi, is the basis of a wide range of environmentally-friendly materials that can be used as alternatives in packaging, building materials, acoustic dampening, and in the fashion industry. By creating an article on mycelium-based materials, students in the class were able to tie together information that would otherwise be covered in a more disjointed fashion across articles about specific products or specific companies using them.

In addition to these three new articles, students in the class expanded a range of other articles. The amylopectin article, for example, was short and barely touched on its importance as a key component of starch foods like rice, potatoes and corn. The previous version also gave little useful information about the compound’s structure, history, or its important roles in diet, textiles, drug delivery systems, or tissue engineering. By adding all this and more, students in the class were able to transform the article into something much more useful to readers, while also integrating it into the wider bodies of information on Wikipedia. Connecting concepts on Wikipedia make them more discoverable, both to readers clicking links and search engines looking at information networks. The act of making these connections also inspires students to think across topics and disciplines.

Other students in the class expanded the bio-inspired photonics, nano-scaffold, and abductin articles. The last of these is especially intriguing because it’s the elastic protein that forms the hinge that connects the upper and lower halves of a bivalve mollusk’s shell together. The students were able to expand the article from four-sentences into something substantial and useful to readers.

Wikipedia’s coverage of a lot of areas is uneven. For subjects like biomaterials, which have the potential to play such an important role in the future of Earth as a livable planet capable of sustaining human life, filling those gaps is important. Maybe one of these Wikipedia articles — or one on a totally different topic one of your students creates — will help guide someone into a field where they go on to make an important discovery. We can all dream about making a difference, but by improving Wikipedia, you and your students actually are.

To incorporate an assignment like this into your next course, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support.

Mars often attracts interest from student editors — after all, it’s the best-known planet after Earth, Mars exploration is a hot topic, and its the only planet known to be entirely inhabited by robots. At the same time, a lot of the gaps that exist in information about Mars require specialist technical knowledge to understand the topic, along with access to scholarly resources that are frequently behind paywalls. A student in Journey to the Center of the Earth created a new article on the magnetic field of Mars, while one student in Planetary Atmospheres created one about Mars carbon dioxide ice clouds and others expanded the water on Mars and climate of Mars articles. In these kinds of specialized topic areas, student editors have a lot to offer.

From engagement rings, to conflict diamonds, to hidden loot in heist movies, diamonds fascinate. While people are usually only familiar with inclusions in the context of gemstones, the material trapped in diamonds during their formation can provide information about conditions in the Earth’s mantle at the time when the diamonds were formed. While inclusions are mentioned in the Wikipedia articles about both the mineral diamond and diamonds as gemstones, the nature of of the inclusions, their formation, and their importance in studying the interior of the planet isn’t a good fit in either article. A student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class was able to recognize this omission and fill it by creating the diamond inclusions article.

While earthquakes are difficult or impossible to predict, certain areas are subject to repeated cycles of earthquakes driven by the accumulation of stress, followed by periodic release. One student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class created an article about this phenomenon, the earthquake cycle while another made major expansions to the Earth’s outer core article. Others created articles about notable academics like geologist Holly Stein and geochemist François M. M. Morel.

Wiki Education’s Student Program offers opportunities for instructors in planetary sciences — be it this planet or others out there — to fill content gaps while empowering students to make a meaningful contribution. For more information, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Thumbnail image in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been a Wikipedian for 18 years. Were it a person, on Friday August 26, my account will be old enough to vote. Over the years, my role has changed from new user to administrator, from pure volunteer to that odd dual role of volunteer editor and Wiki Education staffer. In the last year I experienced an odd identity crisis when the edit count of my work account surpassed that my volunteer account. While my activity waxed and waned over the years, the drive to contribute, to make the internet better by making free knowledge widely available, has remained a constant.

Over those years, Wikipedia has changed dramatically, as has the knowledge environment in which it is embedded.

So many Wikipedians origin stories include an encyclopaedia — maybe bought by parents making a significant financial sacrifice, or an older edition purchased at a garage sale. For me, it was different. I grew up, not just in a world where knowledge was scarce, but also where it was fleeting. I learned about the world through the stories in daily newspapers. Not only did you need to catch it the day it was published — unless, for some reason, you clipped the story, there was no way to go back. Hard facts were only what you captured in your memory, and when people debated what had happened a week or a year or half a decade ago, the only verification was what you remembered.

My perceptions of what was available changed once I went to university, and later to grad school. But even though I knew so much more was available, it still wasn’t accessible. A journal database search was something you needed to request. And whether you read it in a book or a journal, your ability to access a fact depended on the quality of the notes you had taken, and on how well you organized the slips of paper that you worked from.

The internet changed things, but not always for the better. My first decade online (1994 to 2004) saw the birth of the World Wide Web and the rise of the search engine. Though it was growing explosively, the content that was online represented only a sliver of human knowledge. You could find all kinds of weird and wonderful facts online, but finding the same website twice might be a challenge. And whether to trust this arcanum was an open question.

The early 2000s brought further changes. The rise of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere meant that these websites developed more of an identity. The blogger’s creed — I link, therefore I am — meant each blogger was a window onto a world of other sites, often less popular, less widely read, but more likely to be written by an expert. But these were also the days of the Bush administration and their “Post-truth politics”. Bloggers were some of the few to challenge the alleged rationale for the invasion of Iraq, but other blogs and websites emerged as cheerleaders for the administration, or as proponents of dodgy ideas like intelligent design or what was then called global warming skepticism.

This was the state of the world when I began to contribute to Wikipedia. The old ethos of write what you know was crashing into not just a strengthening verifiability policy, but also a (still nascent) idea that you should include citations and a debate over what constituted a reliable source. Calls to include citations also faced another challenge — for many Wikipedians, sources meant sources that were available online. Even if you did consult a scholarly source, before things like Google Scholar and Google Books the only way to search these sources was something like Web of Science, which were slow and clumsy to navigate (assuming you were fortunate enough to have access to a university library).

In a world like this, with Wikipedia on the rise, knowledge was still fragile. The neutral point of view policy gave amateurs the ability to document what experts said without having to decide which experts were correct. The techno-utopian view that we might be above these debates between scholars makes sense until you realize that you need some way to distinguish between the serious scholars and the cranks. To make matters worse, members of the community might support the cranks or worse yet — you might be the one who believes the cranks.

The community eventually figured out a lot of this. Addenda like the “due and undue weight” section of the neutral point of view policy were eventually written. As the breakdown of cultural transmission of the norms of the project broke down under the weight of the “eternal September” of 2006 (where the size of the community exploded), more and more policies and guidelines were written down. The adage that policy was “descriptive, not prescriptive” became less and less true. And the encyclopaedia became less fragile.

Eighteen years after I first registered my account on the English Wikipedia, I’m amazed at what the project has become. When I started contributing to Wikipedia it was at the front lines of “post-truth politics”. Today, not only is it one of the most important sources to combat misinformation and disinformation, it’s also the place where the quality and reliability of sources is debated with more commitment and enthusiasm than anywhere else I’m aware of. It’s far from perfect, it may not even be good enough, but in aggregate, it’s probably the best hope for non-specialists looking for accurate information.

And that is a big achievement.

Back in 2019 I wrote about a study by Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley which suggested that Wikipedia content helped shape the scientists’ understanding of their own field of study. They showed that the language used in the technical literature in chemistry converged with the wording used in Wikipedia articles about a given topic. Through a fascinating study, they were able to demonstrate experimentally that this wasn’t coincidental — the way topics are discussed on Wikipedia influences the way they’re discussed in the literature. The fact that Wikipedia articles influence the way people understand their own fields highlights the importance of experts getting involved in the process of editing articles.

In a new study of Irish legal cases, Neil Thompson and colleagues were able to show that judges rely on Wikipedia articles to inform them about settled cases and precedents, and concluded that judges are relying on Wikipedia as a replacement for their own reading of Supreme Court rulings.

Much like in the previous study, the researchers created 154 new articles about Irish Supreme Court cases, and uploaded half of them to Wikipedia, while keeping the other half as a control set. Most of these articles were created by law students with the support and supervision of faculty (using a methodology based on Wiki Education’s Student Program). Wikipedia’s coverage of Irish Supreme Court cases was very incomplete, which meant that it was easy to create new articles about cases where none existed previously.

What happened next was probably not a huge surprise — creating a Wikipedia article about a case increased its rate of citation in rulings by almost 22%. While this showed that judges are relying on internet searches to locate relevant cases, it said little about how they are using the information on Wikipedia. But the second part of the study looked at the textual similarity between rulings and the Wikipedia articles. Here again, they found a statistically significant effect. In other words, judges (or, perhaps, their law clerks) were paraphrasing Wikipedia articles as they drafted their rulings.

The implications of this study are pretty major. While the best Wikipedia articles provide accurate, comprehensive, unbiased coverage of a topic, most fall short in one area or another. This is rarely intentional — while Wikipedia’s contributors are usually dedicated to producing high-quality articles, they’re mostly volunteers who face constraints of time, access to sources, and sometimes subject-matter expertise. But Wikipedia’s open nature also means that people with vested interests in the outcomes of a case have the ability to manipulate articles about important precedents.

To avoid these sorts of problems, Thompson and colleagues suggest ways to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles: “Policy-wise, this could be addressed by buttressing the reliability and review of Wikipedia content by including legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality, or by augmenting the content of authoritative but less-broad sources, and using those for the provision of legal information about particular jurisdictions.”

These are reasonable suggestions, but they’re also ones that the community has tried without much success throughout Wikipedia’s existence. It’s hard to convince experts to dedicate their limited time to reviewing Wikipedia articles. It can also be difficult for experts to work with the Wikipedia editing community, especially when outside experts don’t have a good sense of the community. (Despite the frequent assumption that Wikipedians are just random amateurs, many have advanced degrees in the subject areas where they contribute, while others have become experts while contributing over the last two decades.)

Short of convincing judges not to use Wikipedia, there are other ways to mitigate some of these problems. The more active editors there are in a subject area, the harder it is to insert bias. People pay more attention to changes to existing articles, especially if they are actively being edited. It’s much harder to insert bias into existing articles than it is to do it when you’re creating a brand new article. Programs that bring more contributors to Wikipedia — like Wiki Education’s Student Program — not only can fill content gaps in legal topic areas, they also bring more traffic and more editorial attention to these articles (and to articles that are downstream from them). After all, the articles that Thompson and colleagues used for this study were mostly created by student editors.

The other way to mitigate potential harm is to make people better consumers of information from Wikipedia. Few people who consult Wikipedia articles ever look at the history tab or the talk page, despite the fact that they can provide crucial information about the state of the article. Even fewer know about plug-ins like “Who Wrote That?“ that supply information about when individual “facts” were added (and by whom). Training judges (or the pool of legal professionals from which judges are appointed) would make them better consumers of Wikipedia. This isn’t a far-fetched idea — the model for this kind of thing exists in our Scholars & Scientists Program, where participants gain these kinds of skills (among others).

As Thompson’s research has shown, Wikipedia is influential on multiple disciplines. If you’re interested in influencing the public’s understanding of your topic area, as well as future ways of writing about your subject area, adding neutral, fact-based information to Wikipedia is the way to go. Instructors who are interested in teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support for assignments. Knowledge or disciplinary organizations, empower your staff or members to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of your topic by hosting a Wikipedia editing course.

Thumbnail image by Blogtrepreneur, (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons