Today, the US Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, ensuring continued patient access to the drug by mail. Thanks in part to the work of Wiki Scholars course editors, the Wikipedia article on mifepristone is ready to inform the coming thousands of readers looking for additional context on the drug and the SCOTUS decision.

It’s no surprise that when news breaks, people turn to Wikipedia not only to understand key topics but also to make more informed decisions. With billions of views each month, the world’s largest encyclopedia covers nearly every subject imaginable, including healthcare content used by patients, policymakers, and healthcare practitioners alike.

When Justice Matthew Kacsmaryk of the district court for the Northern District of Texas temporarily suspended the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in April 2023, the readership of the mifepristone article skyrocketed as people sought related information.

The judge’s decision relied heavily on two studies published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, which found that the drug could harm pregnant women who took it.

Although the papers have since been retracted by the journal due to unreported conflicts of interest on the part of their primary author and methodological concerns, and the US Supreme Court rejected the case (on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue), this case illustrates how individual studies, when taken out of the context of a whole body of knowledge, can create a completely misleading impression of the state of the field.

Cherry-picked sources are often used by activists to support their specific goals, but on Wikipedia, medical content is subject to special sourcing rules that strongly recommend relying on review articles published in the past five years. A properly-referenced Wikipedia article would never rely on a pair of studies that are, at best, outliers. These rules help ensure that Wikipedia articles reflect current understandings of medical topics.

But even with the best of intentions, Wikipedia articles can be out of date, and non-specialists may not know the current state of the literature well enough to catch error misstatements (either intentional or unintentional), which is why bringing subject matter experts to Wikipedia can be incredibly impactful.

In 2019, 2020, and most recently this spring, Wiki Education partnered with the Society of Family Planning to run a series of Wiki Scholar courses where expert members of the society improved Wikipedia articles related to women’s health, including the mifepristone article. In the recent course, an editor added a section on the use of the drug to medically manage early pregnancy loss, while two members of the 2020 cohort also made several small improvements. But it was a participant in a 2019 course who made larger – and more important – changes to the article. 

This editor, who went by the username UCDEBS, separated the existing safety information in the article into a section on side effects. Crucially, for the sake of context, they were able to add information about how rarely serious complications occurred (only 0.04–0.09% of people using the drug had complications serious enough to require hospitalization) and added more information about the duration of side effects. In addition, they added important information about contraindications. 

Ideally, people would get this type of information from their healthcare provider, but when access to abortion care is severely limited, women may need access to these medications under less than ideal conditions, making the availability of high-quality information online even more important.

Since the editor’s enhancements in 2019, the mifepristone article has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times, including the spike in readership following the April 2023 ruling in Texas. 

And today, as readers explore the Wikipedia article seeking answers to questions about mifepristone, the impact of the information will soar once again.

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

“Wikipedia articles represent one of the most accurate sources of STEM-related information that are widely accessed. The accuracy of Wikipedia articles is maintained by a near-continuous process of peer review and checks by members of the participating community. The Wikipedia Student Program helps college students review articles on Wikipedia related to their course of study, curate sources, and check articles for accuracy. Not only does this aid student learning, the process adds new members to the pool of Wikipedia reviewers for the future. The twin goals of maintaining sources of knowledge, and supporting youth in using these sources is very much in line with the mandates of GKF, and we are happy to be able to provide support for this project.” –Mukund Padmanabhan, President of Guru Krupa Foundation.

We know that Wikipedia continues to be a top source for health information on the web; it gets more traffic on medical articles than the NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, NHO, or WHO. The Wikipedia readership of science articles is several times larger than the readership of all scientific publications combined. Wikipedia has more links from search engines than any other website, and is often the first search result listed when people look for scientific information.

Because tools like ChaptGPT are far from 100% accurate and can generate false sources, it’s imperative that Wikipedia articles on topics in STEM are devoid of misinformation. Understanding Wikipedia’s strict sourcing rules and policies forces students to discern what is real and fake as they edit an article. We consistently find improvement in students’ skills in digital media literacy, project management, research, and more after finishing the assignment. 

A key result from this project will be the addition of 145,000 words of trustworthy information to hundreds of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia enables free, open access to the latest research and discoveries for greater education of the general public and practitioners in the STEM fields. 

The Guru Krupa Foundation’s grant will boost Wiki Education’s Communicating Science initiative, a staple of the organization’s strategy since the 2016 Year of Science. We are extremely proud of the pedagogical work that more than 52,000 students have undertaken in this area to date, expanding the coverage of science in 46,000 Wikipedia articles collectively viewed over a billion times and counting. This tremendous impact would not have been possible without the generosity of Wiki Education’s committed partners. We express our sincerest gratitude to the Guru Krupa Foundation for valuing a deep learning experience for all. 

Wiki Education is helping close the gap across disciplines. For example, in 2012, geneticist Jennifer Doudna helped make one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in biology — the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system, which changed editing genomes from science fiction to science. While Doudna’s Wikipedia biography looked substantial, a lot of her research was missing or contextualized in relation to her male colleagues. In 2018, one of our Wiki Scientists transformed the page so that it emphasized Doudna’s scientific achievements.

Then, on October 7, 2020, Jennifer Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on CRISPR. Thanks to the Wiki Scientist’s work, her biography on Wikipedia explains the revolutionary potential of CRISPR and Doudna’s role in this research. Had she not added this content, millions of readers who came to Doudna’s Wikipedia biography to learn why she was awarded the Nobel Prize might have left with more questions than answers. This work reminds the public of women’s scientific contributions, inspiring new generations to pursue careers in science.

As a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, Atlassian believes in collaborating with like-minded organizations to tackle the inequities in STEM. So for their first cohort of Wiki Scientists, they invited their employees, members of 500 Women Scientists, and other experts to work together in our virtual Wikipedia training courses. 

The results speak for themselves. In the 4 months since the course wrapped up, the work participants added to Wikipedia (more than 17K words!) has already reached 170K readers. As Atlassian’s Event Content Operations Manager, Lauryn Yacubich thought the experience would be a great way to expand her skill set while contributing to the common good. She chose to write a biography for Eve Lipchik, an Austrian-American psychologist.

“I always had an interest in psychology and relationship therapy and when I googled her name, I thought she did some significant research that certainly changes the way therapists approach their patients now,” Lauryn reflected. “So I was surprised the biography did not exist. You don’t usually think about Wikipedia lacking in that department but I was glad I was able to contribute something. I wanted to make sure I got her background and her approach to research correct.”

Lauryn said the experience definitely invigorated new aspects of her work. Not only did it give her a chance to expand her copywriting skills, it was also a nice reminder of what drew her to Atlassian’s mission in the first place. 

“In regards to STEM, I never really considered it a part of my job, but I quickly realized that I am part of a much larger movement and the sooner I see my impact, the better I am able to contribute to the industry more.”

She’s also newly inspired to get back into some personal writing and blogging. “I feel refreshed and I also now know where I could potentially put my interest in psychology energy into – updating Wikipedia articles.”

Editing Wikipedia is a powerful, high-impact way to amplify public knowledge, but the barriers to entry into the Wikipedia ecosystem deter many. With hands-on support from Wiki Education’s Wikipedia experts, plus learning together in a cohort, these Atlassian Wiki Scientists were able to reach 170K readers so far with their work. This exposure for women in STEM who didn’t have a Wikipedia biography before could benefit their careers and the field in general.

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. It also does the important work of boosting a scientist’s credibility, changing stereotypes about who gets to be a scientist, and fostering trust in scientific research. 

Together, we can increase public awareness of women in STEM while bringing more diverse voices to the writing of our living history. 

Interested in joining this initiative or starting one of your own? Send an email to partner@wikiedu.org. We’d love to help more companies achieve their missions of elevating women in STEM and other fields through this important work.

Phila Rembold is a PhD student in theoretical physics who signed up for a Wiki Scientists course to complement the outreach component of her PhD program. The course allowed her to explore her curiosities with Wikipedia as a long-time user of the platform and as a physics researcher. 

“APS communications had emailed my supervisor who forwarded the invitation to the group. I had not done much editing before and thought this would be a good way to initialise my efforts. In general I think you can learn twice as fast with someone to teach you,” Rembold says. 

Rembold reflected on Wikipedia’s connections to her research field as well as her identity as a woman in STEM.

“As a woman in theoretical physics I often find myself as part of the minority,” Rembold says. “By making articles more accessible I am hoping to support those who are relying on openly available sources to familiarise themselves with physics, hence encouraging them to proceed in that direction. To become a good researcher you shouldn’t need privilege, just a healthy amount of curiosity and stubbornness.”

Equity on Wikipedia is especially important to Rembold, who sees the platform as a pathway towards reducing gender biases in fields like physics.

“Language is a powerful tool for fighting discimination and the way we use it is shaped by what we read. Field relevant Wikipedia articles will be read by almost all my current and future colleagues. Hence, editing those articles means implementing a standard of communications and removing bias from our community (at least to a certain degree),” Rembold says. 

Following her Wiki Scientists course, Rembold continues to contribute to Wikipedia pages within her research specialty of quantum physics. 

“During the course I had started restructuring the article on nitrogen-vacancy centers, among others, and cutting redundancies. Afterwards I worked with two of my coursemates to improve the article further. They helped me to improve my writing and suggested which explanations needed fine-tuning, as well as improvements for the figures,” Rembold says. 

Rembold also shared words of encouragement for budding scientists and professionals who may be interested in learning more about how to edit Wikipedia. 

“I have talked to a few of my friends who are still undergraduates, who expressed interest in applying what they have learned in their university courses/readings to expand Wikipedia. All in all I think there are many advantages from an outreach and teaching perspective,” Rembold says.

Rembold now approaches Wikipedia as an active participant in its changing landscape. With a mantra of equity through open data spanning a variety of disciplines, Wiki Education is proud to facilitate better representation on Wikipedia and Wikidata. 

Alongside advocating for better representation on Wikipedia, Rembold stands behind the charity of Wikipedia, as it allows scholars and scientists to give back to the public through their contributions. 

“I think this course should be mandatory for PhD students. It has been a lot of fun and very educational,” Rembold says. “Furthermore, it gives an opportunity to give back to the people, as most of us are funded from public sources. I think it should generally be a larger part of research to convey the basics if not the outcomes of one’s work to the public.”

To take a course like the one Phila took, visit http://learn.wikiedu.org

Featured Image Credit: BonPhire, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Hero Image Credit: Pivari.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I attended the Academy of Criminal Justice Society’s annual meeting in Kansas City, promoting Wikipedia assignments to criminology instructors. In the past, we’ve supported courses like Annette Nierobisz’ Women, Crime, and Criminal Justice course at Carleton College with fantastic outcomes. For example, students created a new article, reproductive health care for incarcerated women in the United States, sharing information with the public about the lack of reproductive health care available to incarcerated women. We’re looking forward to bringing more criminal justice courses into the Classroom Program, as students can identify topics relevant to citizens’ daily lives and provide reliable, accessible, verifiable information.

Later in the month, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald attended the American Society of Environmental History conference in Chicago, speaking to potential program participants about the power of disseminating information about environmental science to the general public. Students in Julian Fulton’s course at California State University, Sacramento, for example, wrote the article about mercury contamination in California waterways, bringing their classroom studies to Wikipedia. Now readers can learn more about this topic that was previously missing.

In the last week of March, Research Fellow Zach McDowell and I attended the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Commons Conference in Savannah to present preliminary results from our fall 2016 research project to evaluate student learning outcomes during a Wikipedia assignment. Conference attendees came to learn about teaching with technology, learning theories and pedagogy, assessment, and new projects to achieve their learning goals with students.

Finally, earlier this month, Samantha and I were at the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting here in San Francisco. Last year, we started a partnership with ACS to target chemistry articles in our effort to bring accurate and accessible science to the general public. We have supported 34 chemistry courses with more than 700 students, and they’ve already added 674,000 words to Wikipedia. One undergraduate student we met, who wrote a Wikipedia article in her course, said she “loved it and thought it was fun and exciting.” We’re inspired by the work students have done and their motivation to make public knowledge available, and we’re poised to support even more students after this week’s conference.

If you’d like to join our initiative to teach with Wikipedia or partner with Wiki Education, please email us at contact@wikiedu.org.

• The spring term kicked off at the beginning of the month, with the first rush of recruitment bringing on 213 courses into our program by the end of the month. (In context, we supported 215 total in spring 2016; this spring, we’re anticipating supporting more than 100 additional courses.)
• Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald, and Wikipedia Content Expert for the Sciences Ian Ramjohn hosted the first Wiki Ed Office Hours of the year, an interactive session in which instructors can ask questions and get feedback. Based on the success of these events last year, we’re planning to host them on a regular basis moving forward.
• The Wikipedia article about former United States President, Millard Fillmore was promoted to Featured Article thanks to the work of George Mason University Visiting Scholar Gary Greenbaum.
• Surveys for the Student Learning Outcomes research closed. There were 1,200 participants in the preliminary assessment and survey, 887 in the post assessment and survey, and 559 participants in the post-course qualitative survey. These are truly exciting numbers from which we’re excited to learn.
• We welcomed a Research Assistant, Mahala Stewart, to the Wiki Ed team. Mahala will be working closely with Zach to process and analyze Student Learning Outcomes data.

Programs

Educational Partnerships

January marks the beginning of the new term, and we used the brief time before students get started on their assignments to attend conferences to recruit new program participants. Samantha joined our partners, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), at their annual conference in Austin. We started the partnership with LSA because of Wikipedia’s dearth of coverage in language and linguistics. At the end of January, we have brought on a total of 38 courses within the discipline, and the students have added nearly 300,000 words to relevant Wikipedia articles. After the momentum we saw at this year’s conference, we’re confident linguistic students in the Classroom Program will contribute to that growth.

Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson and Helaine attended the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Denver, where they presented during a digital literacy workshop. After engaging with instructors at this conference, it’s clear there’s a heightened focus on digital history projects within the field. History instructors are eager to teach students skills they can take beyond the academy, and digital literacy is key. Wikipedia assignments align well with history courses because of the opportunity it presents to teach students how to document history, and because of the great impact on Wikipedia that history students can make along the way.

The outreach team has spent the month helping new instructors to design their first Wikipedia assignments and to learn how to use Wiki Ed’s tools and support infrastructure. As of January 30, we have brought 106 new courses into the Classroom Program for the spring 2017 term — 36 more than this time last year. We’re proud of the growth we’ve been able to make by increasing Wiki Ed’s visibility, recruiting new instructors at outreach events, and improving processes that allow us to support more instructors.

Classroom Program

Status of the Classroom Program for Spring 2017 in numbers, as of January 31:

• 213 Wiki Ed-supported courses were in progress (101, or 47%, were led by returning instructors)
• 2,919 student editors were enrolled
• 69% were up-to-date with the student training modules
• Students edited 584 articles, created 8 new entries, and added 76,400 words.

In Spring 2016, Wiki Ed supported 215 courses in total. the Spring 2017 term has only just begun, and we’re about to surpass that number. The rapid growth of the Classroom Program not only speaks to the inherent value of Wikipedia-based assignments, but to our ability to reach new instructors and retain existing participants in our program. Numbers alone cannot convey the entire story, however. As we grow, we are building a community of instructors and students who care about public knowledge and media literacy and recognize that both of these are foundations of civic engagement in the 21st century.

Based on the success of our Wiki Ed Office Hours series last term, we’ll be holding these interactive sessions on a monthly basis. Our first program was on January 31 and the second will be on February 2. At our first session, Helaine was joined by Samantha and Ian as they fielded questions from new and returning instructors. As the term gets underway, instructors were curious about subjects ranging from grading to different draft spaces on Wikipedia. We hope not only to reach a larger number of our instructors during these sessions, but also that our instructors have a chance to interact with one another and learn from each other’s differing expertise. As the program continues to grow, we see Office Hours as a vital tool in our ability to interact with our instructors on a more personal level and to provide them with the support they need.

Student work highlights:

The concept of toxic masculinity has attracted a lot of interest in recent years, but the Wikipedia article was just a three-sentence stub when a student in Kyra Gaunt’s Social Inequality class started work on the article. In the course of expanding it, the student added sections addressing the subject in the contexts of sports, violence, and sexuality. Other students in the class expanded articles on a variety of topics including housing inequality, social inequality and women’s sports.

Several other classes are also off to an early start. Students in Joan Strassmann’s Undergraduate Research Perspectives have created an article on diastolic function and expanded articles like that of the moor frog, the Black-and-white ruffed lemur, and the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, while a student in Andrew Lih’s Wikipedia and Public Knowledge course expanded the list of 2017 Women’s March locations.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady spent January working with existing Visiting Scholars program participants and onboarding several new sponsors at different stages of the onboarding process. He worked with our partners at the Association for Women in Mathematics to put out a call for applications for a Visiting Scholar that will improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women mathematicians and their contributions to the field.

Existing Visiting Scholars continued to do great work. George Mason University’s Gary Greenbaum brought the article about former United States President, Millard Fillmore to Featured Article status. The Smithsonian Institution’s Visiting Scholar, User:Czar, made substantial contributions to articles on African art and artists, such as artist and Curator of African Art at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, sound and installation artist, Emeka Ogboh, and London-based art fair, 1:54.

Program Support

Communications

Director of Programs LiAnna Davis worked with media firm PR & Company to pitch Wiki Ed’s program as a way to teach students media literacy skills to potentially interested journalists.

Ryan and Helaine began the planning phase of Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program Newsletter pilot, in anticipation of its February launch.

Blog posts:

• Wiki Ed heads to linguistics and history conferences this week (January 3)
• Wiki Ed encourages geophysicists to teach with Wikipedia (January 4)
• The Roundup: Serious Business (January 16)
• Rediscovering the “higher” in higher education with a Wikipedia writing assignment (January 20)
• Monthly Report for December 2016
• Students share linguistics with the world (January 23)
• Teaching Digital History with Wikipedia (January 26)
• Thanks for the code contributions, GCI students! (January 27)
• Roundup: Food Browning (January 27)
• Welcome, Mahala Stewart! (January 31)

External media:

• Year of Science 2016 – a new model for Wikipedia outreach, Lane Rasberry, Bluerasberry.com (January 7)
• Episode 28: Zach McDowell, research fellow at Wiki Education Foundation, Priyanka Kaura, Ideas on Fire (January 11)
• Can academic faculty members teach with Wikipedia?, Don Watkins, opensource.com (January 16)
• The Wikipedia Manifesto, John Kleefeld, Educatus (January 17)
• Three Reasons Why Earth Scientists Should Edit Wikipedia, Evan B Goldstein, EOS (January 27)

Digital Infrastructure

In January, the focus on collaboration and mentorship continued. Outreachy intern Sejal Khatri continued adding features to the user profile pages, which now highlight both the total impact made by an instructor’s students and the total individual impact of a student across all Wiki Ed courses they’ve participated in. Google Code-in wrapped up in mid-January, with some impressive code contributions from high school students around the world.

Product Manager Sage Ross worked on two experimental Dashboard features that we expect to begin beta testing soon: authorship highlighting in the Article Viewer, and a chat feature for course participants. The authorship highlighting feature builds on whoColor, a system for showing which parts of a Wikipedia article were contributed by which users. Our plan is to highlight everything that the students contributed, so that an instructor can easily visualize what their students added to an article. The chat feature uses Rocket.Chat, an open source competitor to Slack, to integrate per-course chat channels into the Dashboard, where students can discuss their Wikipedia assignments, ask and answer each others’ questions, and collaborate.

Research and Academic Engagement

On January 17, the surveys for the Student Learning Outcomes research closed. There were 1,200 participants in the preliminary assessment and survey, 887 in the post assessment and survey, and 559 participants in the post-course qualitative survey. We awarded 32 $50 Amazon.com gift certificates to winning entrants via email.

Additionally, we brought on board a new Research Assistant, Mahala Stewart. Mahala is helping with the Student Learning Outcomes quantitative and qualitative data analysis. She and Research Fellow Zach McDowell spent the majority of January cleaning up the data output from the internal survey system, conducting preliminary analysis, and planning the process for more complicated analysis.

Finally, Zach started three different writing projects and one conference proposal with instructors from the Classroom Program, based on this research.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

For the month of January, expenses were $155,853 versus the approved budget of $210,890. The majority of the $55k variance continues to be due to staffing vacancies ($16k); as well as the timing of Board and All Staff meeting ($43k) expenses.

Our year-to-date expenses of $1,056,061 was also less than our budgeted expenditures of $1,406,975 by $351k. Like the monthly variance, the year-to-date variance was also impacted by staffing vacancies ($116k) and the timing of Board and All Staff meeting ($50k) expenses.

In addition, the timing and deferral of professional services ($70k); marketing and cultivation ($22k); volunteer workshops ($11k); and printing ($17k); as well as savings in travel ($66k) contributed to the variance.

Fundraising

• Wiki Ed was awarded a second $25,000 gift from the Broadcom Foundation. The money will be used to improve students’ employability skills, engage students – a majority of which are women – in science communication, and expand Wikipedia’s coverage in underdeveloped topic areas (with a specific focus on STEM topics).

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Securing funding
• Developing the next annual plan

In January, Frank met with members of the board’s ad-hoc Fundraising Options Taskforce via video conference. As a result, the taskforce came up with recommendations for the full board to discuss during its biannual in-person meeting at the end of the month.

On January 28 and 29, the board gathered in Tiburon for its first in-person meeting of 2017. Frank provided participants with an update on the state of the organization and a first outline of the plans for next fiscal year. The board completed its work on the Wiki Education Foundation’s mission statement, amended the organization’s bylaws, and started a conversation about the upcoming strategic planning process.

Visitors and guests

• Paula Golden, Executive Director, Broadcom Foundation
• Nick Alexopoulos, Vice President for Academic Programs and University Relations, Broadcom Foundation
• Kirk Adams, President and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind
• Melissa Ganus, Wikipedian

You can also use the Students tab to see recent changes from particular students, or the Activity tab for recent edits by all students in the class.

The diff viewer is a first step toward making it easy to review and evaluate students’ Wikipedia editing. We’re eager to make further improvements; please give the diff viewer a try, and share your thoughts about how it works for your Wikipedia project.

Picking the right Wikipedia article for student editors is an exciting, but challenging, task. Topics for term papers can be re-used every year, because only the instructor reads them. The social and instructional benefit of a Wikipedia project come from the thousands of people can read— and benefit from—what students have written.

This means finding articles for each class. These articles should be high impact in a field, but not well-developed on Wikipedia. Of course, article selection will differ based on the goals of your assignment. A writing course may allow students to work on any topic that interests them. A fungal diversity course may have a narrower set of options.

So, where is an instructor to begin? We’re here to help. We’ve created a new online orientation that helps instructors find articles to work on. It offers helpful ideas for navigating Wikipedia’s quality rankings, categories, and WikiProjects.

Typically, good articles for students to improve are:

1. Rated low-quality but high-importance by a WikiProject. That’s a group of Wikipedians who share an interest in a specific topic on Wikipedia. Often, these volunteers make lists of articles that need attention.

2. Covered in some depth by two or more independent, fact-checked or peer-reviewed sources.

3. Not controversial. Students should avoid heated discussions that might stir a lot of passions. Choose articles where a first-timer can make a meaningful contribution from the start.

I hope this new orientation module helps both new and experienced instructors find articles for students to improve. Wiki Ed’s Wikipedia Content Experts (Adam Hyland and I) are always on hand to answer questions. We can let you know about articles in your academic area that need improvement.

If you’re already teaching with Wikipedia, I hope this helps streamline your article selection process. If you haven’t taught with us yet, I hope you’ll see the impact your course can have on Wikipedia.

You can always reach out to learn more about teaching with Wikipedia. Send us an e-mail: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Searching, by Strevo. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

Call it the “tyranny of the cute.” When it comes to conservation of habitats and species, the cute have an advantage. Darwin may not have factored “fundraising potential” into his survival of the fittest, but charismatic critters sell more calendars and raise more money.

This is a big deal for reptiles. Reptiles are almost a third of invertebrates on the planet, but don’t make it to their fair share of conservation lists. The World Wildlife Fund only identifies two reptiles (and they’re turtles, which are adorable). We also know less about them.

In a recent paper from Oxford and Tel Aviv Universities published in the journal Biological Conservation, we have a good sense of how this plays out on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia reflects the passions and interests of those who write it. In 2014, those writers had tackled 10,002 reptiles species. Across all languages, those pages were viewed 55 million times.

Curiously, the researchers found that two thirds of reptile species were missing articles on the English Wikipedia. For academic experts specializing in zoology, ecology, environmental sciences, and a slew of other fields, this gap in public knowledge presents an enormous science communications opportunity.

After all, Wikipedia is “the Internet’s favorite website,” with a greater share of mobile traffic than CNN, Fox News, and USA Today combined. It’s an unprecedentedly powerful public resource.

Of course, not every expert has the time to create or review 6,000 reptile articles (or any other species, for that matter). But consider the learning experience this presents to students in higher education.

By stepping in and filling in information about those neglected species, these students become familiar with an underrepresented creature, its habitat, and the challenges it faces. But they also contribute greater knowledge about these neglected species to the rest of the English-speaking world.

That means people have better access to information they can use to guide a range of decisions. It can impact the conservation efforts they support. It can change the way people view land use in their communities.

For students, it gives them an opportunity to become an expert on a topic. The student who writes an article about a reptile species is probably going to be the top Google search result for that species. Imagine the impact that has on motivating student writing and research!

The Wiki Education Foundation has seen enormous success with classes that tackle flora and fauna articles on Wikipedia. Dr. Joan Strassmann’s course at Washington University in St. Louis is just one example. Students in her fall 2015 course created or expanded a whopping 362 articles about bee species.

The success of classes like these inspired us to create guidebooks, such as “Editing Wikipedia articles on species” and “Editing Wikipedia articles about ecology.” For higher ed instructors who participate in our program, we can send print copies for each participating student, free of charge. Participants also gain access to tools that make editing Wikipedia simple for students, and help instructors track student contributions to Wikipedia articles.

Our Wikipedia Year of Science initiative is underway. It’s based on the idea that students, with access to academic resources and guided by experts in the field, are the best bet for improving and expanding science topics on Wikipedia. Putting that knowledge at the fingertips of millions is an enormous driver for improving the public’s understanding of endangered and threatened species that are just as important, but perhaps not quite as cute, as pygmy goats.

If you’d like to participate, check out our Year of Science page, or send us an email: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Kitz Zwergziege by 4028mdk09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0