Edit 2019/Mind the Gap: How Students are Tackling Important Content Gaps on Wikipedia: 2024/Main Page

Due to limited space, WikiConference North America 2019 unfortunately could not accommodate this submission in its program this year.
Please check out our Unconference for opportunities to present and share there.

Despite its nearly six million articles, Wikipedia is still rife with content gaps. A great deal remains to be done in fields pertaining to women and other traditionally underrepresented populations as well as more academic subjects where sources largely exist behind paywalls. With the support of Wiki Education, professors throughout the U.S. and Canada are working hard to fill in these content gaps and bring Wikipedia closer to the sum of all human knowledge that it strives to be.

In this panel, three professors from Wiki Education's Wikipedia Student Program will discuss how they and their students are addressing Wikipedia's content gaps. They'll explore how they are implementing the Wikipedia assignment in their courses, and the critical role their students are playing in filling in these content gaps. Additionally, they'll discuss how content gaps are inextricably linked to issues of equity and diversity, the challenges associated with addressing content gaps in the classroom, and broadly speaking, why this work is so motivating and important.

Beth Williams, Senior Director, Robert Crown Law Library and Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford's Law School, will focus on her use of the Wikipedia assignment in her Advanced Legal Research course, and how law students are particularly well-positioned for filling in content gaps in legal fields on Wikipedia. Joan McRae, Professor in the Dept. of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Middle Tennessee State University, will address how her literature and foreign language students are using their cross-cultural knowledge to make Wikipedia more inclusive. Theodora Danylevich, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, will explore the critical role that students can play in overcoming Wikipedia's Gender Gap. Helaine Blumenthal from Wiki Education will moderate the panel.