Create 2021/Engaging subject-matter experts during a national emergency: Wiki Education and COVID-19: Submissions:2021/Editing seems too hard

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2021.

In 2020 and early 2021, Wiki Education undertook a campaign to improve the quality of information related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over several months, Wiki Education ran a series of courses affiliated with our Wikipedia Scholars & Scientists program. To our knowledge, this initiative was the first effort ever to engage subject-matter experts during a national emergency to systematically improve Wikipedia’s coverage of a topic crucial to the general public. In this presentation, we'll review what we learned about running multiple courses in the same topic area, how we engaged subject-matter experts to improve both local and global information about the pandemic, and how their specialized backgrounds helped improve Wikipedia's coverage of impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic.