Edit 2019/Birds of a feather: classroom programs and campaigns: Submissions:2019/“Wikipedians are born, not made” – applying the learnings from a 10-year-old research paper after all

This submission has been designated as a lightning talk at WikiConference North America 2019.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the United States has adopted a multi-component strategy to improve health content on Wikipedia, including both local and global events and campaigns, and partnering with university graduate and training programs in adopting the platform developed by the Wiki Education Foundation (See https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2018/07/23/osh-wikipedia/). Building off the success of previous events, we organized the global campaign Wiki4WorldHearingDay2019 (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki4WorldHearingDay2019) in association with the World Health Organization and several other organizations. Tracking via the Programs & Events Dashboard took place between 21 January and 31 March 2019, revealing that 74,000 words were contributed to 90 existing and seven new Wikipedia articles in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish, and 21 media files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/International_Society_of_Audiology/Edit-a-Thon_for_World_Hearing_Day_2019). Althought the Dashboard indicates the participation of 66 editors, many of the contributions came from work of groups of researchers, instructors and students. Together, these pages received 2.8 million views. The campaign benefited from several groups who had participated in the classroom program and, in turn, motivated still other groups to use the classroom programs. Both experiences give us an insight not only on the specific interests of the recruited editors within an area of knowledge, but also on the interest of the public in general.

Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.