Edit 2021/Engaging subject-matter experts during a national emergency: Wiki Education and COVID-19: Submissions:2019/How can Africa and North America partner to promote the goals of the Foundation

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.