Submissions:2016/Wiki Ed's Year of Science: What's worked so far, and where we go from here

Title

Wiki Ed's Year of Science: What's worked so far, and where we go from here

Theme

Education

Academic Peer Review option

No

Type of submission

Presentation

Author

LiAnna Davis and Jami Mathewson

E-mail address

liannawikiedu.org, jamiwikiedu.org

Username

User:LiAnna (Wiki Ed), User:Jami (Wiki Ed)

Affiliation

Wiki Education Foundation

Abstract

The Wikipedia Year of Science is an initiative led by the Wiki Education Foundation to improve Wikipedia's science content in 2016. Science, you say? Isn't STEM content on Wikipedia already pretty good?

You might be surprised.

In this presentation, Wiki Ed's LiAnna Davis and Jami Mathewson will explain why science content on Wikipedia needs work too, and what Wiki Ed has done during the Year of Science so far. The Year of Science – a large-scale initiative to improve Wikipedia’s content in STEM and social science topics spearheaded by Wiki Ed – runs through 2016, with an evaluation phase to follow in 2017.

We'll describe our work so far, including:

• forming partnerships with academic associations, including the American Chemical Society, Society of Marine Mammalogy, and American Society of Plant Biologists
• gaining insight from subject matter experts about the quality of science content on Wikipedia
• collaborating with the Simons Foundation on edit-a-thons at seven science association conferences
• creating discipline-specific editing guides in science topics such as chemistry, ecology, environmental sciences, species, and genes and proteins
• understanding why writing articles for Wikipedia is such a powerful experience for students, especially women considering pursuing science careers
• (most notably) supporting more than 2,000 student editors in the sciences in the spring 2016 term as they wrote for Wikipedia for the first time, and supporting more than 3,000 student editors in the sciences during this fall term

We'll describe the impact we've had to Wikipedia, how Wikipedia fits in to broader trends about science in higher education, and the lessons we've learned along the way. We'll also talk about where we're going from here: What are we doing this fall to close out the Year of Science, how can Wikipedia community members interested in science content participate, and what are the next steps?

Length of presentation

20 min

Special schedule requests

None

Preferred room size

25–50

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

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