Since January 2018, Wiki Education (a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that builds bridges between academia and Wikipedia in the United States and Canada) has run professional development courses to train subject-matter experts to contribute to public knowledge on Wikipedia. In this session, I will share how this program works, the tools and curriculum we use, some of the results, and important lessons we have learned along the way. My hope is that attendees will use this knowledge to incorporate into their own outreach toolbox.
The Wikipedia community has long understood the potential for subject-matter experts to be valuable contributors to the encyclopedia. Academics, professionals, and other experts have a broad understanding of literature in their field, and thus are well positioned to evaluate the reliability of sources, organize complex concepts, or identify aspects of a subject that are missing, underrepresented, or overemphasized. It's for some of these reasons that thousands of articles are tagged as needing expert attention.
Academics and other experts are passionate about sharing knowledge, a core trait among Wikipedians. However, Wikipedia is a unique writing environment that can be jarring and difficult to adapt to. Hard work can be undone, thoughtful composition can be changed, verifiability is typically prioritized over "truth," original research is not allowed, citations are required for just about everything, and expertise itself does not guarantee authority or deference. These characteristics and their underlying justifications are easy for the editing community to take for granted, but require effort to adapt to, especially coming from a culture that in many ways is just the opposite.
Personally, the question of how to engage subject-matter experts is one that has interested me as a volunteer for years, and I am excited to share this model that we have found to be successful. Some of the courses we have run have been broad in scope, like "humanities" and "sciences," while others have been narrower, like courses on American politics or women in science. Our most popular series of courses has been on women's suffrage. Wiki Education teamed up with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to train historians, archivists, academics, and independent researchers to improve articles celebrating the centennial of women's right to vote (the Nineteenth Amendment) in the United States. After running three such courses, we invited alumni to return for an Advanced Wikipedia course in which we worked together to take a deep dive into a single article, aiming to bring the article on the Nineteenth Amendment itself up to Good Article quality. At the time I write this, the article has nearly tripled in size and awaits a Good Article review.
In this session, attendees will learn how our model works, with the goal of increasing subject-matter expert engagement in other contexts and geographic areas beyond what Wiki Education can support. I will demonstrate the tools we use, go over case studies, explain the structure of the training, and share what has worked well (and what has not worked so well). I hope for this to be a session with a lot of interaction with the audience, answering questions about how to use this model, its possibilities, and its limitations, as opening conversations about how it could be improved.
*[https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/Wiki_Scholars/Colorado_Alliance_of_Research_Libraries_Wiki_Scholars_(Summer_2019) Example course, run in partnership with the Colorado Association of Research Libraries]