Editing Wikipedia is good for your research [citation needed]
As a researcher, you probably read Wikipedia articles regularly, and you might even rely on it. But have you ever thought about editing it, or writing articles from scratch? The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia and related projects, wants you!
What’s in it for you? You can fix the public record in an area that matters to you, address bias by covering under-represented areas or just improve your own knowledge. Or, if it’s useful to refer to certain Wikipedia articles regularly, why not improve them for your own and others’ benefit? A large number of university and school courses around the world have even incorporated it into their curricula.
Until recently, though, editing Wikipedia has been pretty tough. It required writing wikitext, an arcane markup language which starts simple (“italics”, ==headings==) and quickly becomes an unreadable mess for tables, infoboxes, and templates. However, thanks to the significant resources dedicated by the Wikimedia Foundation to this problem, the Visual Editor has finally arrived. So writing an article is now more like using a word processor.
So, to take advantage of this, ITS Research is teaming up with the University Library to run an experimental workshop. We hope to teach humanities researchers how to edit articles, while staying on the right side of Wikipedia’s rather complex set of policies. You’ll learn how to make minor corrections, start articles from scratch, use categories, infoboxes and images, in areas of interest to you. And in return, we hope to learn whether editing Wikipedia is a valuable research tool for others.
