Collaborate/Expert

The Ada Lovelace Day 2012 event hosted by the Royal Society brought experts, Wikipedians and the public together to improve articles about women scientists.

Wikimedia invites not just published expertise, but experts themselves.

In return, we give an opportunity to engage and inform the public about the expert's subject.

Lecturers, researchers, librarians, technical writers, and science communicators are among those who can and do use their skills to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects. This can be done as an event which involves the public both in learning about the topic and improving Wikipedia.

People with an expertise in a subject, and the ability to communicate it to a general audience, are well-placed to improve Wikimedia sites in a number of ways. Not all of them require as much time as writing or overhauling an article.

• feeding into discussions about article improvement
• recommending reliable sources
• influencing the design of navigational boxes that guide readers around a topic
• classifying images and media files or classifying articles
• reviewing articles against quality criteria such as comprehensiveness or fair representation of the literature
• identifying or evaluating educational materials, or opportunities to make educational use of reference materials

These activities affect pages and images which are often top search-engine hits for their topic, and which reach large numbers of people every month.

It is worthwhile getting in-person help on these topics as they are often easier in practice than the lengthy documentation would suggest.

Next steps

• If you are in a Jisc-funded project, contact the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador, Martin Poulter, (martin.poulterwikimedia.org.uk).
• For other inquiries in the UK, contact Wikimedia UK (infowikimedia.org.uk).

Footnotes

This page has been created as part of the 2013-14 partnership between Jisc and Wikimedia UK