For centuries, propagation of scientific information was controlled by those who broadcasted it, including scientific journals, news outlets, and radio or television shows - propagation was a question of who could speak. The onset of the internet marked a monumental change in who could broadcast and access scientific information. While everyone can now broadcast information in blogs or social media (i.e. everyone can speak), propagation is now driven by those who help find and curate information - propagation is now a question of who gets heard. The democratization of scientific information on popular websites shows promise for quicker information transfer among scientists and between scientists and the public, debiasing select social structures (e.g. gender inequalities), and improving access for underserved populations. However, scientists still heavily rely on traditional methods (e.g., peer-reviewed publications) to share scientific information, which are largely inaccessible to those outside academia. To bridge the gap between aquatic scientists and the public, we established WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography as a group of editors who aim to improve the reliability and accuracy of scientific information relating to inland waters and marine environments on Wikipedia by encouraging aquatic scientists to share their subject expertise on this popular website.
Results/Conclusions
The readership of limnology- and oceanography-related English Wikipedia articles is large, with over 96,000 collective article views per day for articles within the scope of the project. However, most articles were determined to be difficult to read, poorly organized, and/or missing information, as >70% of the project’s articles assessed have only a rough collection of information, lack citations, and/or are deficient in key elements such as diagrams or information boxes. We recruited and trained dozens of scientists at varying career stages to contribute their expertise to improve the information on these pages through workshops, online training materials, edit-a-thons (focused editing time), and advertisement through Twitter. Through a single edit-a-thon, we added over 25,000 words across 28 Wikipedia articles, created three new articles, and improved the readability of articles based on analysis from the artificial intelligence Objective Revision Evaluation Service. We also report on ‘lessons learned’ for encouraging ecologists to contribute their expertise to the world’s largest open access project, representing freely accessible collective human knowledge.