Look It Up: Humanities Students are Filling Wikipedia’s Content Gaps

Every month users around the world click on some 10 billion pages of the English-language offerings on Wikipedia. There they access verifiable information about everything from baseball’s origins to the history of timber-logging in seemingly countless articles written and amended by thousands of volunteer editors. 

Since Wikipedia first launched in 2001, its ever-growing team of editors has largely represented a single demographic: highly educated white males from North America and Europe, whose contributions are both formidable and also limited. 

“One of the challenges of having such a homogenous group of volunteer contributors is the diverse perspectives are often missing in the content that gets written,” says LiAnna Davis, chief programs officer and deputy director of Wiki Education, a non-profit spun off by the parent Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the popular website. Wiki Education finds ways to connect the online encyclopedia with higher education faculty and institutions.  

To meet this challenge, Wiki Education has embarked on a three-year Knowledge Equity Initiative administered through the Wikipedia Student Program. Supported by Mellon, the initiative aims to recruit 16,000 students in 800 humanities courses to improve roughly 16,000 Wikipedia articles with the help of faculty partners whose expertise is in under-represented content areas in the humanities and who will make Wikipedia article editing part of required coursework.   

The program is rooted, as were similar previous efforts, in the understanding that enlisting a diverse group of students to create content on Wikipedia will yield a more comprehensive and rounded body of information benefiting millions around the world who access the site every day.  

Davis offers the example of a Wikipedia article on the Mexican-American War to demonstrate where the site can be improved. Full of detail about its skirmishes and military men, the article in question lacked information about “the involvement of the women and Native communities in both Mexico and the United States,” she explains, until students in Wiki Education’s program added it.   

“How do you look at the perspectives of other people who were impacted by or involved in this particular incident that are not represented in the current article?” she asks. “That’s what this project is really about. We want to increase the number of classes that are participating in our program that are working to address those historically marginalized perspectives.”  

David Sartorius, a professor of Latin American history and women’s studies at the University of Maryland, has made Wikipedia article editing part of his undergraduate course requirements since 2016. He recalls one student from Mozambique disappointed by the failure of Wikipedia’s article on hip hop to address non-US influences on the genre; she had come across it in Sartorius’ class on the African diaspora.   

In response, she “tackled the hip hop entry and completely restructured it and acknowledged, with scholarship and citations, the transnational influences of hip hop,” Sartorius says. “Eight years later, those changes have not been overwritten by anyone else. There's something like 1,400 people who edit the Wikipedia page for hip hop a month, which is to say more people have seen her scholarly work than will ever read my book reviews.”  

The appeal of that likelihood—of the potential to have a broad impact on cultural discussions on any topic—is intrinsic to this initiative. Knowing that their expertise and research will become part of this century’s answer to the Encyclopedia Brittanica is a key motivator for participating students.  

“This is an incredible opportunity,” Davis says. “Students care way more if what they're doing is going to be read by people, used by other students, and appearing on Wikipedia, than they care if it’s a paper they’ll turn in and if they're lucky, their professor will spend five minutes reading and commenting.”  

Delia Steverson, a professor of English at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century African American literature, agrees. Students who work on Wikipedia articles in her courses are motivated by the knowledge that their contributions will likely outlive them.  

“They feel more dedicated to the work because they know Wikipedia, and they know that it's going to be seen by strangers,” she says.  

Steverson says the assignment has sparked philosophical debates essential to intellectual exploration in the classroom.  

“‘What does knowledge mean and how do we acquire knowledge? What does it mean to consume or create, and why is it that we're working a lot with African-American authors? Why is it that everybody doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?’ Why? Because it has to be reliable. It has to be credible. Then, we talk about what that means,” she says.   

Ian Ramjohn, Wiki Education’s senior Wikipedia expert, is an exemplar of a similarly questioning approach. “Decolonizing Wikipedia,” his chapter in the 2022 textbook, Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice, examines how systemic inequities stymie efforts to diversify Wikipedia content. In places with power outages or a lack of broadband access, for example, would-be editors cannot get online to edit contributions. If a person lacks the money to get behind a paywall, they can’t link to acceptable sources to buttress their Wikipedia entry, a premise on which editing for the site is built.   

Wikipedia articles fall short in more subtle ways as well—through word choice, for instance. Ramjohn highlights an ongoing tension in biographical articles between “emigrating from” and “immigrating to.” The latter expression offers “a good hint that this is being written from the perspective of the country they end up in,” he says, which to his mind privileges the experience of that adopted country over that of the ostensible subject of the article.  

Teaching students to be mindful of these distinctions is as vital to this project as is teaching them how to engage with information more generally—especially in the age of artificial intelligence It’s a building block to learning digital literacy.  

“Why is there more knowledge out there about white straight folks than about queer folks? Why is it when you look at a Wikipedia page of a woman, most of the [information] can be about her husband?” Steverson says. “What my students leave with is this critical skill of questioning and not just consuming.”