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emma-baker-photo-bw3 - climate adaptation.

Dear colleagues,

Last year there were 98.3 million pageviews of climate change articles on Wikipedia. That’s over 267,000 pageviews per day. 

Did you know that absolutely anyone can edit Wikipedia? Yet many of those in the climate change community are not making use of this powerful tool to make climate change information more freely available to the general public and robust. The more specialists who contribute to Wikipedia, the more reliable its content is likely to be. 

In 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation estimated that only about 20% of Wikipedia editors were from the Global South. And in a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia, as little as 8.8% of contributors were women. It is critical that editors representing a diversity of genders, social and cultural perspectives, disciplines and languages contribute to the platform - linking local experiences with this global knowledge base. 

The Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) have launched a practical guide to editing Wikipedia, as well as an invitation to a week-long “edit-a-thon” - Wiki4Climate. We aim to encourage the climate change community to actively contribute to the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, particularly women and practitioners and researchers from the Global South. 


Wikipedia Asian Month Edit-a-thon 2019 at Angamaly, India, by Wikimedians of Kerala UG

Edit-a-thons are where a group of people come together, in person or virtually, to edit Wikipedia on a particular topic. It can be a good way to improve the quality of information on Wikipedia and encourage people to become contributors.
 
Sign up to our online edit-a-thon

At our online edit-a-thon, you will get hands-on advice and training from Wikipedia experts around the world. The event will run for one week, however you are free to attend according to the time you have available. You can choose to edit for ten minutes a day, or every day for the entire week. If you are able to add one sentence or paragraph, or simply add a few robust references, you will be making an important contribution. 

The Wiki4Climate event runs from 24 November - 1 December and you can sign up here.

For any questions, please contact wiki@southsouthnorth.org 

Additional resources:

Five-minute video on the Africa Climate Change edit-a-thon held in August 2019

News article: Edit-a-thon helps tackle Wikipedia’s Africa gap

Recording of CDKN and FCFA’s Wikipedia webinar held in October 2020

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