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When you want to learn about a brand-new topic, you probably head to Wikipedia.

You’re not alone; your professors are doing that too, admitted ������ɫ Associate Professor of English Jennifer Lynn Stoever. The free, online encyclopedia is the eighth most visited website in the world and the only one in the top 10 run by a nonprofit.

This past academic year, Stoever joined Wiki Education’s Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee and also participated in the nonprofit’s Speaker Series in September 2024.

Wiki Education works to build and expand content on the English-language Wikipedia site, to make it more accurate, representative and complete, according to the organization’s communications and outreach coordinator, Colleen McCoy.

The organization received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation for its Knowledge Equity initiative. Faculty members from across the country are advising and supporting the creation of new curricular resources, engaging in outreach and more. The nonprofit encourages faculty to incorporate the “Wikipedia Assignment” into their coursework: writing and posting a well-researched article on Wikipedia in lieu of the traditional classroom paper.

In January 2024, Stoever was preparing her syllabus for her class on Black Women and Creativity in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the first time that she had taught the course since the pandemic, and she was rethinking the structure of the final class project.

The ������ɫ Art Museum had just obtained new artwork from painter Howardena Pindell, sculptor Alison Saar, woodcut artist LaToya Hobbs and quilter Loretta Pettway Bennett — major Black women artists that Stoever wanted to incorporate into her class plans.

“When I went to look at their Wikipedia pages and saw that these incredible artists had pages that were just stubs or ‘starters,’ I was so upset!” she recalled. “And the idea just clicked: why don’t we research and do an edit-a-thon to improve those women’s pages?”

True story: Stoever Googled “How to use Wikipedia in your classroom,” which led her to Wiki Education. She applied, and within weeks, the organization built a dashboard for her class, assigned students a Wikipedia expert as a guide, and gave the professor her own mentor, along with online talks and events throughout the semester.

“I couldn’t believe my luck! I was just hooked from there, and when our (Edit-a-Thon) event was so successful last year, I knew I wanted to get more involved with them and share their work with everyone I know,” she said.

Diversity and accuracy

As a free resource, Wikipedia provides access to accurate and reliable information to people who may not otherwise have access to university libraries and research.

Part of its power is that anyone can share in the dissemination of knowledge. The site’s volunteer editors are spread around the globe, an added layer of protection in keeping the site independent. These volunteers follow five basic principles: Remember Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, write from a neutral point of view, respect copyright, treat each other with respect — and remember that there are no firm rules.

But there’s a lingering problem: 89% of those editors are white and 80% are men, an overrepresentation that can skew Wikipedia’s content. Currently, the site’s top three topics are military history, sports and video games, and only around 20% of its English-language articles are about women or nonbinary people, Stoever said.

Diverse editors mean more accurate content. In 2024, Stoever’s students noticed that articles about the Black female artists they researched left out key life experiences of racism or only connected their artwork to European art movements. Students made sure to make the artists’ deep connections to African-American traditions and aesthetics visible.

“Contrary to popular belief, every fact you add to Wikipedia needs to have a citation, and one of the reasons why Black people are underrepresented on Wikipedia is that they are underrepresented in history, the media and in the academy in the first place,” Stoever said.

When Stoever started, the Wikipedia entry for Ed Wilson — a major Black artist, activist and founding chair of ������ɫ’s Art Department — only had a single line of text. In addition to working on the pages of the Black women artists in the Museum’s collection, the students also developed Wilson’s Wikipedia profile. Today, his entry has seven paragraphs, including information on his early life and career.

In April, Stoever held her second Black Women Artists Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon in partnership with the ������ɫ Libraries and the Engaged Digital Humanities Working Group. This year’s session focused on Black women artists Linda Goode Bryant, Maren Hassinger, Folayemi Wilson, and Dindga McCannon and included a handmade, physical zine about the artists who promoted the event.

“It seems counterintuitive to promote a digital event with something we cut and pasted together, photocopied, folded, stapled and cut, but it honored the creative processes of the 1960s and ‘70s and the activist communities we studied in class,” Stoever said.

Students had to become history detectives, searching for information in hometown newspapers, activist journals, art exhibition catalogues, print books and archives of Black news media. For a lot of them, it was more research than they put into previous undergraduate coursework.

All told, the students made 87 edits and added 29 references and 4,000 words across the four pages. Their changes also stayed — a big deal in Wikipedia.

“The bareness of some of our artists’ articles caused me to confront the question of why our resources to learn about contemporary Black artists were so difficult to find. Or are they actually accessible but not platformed enough in our schools?” reflected Izzy Gomez ’25, an art history major who took Stoever’s class.

Learning how to edit and add information to Wikipedia was eye-opening; Gomez hadn’t realized how democratic the process was, they said.

“I have learned so much about the creative ways of collectiveness, community building and working with the resources you have —from my study of Linda Goode Bryant, and building her Wikipedia article with my class,” they added.

Stoever also arranged for Wiki Education to give a workshop on campus and has encouraged her colleagues to try it out. This fall, she will participate in a panel discussion on “Open Knowledge as Pedagogical Praxis: How Wikipedia Can Transform American Studies Curricula” at the annual conference of the American Studies Association.

“It’s not a site for original research, but an aggregation of what we know to be true about the world,” Stoever explained. “So it is important that we keep it safe, reliable, free to all and neutral, a place where facts are documented facts, especially in a media environment that is saturated by misinformation.”