Edit, easy to collaborate sort of bare text and images software. Wiki is not the same as wikipedia, but they merged the two together, and it began in 2001 as a kind of side project of a more traditional encyclopedia. It was a drafting space for that more traditional encyclopedia. But it kind of took off to get a life of its own and very quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of articles. Steve so who writes and edits for wikipedia and how do you double check that the information is 100 accurate . Ryan as far as who writes wikipedia, anybody can write wikipedia. You can write wikipedia. I write wikipedia. Anybody who decides that they want to share in the compilation and sharing of human knowledge, how do you check it . One of the fundamental rules of wikipedia is that there is everything is verifiable, and so, anything that you read on wikipedia should have been written in another reliable source first, and then it was cited in wikipedia and summarized. If you look at a wikipedia article and you look all the way to the bottom, all those little footnotes, those are all sources, so you should in theory be able to verify anything you read on wikipedia by following those sources. Steve and if you have the subject of one of those wikipedia biographies or articles and the information is blatantly false or wrong, how can you correct it . Ryan so, it is tricky. A lot of people will be tempted to just go and edit their biography themselves, which is a little its a hairy business because wikipedia has a conflict of interest policy. The idea is you cannot have a neutral encyclopedia if people are writing about themselves. But the best thing to do is to make a note about it on the talk page. A lot of people dont realize that every small article on wikipedia has a talk page where people talk about that particular article. And so, if there is something there is something problematic that is written about you, you can go to that talk page and leave a message. There are also contacts that are dedicated to removing, say defamatory information. , and so, there are dedicated venues that can help you do that if it is something that is like an emergency. Steve do you have a sense of how often people go to wikipedia for background information, how many people travel to your site on a regular, daily basis . Ryan i imagine i would be surprised if any of the viewers right now did not go to wikipedia on a pretty regular basis. There is Something Like 1. 5 billion unique devices that visit wikipedia every single month. It is where people go to find information about pretty much any topic, and thats why our organization is dedicated to trying to make sure that it is as good as possible. I think there is a growing recognition that wikipedia is a source that people use. It is where the public learns. I think in academia for a long time, it was the scourge of professors where students would be citing wikipedia and relying on it too much, and professors took a perspective of get wikipedia out of the classroom. And now, they are coming around and realizing that it is not going anywhere. Students are using wikipedia. It is where people are going for information, and so it should be good. Steve explain that transformation. Because as you point out, many College Professors would forbid wikipedia as a primary source for any research topic. Why and how is that changing . Can you elaborate . There and to follow it to the reliable sources that you can then cite. We typically, when we talk to students in particular, we talk about when you go to wikipedia, look for those footnotes at the bottom. Go to those footnotes to verify things, and then cite those footnotes. Do not cite wikipedia. Steve so lets take a deep dive. You said that anyone can provide information to wikipedia, but basically, who are the content creators . Who are those who are editing the material . Give us a sense of who the people are that provide this information that we can find online. Ryan so wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and it is really easy to just go on and click the edit button. It is kind of hidden there at the top, and to just change something in an article, but it is hard to do well. It is hard to really jump into an article and make significant changes, because there are a lot of policies and guidelines involved, but as far as who writes it, so just because everybody can write wikipedia, not everybody does. And we find that for a project that is trying to accumulate the sum of all human knowledge, there are a lot of demographics that are just not reflected in the population of the editors of wikipedia. So for example, we find that the average wikipedian is overwhelmingly male, and only about 15 of contributors self identify as women. They are come from primarily , englishspeaking countries, primarily the united states, u. K. , australia, western europe, and so, it is difficult to say that it is encompassing all of human knowledge. That is another area that we are trying to address is that they are these volunteers come from very particular places, they write about what they are interested in, and because they are volunteers as well, they tend to write about things that a lot of people know about, that a lot of people are interested in, things like sports and video games and certain topics that come from pop culture. Meanwhile, topics about other parts of the world that are of interest to other people who dont participate are neglected, and so, there are significant content gaps on wikipedia, and that is something that we are trying to address as well. Steve i notice when someone passes away, almost immediately, the date of death is posted on wikipedia. Who is doing that . Ryan again, thats just anybody. There are some people who i think are looking for that particular kind of edit in order to kind of jump in there first and make that change. Wikipedia is increasingly really good at covering Current Events because there are a lot of eyeballs looking at it, a lot of people that are kind of processing the information as it comes in. Being a tertiary source, it does being a tertiary source, it does not fall into all of the same issues that the news media comes into so wikipedia should not be relying on primary sources. It should wait until things are reported and then assess the weight of different sources, so if somebodys death is being reported on in a whole bunch of sources, then it is probably reliable, but if only one source is reporting on it so far, then maybe it should not be in there. So to answer your question, it could be anybody. Including, again including you, including any of your viewers, if you see that sort of thing, if you have some reliable sources, then you can go into wikipedia and you can change it. Steve so a hypothetical. In social media, people can say what they want on instagram or twitter. If you have an ax to grind against john doe, for example, and you say that he is a serial killer or he is a child rapist, things that are blatantly false, and yet that is posted, how is that person correct able to correct that . Ryan so wikipedia tries to be really hypervigilant about biographies of living people. This dates back to an incident that happened years and years ago where a famous journalist, his biography on wikipedia linked him to the assassination of jfk. Which he had nothing to do with obviously. But it remained for some months until somebody pointed it out to this journalist and he wrote a scathing oped about wikipedia and that led to a special policy on biographies of living people so that, by default, we should be airing on the side of keeping that material out. If it does make it in, it is usually corrected by the regulars, the people who are watching recent edits, the very active wikipedia editors. It is usually corrected pretty quickly, but when it is not, again, you can go to the talk page, you can fix it on your own, just by editing the page, or there are special venues all across wikipedia that are dedicated to resolving problematic material about living persons in particular. Steve and what is your Revenue Source . Those who go to the wikipedia website will often see a banner asking for money. Ryan so i work for the wiki education foundation, which is a grant funded nonprofit that is separate from wikipedia, so those banners those go to the , Wikimedia Foundation which is the organization that operates the programs and the servers that run wikipedia. We are a separate one. We interface with academia, and we believe that academia and wikipedia belong together, and so, our whole organization is based on bringing wikipedia into classrooms and then drawing on the knowledge that is available in universities to improve those content gaps that i talked about, those issues that those topics that are not as good as they should be on wikipedia. Steve i grew up reading the encyclopaedia britannica. I guess those days are long gone. Ryan they are still around. I know that they stopped their print version, but it is hard to compete with wikipedia. It is a free resource. It is huge. And it is kind of ubiquitous. It has very much changed what it means to be an encyclopedia. Steve and so what is the future of the program . Ryan the future of the program that i run is the scholars and Scientists Program. It is to continue to try to partner with academic associations and universities, archives, libraries, to find people who can bring their subject matter expertise to wikipedia. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that is edited by volunteers, has done an amazing amount of good work, but theres some topics that really benefit from having a broad understanding of the literature on a particular topic. So for example, when we are talking about at the a. H. A. Conference this weekend, its about a partnership with the national archives, where they were running an exhibit, and still are running, on the centennial of the 19th amendment, of women getting the right to vote in the united states. And they came to us, and we worked together to recruit a bunch of academics, archivists, and librarians to improve wikipedias coverage of those topics because when people go to the exhibit and want to learn more about womens suffrage, they are going to then go to wikipedia and find more information on the 19th amendment, on the key figures. And so, we worked with these people over the course over six courses and improved a whole lot of articles. It created a lot of biographies about suffragists that didnt exist on wikipedia before and took on the 19th amendment and to the quality i am biased. But i think it is very much improved. I hope to do a lot more that kind of partnership, that kind of focused engagement. We know that subject Matter Experts are really understanding. Like i said, there is kind of a change in the way the academics view wikipedia. And they tend to be viewing it as something that they know they should be involved with in some way, to share their knowledge. They are passionate people who have dedicated their lives to particular subjects and it only makes sense that they share it on wikipedia. They find that while it is easy it is really while it is easy to get started, it is hard to do well, and that is why we have the kind of structured professional Development Program that walks people through how to do wikipedia, how to share that knowledge on wikipedia, how to adapt to the different form of writing in a way that makes sense. We take time, we meet with them virtually, through chat, through my feedback, and that is our intervention in this regard to try to make it so that more subject Matter Experts feel comfortable computing. Contributing. Steve before we let you go, what is your own background and why did you decide to take on this project . Ryan so i have been a wikipedia volunteer since about 2007, and i started as a volunteer editor as well as a researcher of wikipedia, and then has a phd student, i started teaching classes and brought wikipedia into my classes. That is what led me to this organization. The wiki education foundation. That is exactly what they were doing, and i found it to be a really powerful way to engage students, where instead of writing a term paper that kind of gets thrown away at the end of the semester, they write a wikipedia article that they can show off to all their friends because everybody uses wikipedia and it persists after the course. They learn Digital Literacy information, writing skills, so i was very passionate about that, and meanwhile, every time that we go and try to recruit for the student program, academics would keep asking us, well, this is great that you had this structure to help students. What about something for us . It is from that idea that there is a demand from subject Matter Experts for some sort of support system. That is why we started shifting and its why i was really passionate about highlighting that program, and that was about two years ago, and it has just been growing ever since. Steve ryan mcgrady, he is the manager of the scholars and Scientists Program at wiki education, joining us from new york. Thank you for being with us. Ryan pleasure to be here. Announcer 1 this is American History tv featuring events, interviews, archival films and visits to college classrooms, museums and historic places, exploring our nations past every weekend on cspan three. Historian jarret hardisty talks about his book, black lives, native lands, white worlds, a history of slavery in new england, which focuses on the regions involvement in slavery and the slave trade during the colonial era. The Hingham Historical Society and abigail