User:Clayoquot/Wikipedia and climate change

How can humanity solve the climate change problem? For this, the most pressing question of our time, many partial answers actually exist - for instance, in 2018 the IPCC released a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, which assesses and summarizes current knowledge about climate change mitigation. But for most people, including policy makers, this information is in documents that are too long and too technical to be understood.

In its report, the IPCC declared that "Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." The magnitude of the required transformation has been quite widely reported, but the substance of it – i.e. what are all these changes going to be and how will they affect everything else in the world? – has barely been touched in the popular press. Wikipedia has the potential to make high-quality information about climate change widely understandable and universally accessible.

Wikipedia's opportunity

Much research done in the past few years about what kinds of messages around climate change move people. There is a large gap between evidence-based practices and common practices in climate change communications:

The main reason people reject the science of climate change is because they reject what they perceive to be the solutions: total government control, loss of personal liberties, destruction of the economy... What motivates people to care and to act is an awareness of the genuine solutions: a new clean-energy future, improving our standard of living, and building local jobs and the local economy.

— Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.*

Much of our content in the mitigation and adaptation space is significantly outdated – one remark was “frozen in ~2011” – and disorganized. Wikipedia can be a place to radically improve public understanding about opportunities and solutions, in addition to maintaining our traditionally-strong content on the causes of climate change.

State of the English Wikipedia community in the climate change area

All efforts to improve climate change content on Wikipedia are made by unpaid volunteers in their spare time. We estimate that the number of editors who are actively contributing to the ~1600 climate change articles in the English Wikipedia is in the low double-digits. The number who regularly participate in discussions at wp:WikiProject Climate Change is approximately ten. Articles are out of date primarily because of lack of volunteer time.

Over a hundred non-profit organizations have set up Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) programs in which an individual, who is typically a full-time paid contractor to the organization, works to develop content, share existing content, and mentor others in ways that further the educational missions of the organization and of Wikipedia. No WiR program has ever been dedicated to climate change and very few have touched on environmental issues.

Goals and opportunities for outreach

At WikiConference North America 2019, we discussed several ideas for collaborating with educational institutions and recruiting volunteer editors. An excellent way for corporations and institutions to help would be to sponsor one or more Wikipedians in Residence dedicated to improving content on climate change. Ideally, this person would have both strong Wikipedia editing/collaboration skills and knowledge of the subject material.

Around half of Wikipedia’s readership is in the versions of Wikipedia that are in other languages. In the health space, there is a model to improve content in multiple languages that works as follows: Editors identify high-priority medical articles on the English Wikipedia and improve the lead sections of those articles (i.e. the first three or four paragraphs before the table of contents). Then Translators Without Borders translates the lead sections and adds them to other-language Wikipedias.

Discussion points

Please discuss on the Talk page.

1. How can we get experienced and new Wikipedians to volunteer to improve articles on climate change?
2. What would it take to get one or more Wikipedian in Residence programs started up with a focus on climate change? I honestly don't think it would be difficult to get charitable foundations or corporations to provide arms-length funding if an educational organization is willing to manage the program.