Science & health

This is the place to find tasks relating to science and health.

Simple science & health

Are you good at explaining complicated ideas? Would you like to practice and become even better? Then editing Simple English Wikipedia is an ideal task for you! This version of Wikipedia was created to make information accessible for children and adults who are learning English.

This is a great task to do with children or with someone who is learning English because you try out your explanations on them, or get them to act as your editor and check that what you have written makes sense.

Here is how to improve an article. As you follow the steps, keep this page open and right click to open new tabs so you can see the instructions without clicking the back button!:

First familiarise yourself with how to write Simple English.
Then choose either Science or Health.
Log in to Simple Wikipedia using the link in the top right of the page - your Wikipedia account will work there too.
Choose an article from the subcategories and read what is already there.
Click the "Change" button to edit the article. Add or improve the information.
Click the big blue "Publish changes" button at the top to save your edits.

De-orphaning

The beauty of Wikipedia is that people can just stumble across articles via the handy blue interwiki links and read about people, places or things that they had never heard of five minutes before. This isn't possible if there aren't any links to an article though - such articles are known as "orphans".

To make knowledge more connected and help people to discover a fascinating researcher and their work, follow the steps and de-orphan a scientist.

Detailed science & health

Wikipedia editors form groups called Wikiprojects to supervise content that they care about, add new relevant content, and work together to set standards and improve the encyclopedia.

Visit Wikiproject Medicine or Wikiproject Science to learn more about these communities, discover specific rules about editing specialist articles, and find ways that you can contribute.

Once you are familiar with how the community wories, you can find something that needs improving: under the Stats section for Wikiproject Science or the Metrics section for Wikiproject Medicine you can click on the numbers in the tables to find lists of great articles (to use as inspiration) or of articles that are rated as only stubs or low-grade (where you can make a big difference by editing and improving).

One example of an article that is relevant to the current pandemic and needs improving is the page on viral shedding.

Add a missing or new page

If you think an article on a science or health topic is missing from Wikipedia but are not sure where to begin with creating it, get in touch via email, or leave a message on my User talk page and we can discuss how you can create it!