The world’s largest online encyclopedia hardly needs an introduction — but if you could use a refresher, check out its Wikipedia page.
A ubiquitous entity on the web, Wikipedia is used by just about anyone who wants to learn something online. It can be a starting point for an upcoming school report as much as a venture into a rabbit hole to stave off boredom (ever heard of the list of lists of lists?). But it’s also a global community devoted to sharing accurate, unbiased, and freely accessible knowledge.
In theory, it’s simple to join: Anyone with an account can edit Wikipedia. But for those committed to doing it the right way — that is, not the vandals — it can be daunting to know where to start.
For members of the physics community, that’s where the American Physical Society’s Wiki Scientist courses come in. The six-week program, offered by the Society’s Office of Public Engagement in partnership with Wiki Education, teaches physicists how to add and edit content to Wikipedia pages for a variety of physics-related topics, from its history and people to its concepts and theories.
Since 2020, Wiki Scientist instructors have coached over 200 participants to contribute to more than 650 Wikipedia pages and create almost 100 new ones, according to the course’s public dashboard. This year, to commemorate the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, they’re updating several pages — including favorites like magic wavelength, atom interferometer, and stimulated Raman adiabatic passage — and drawing from sources like the Quantum Foundations Collection, an assemblage of research papers pivotal to the development of quantum mechanics over the past century.
Wiki Scientist participants come from both industry and academia and range in career level from undergraduate students to career physicists and retirees. “A couple of professors said that they already did a Wikipedia component in their classes,” said Meghan Healy, the community and operations specialist at APS and Wiki Scientist’s organizer. “They wanted to learn more about the Wikipedia side of things — how to update it and how relevant it is for their classes — which was really cool.”
The program has hosted courses with a variety of themes. Last year, participants updated pages related to plasma physics: think stellarators and the warm–hot intergalactic medium. The year before that, it was climate and energy: think thin-film solar cells and climate change in Illinois. They’ve filled dozens of pages with the accomplishments of lesser-known physicists from around the world, both past and present — Facundo Bueso Sanllehí, Hisako Koyama, and Ilham Al-Qaradawi, to name a few.
But once participants got some practice under their belts, there was no limit to what they could edit. Some dabbled in topics that interested them personally, while others used their newfound skills to share their expertise. “In last year’s course, someone was super interested in this one biophysics application of plasma,” said Healy. “He worked with it in his actual job, so he obviously knew a lot about it and wanted to improve the existing article.”
It can be valuable for scientists to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia. But first, they need to learn the ropes. After familiarizing themselves with Wikipedia’s editing interface, guidelines, and policies — including its five pillars — new editors must learn to navigate the complex etiquette of shared authorship in its vast volunteer community.
“When you start editing with Wikipedia, no one asks you what your qualifications are, or what degrees you have, or what your job is,” said this year’s Wiki Scientist instructor. Editors discuss and debate edits on talk pages, where their sole credibility lies in the edit history posted on their user profile for all to see. “New editors start with zero edits. You have no credibility whatsoever.” But by learning the community guidelines and editing and citing material properly, he added, “That's how your expertise, your qualifications start to get known and acknowledged.”
That kind of pressure is what makes getting started the hardest part. But “anyone can contribute and make good-faith efforts to improve Wikipedia,” said a 2024 participant in a testimonial. “It isn't as scary as it seems, and you won't break anything!” In this year’s cohort, Sandy Auttelet (Wikipedia alias: TheTactileTutor) aims to use the training to spread a similar message, producing short-form videos for her tutoring business to help students feel more comfortable checking the validity of sources on Wikipedia’s physics and math pages.
Seasoned and newbie editors alike work together to fill gaps, fix inaccuracies, add reliable sources, and monitor recent changes to pages on their watchlists. The bots help, too. Healy noted that during APS Public Engagement’s Science Trust Project coffee hour last summer, computer scientist and Wikipedia tool developer Aaron Halfaker described the machine learning models that act as the platform’s quality control, filtering new edits — about 160,000 per day — to remove the “obviously bad” ones within five seconds. The rest of the “bad” edits, which are often ambiguously bad — reasonable-sounding but inaccurate additions like “the monarch butterfly is Canada’s national insect” — are flagged and removed by community members within minutes to days.
“I didn't realize how big the community was and how interactive people are,” said Healy. “People actually really work together.” Along with talk pages, Wikipedians convene on village pump discussion boards and WikiProjects, where teams of editors work together to manage subject areas like physics — and even the American Physical Society.
With that kind of support network, Wiki Scientist participants leave the course feeling well-equipped to continue contributing to Wikipedia to help make and keep it a trusted source of knowledge, and reliable sources, for physics and beyond.
