How to contribute climate change information to Wikipedia: A guide for researchers, practitioners and communicators.

This publication shares guidance and tips on how to edit Wikipedia. It is intended for researchers, practitioners, communicators and any others with access to climate change information who would like to share it more widely with the world.

Wikipedia is a powerful platform to make climate change information accessible to all. However, people working in the climate change field often overlook Wikipedia as an outreach channel. For researchers, emphasis is typically placed on academic publications, and for practitioners, communication typically takes place through specialist publications, reports and briefs. However, Wikipedia can be used to communicate information from these outputs to a different (and wider) audience.

This publications outline why Wikipedia is a powerful tool for sharing robust, verified climate change information in the digital domain, and why more female editors and editors from developing countries are critical to make Wikipedia’s information more relevant, localised and representative of the ‘sum of human knowledge’.

It provides step-by-step guidance on how to edit articles on Wikipedia, along with tips and suggestions on style and structure to make your editing process a smooth one. We also provide guidance on how to get involved with the Wikipedia editing community, and share our experience of organising a Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thon’ so that you can arrange your own online or face-to-face editing events. Edit-a-thons are where a group of people come together, in person or virtually, to edit Wikipedia on a particular topic and can be a good way to improve the quality of information and encourage people to become long-term contributors.