About

This page is the home of an effort to try to improve the quality of Wikipedia's pages related to astronomy. The idea is that if a lot of people each contribute a little bit of time and effort, they can make big improvements to an already popular information source.

This site will serve as a resource for keeping track of which pages are being adopted by a subject expert and as a source for tips on using and editing Wikipedia pages.

Why Wikipedia?

Millions of people already use Wikipedia. If there's a news story about some new discovery or mission that piques someone's interest, Wikipedia is the first place many of them will go. It's so popular that teachers often have to tell students not to use it for homework.

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the AAS has previously recognized the opportunities Wikipedia may present for public outreach:

WIKIPEDIA: A PUBLIC SERVICE OPPORTUNITY

Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, is wildly popular among students of all ages as a source of fast, free information. Some statistical studies even show that Wikipedia gets more hits than the nasa.gov web sites. However, recent experiences have made me think that perhaps more than just non-scientists use Wikipedia materials. During an August NASA workshop's coffee break, several speakers told me that Wikipedia was among the sources they checked for information in preparing for their own professional talks.

The homepage for the International Society for the Origin of Life (ISSOL) requests that members check the Wikipedia pages of their specialty and edit them as necessary. A similar request was made in the March 13 issue of EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Let me encourage you to take a few moments to read the Wikipedia pages for your areas of expertise and to correct any "howlers" you find. Wikipedia editing is fast, free, and anonymous. Your professional assistance will be useful to the public, your children, and perhaps even your DPS colleagues.

--Reggie L. Hudson, Professor of Chemistry, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida 33711
in DPS Mailing #07-17

There are various competitors to Wikipedia in the works. None of them seem capable at this point achieving the same impact as a systematic improvement of Wikipedia content.

  • Citizendium bills itself as "public participation--gently guided by experts" and requires contributors to use their real names. Their focus on quality is admirable, and someday they may be a household name, but they're not yet. At last check, they had about 6200 articles. If you decide to help out with this project, you may want to submit the same article to them. Just be aware, they have some different rules and some higher expectations for maintenance. Having said that, if you want to just write something really good and dump it there, it seems unlikely they would turn you away.
  • Scholarpedia articles are peer-reviewed and written by invited or elected experts. Obviously, this is going to grow more slowly than something that can be edited by anyone, and right now few people have even heard of Scholarpedia. One problem with this idea is that writing these articles is probably a low-ranking item on the to-lists of most of the invited authors. As of May 2008, there were over 1100 articles "reserved" (meaning someone had agreed to write them), but only 328 had been written and reviewed.
  • Google has something Wikipedia-like in the works that they're currently calling "knol" (or "knols"?), but they haven't been forthcoming with details.

Why coordinate the effort?

A recent check indicates there are over 400 solar system articles and over 10,000 astronomy articles on Wikipedia. Keeping track of which pages are already receiving attention should make it easier to prevent duplication of effort and determine which articles and types of articles need the most help.

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