Five-hundred million visitors click on it each month, at a rate of 8,000 views per second. Wikipedia contains 1.5 million citations, and drives more traffic to online scholarly articles than all but five other websites.
But science on Wikipedia remains woefully underrepresented.
In response, Wikipedia declared 2016 the “Year of Science,” and campaigns to bolster scientific content on Wikipedia blossomed worldwide. Despite those efforts, science on Wikipedia, especially science at the fringes, is still riddled with gaps and outdated information.
Wikipedia grades its articles on their completeness and their importance. A quick survey of DCO-related topics reveals that many receive low grades, some are too incomplete to grade, and some don’t even exist.
As an example, “serpentization” is missing from Wikipedia. There’s a small section about serpentization relegated to the entry about its mineral product, serpentinite. If serpentinzation is truly one of the five most important reactions on Earth, it deserves its own page on Wikipedia.
Contribute to Wikipedia
DCO is launching an effort to enhance deep carbon science articles on Wikipedia, starting with a newsletter feature listing some of the articles in need of attention. Follow these steps to help the cause:
- Create an account on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CreateAccount&returnto=Main+Page
- Click to enroll in the DCO Wikipedia campaign. Use "wikidco" if it asks for a password to join.
- Or start editing one of the DCO topics of interest listed below.
Six Sorry Stubs
A Wikipedia stub is an article that is too short to provide "encyclopedic coverage" of a topic. Six DCO-related articles that are currently stubs:
Hadesarchaea
Poás Volcano
Melt inclusions
Chemical oceanography
Computational geophysics
Biogeophysics
and a bonus: Outer core
Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing for help improving Wikipedia.
