User:NeuroJoe/Boston College BI481 Neuroscience Stub Editing Activity
As of August 2011, there were over 700,000 registered editors working on over 3.8 million articles on Wikipedia,the online free encyclopedia that is open for all to edit. On a daily basis, about 14% of all internet users worldwide visit Wikipedia for reference information (Wikipedia:Statistics). During the spring of 2009, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) issued a call to action for its members to participate in neuroscience outreach on Wikipedia by improving the neuroscience related content on the website. Specifically, it was decided that the main neuroscience page would be the focus of initial effort for editors participating in this activity. While this main page may be a jumping off point for readers interested in the general field of neuroscience, there are thousands of neuroscience related articles on Wikipedia, hundreds of which are too short to provide encyclopedic knowledge on a particular topic, and are therefore termed “stubs”. These stubs may also contain incomplete descriptions of their topics, have poor referencing, or may be factually incorrect.
In my BI481 Introduction to Neuroscience course at Boston College, I have instructed my students in a Wikipedia neuroscience stub improvement activity for multiple semesters. The individual semester course pages are linked below. My students work in groups of 3-4 to substantially improve a stub of their choosing from a list I have compiled using the hundreds of neuroscience stubs that exist on Wikipedia.