SLU/The project

Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the source of knowledge for the public. When using Google or other search engines to find information, Wikipedia articles will almost exclusively belong to the highest ranked websites. Therefore, Wikipedia should also be the natural arena for knowledge-sharing by those who know the most about a topic.

Currently, Wikipedia projects linked to universities are so far based on student contributions and individual researchers, but to this day there is no project where researchers officially affiliated with a particular university write about science on Wikipedia in an organized form. Since no university has taken this challenge seriously, SLU pioneers the scientific community's commitment to Wikipedia.

This project was launched at a Wikipedia day on the 18th of January 2013 with international invited speakers and is followed up with development of manuals, and a help desk run by a project manager for a five-month period. The project will be monitored and reported at a conference a year later with the goal of at least 100 researchers having made a substantial contribution to Wikipedia. The intention is to have an annual Wikipedia day when researchers participate in workshops and training and/or write about their field of research in Swedish and foreign Wikipedia.