Wiki loves Sustainable Development Goals

Purpose

The overall purpose of this initiative is to spread free knowledge about the 17 SDGs and their key content topics through Wikipedia.

One of the tools to do so is to gather NGO and university experts from the field as well as Wikipedians to gather content and references, to contribute to edit-a-thons, both offline events and online ones and in general to perform editing work.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals proposed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to be accomplished by 2030. Key to making the SDG process successful is to make the information and data on the 17 goals available and understandable. Wikipedia is a powerful – perhaps the most powerful – tool for disseminating concepts and the latest findings of the scientific community to the public. Wikipedia is the 5th most used website on the internet. Yet, its potential remains under-utilized by most scientists due to the lack of coordinated effort, incentives and insufficient awareness of Wikipedia’s communication power.

Wikimania Stockholm in August 2019 had as theme "Stronger Together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals". As a follow up the idea is to gather NGO and university experts from the field and Wikipedians to host edit-a-thons. Project-everyone has a wide network of contacts in NGO and universities.

Discussion about the title

Most notable, at least within the Wikimedia Movement, is Wiki Loves Monuments, an annual photo hunt and contest of monumental buildings. The Wiki Loves X branding has been used for all kinds of Wikimedia community organized events. The general meaning is to have a focused collaborative effort on a specific theme. Not all Wiki Loves X projects are photo hunts. The original idea of "Wiki Loves SDGs" is to focus on writing Wikipedia articles relating to SDGs. The question came up naturally to also include a kind of photo hunt to illustrate those articles, and to illustrate the gap between current situation and projected situation.

Wiki Loves SDGs is the working title of the project. It has a clear appeal, at least to people who are knowledgeable about the SDGs. This is good. We want to attract people who are knowledgeable about the SDGs to participate and share their knowledge.

Proposed work to be supported

Editing, updating and improving 17 SDG Wikipedia articles plus related articles on topics relevant to each SDG:

Recruiting scientists from different NGOs and universities across the globe. The scientists’ role will be to provide content as well as seek content from the scientific community.
Quantifying the quality of the Wikipedia articles in question before work starts (conducting a baseline study) and after the editing has been completed. Quality metric indicators to be used have been defined and are a mixture of quantitative and qualitative parameters.
Compiling a list of global and local SDG leaders who merit a biography on Wikipedia. Writing biographies for Wikipedia has been proven a successful goal for WikiGap, on which we can build further.
Deciding on which Wikipedia articles to work on based on a combination of high view rates and importance of the topics. Select at least four Wikipedia articles for in-depth revision for each SDG, totaling 68 Wikipedia articles. For example for SDG 2 (“zero hunger”), the related topics may include hunger, malnutrition, food security, sustainable agriculture.

Edit-a-thons:

Translating the findings into Wikipedia content.
Recruiting Wikipedians to join scientists.
Organizing edit-a-thons at event locations to be determined.

Coordination and communication:

Project coordination, including establishing collaboration with several university partners to leverage SDG expertise
Wikipedia instruction & guidance of all others, quality assessment, project communication.

Thematic focus of SDG edit-a-thons

There are several options in terms of the focus of SDG edit-a-thons, see the table below.

Table 1: Possible focus areas of an SDG edit-a-thon
Option	Examples
SDG pages themselves, to include up to date references which reflect latest UN data and developments.	There is an SDG overview page but only some of them have their own pages currently
Topics and scientific terms that are central to the SDGs	For each SDG we could identify some (for example 5 or 10) topics and terms that require improved Wikipedia articles.
SDG leaders	Compiling a list of global and local SDG leaders who merit a biography on Wikipedia. Writing biographies for Wikipedia has been proven a successful goal for WikiGap, on which we can build further.
Country pages updated with SDG info to show progress/action taken at a national level, to hold governments to account.	Example: Lebanon Problem: this is a high level article which has a given template. We would need to see where in the template it fits and might not be able to add much detail. The detail would probably have to be added in a sub article like “SDGs in Lebanon” Example: SDGs and Lebanon
Activist and movement pages to show links to the SDGs, where relevant (following the model of wikigaps).	Examples: Goalkeepers (Gates Foundation), United Nations Sustainable Development Group

Sub-projects or events

Past events

We had an online one-week long edit-a-thon on SDG topics during Global Goals Week, 19-26 September 2020. For more information see here.

Participants

Many members of the group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development are supporting this initiative. If you are interested to get involved then please write on the talk page.