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Established in 2019, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Wikipedia Initiative proceeds from the conviction that it matters to edit Wikipedia, especially for academics committed to knowledge equity as a fundamental groundwork for social justice. We are developing skills, cultivating inclusive community, and building structures of support and recognition for scholars of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and language studies who want to engage with Wikipedia as a form of global public scholarship.
We offer two monthly workshops, coordinate collaborative editing projects, and share a growing online library of free and open help and advice resources. All our workshops and resources work to address the specific needs of academics editing Wikipedia and to highlight their essential role in addressing issues of knowledge equity. We track our events on the WikiProject Writing outreach dashboard campaign.
Why Wikipedia?
editWikipedia is an online, multilingual, open access encyclopedia developed entirely by volunteers. Wikipedia's goal is to provide all with access to equitable understandings of "the sum of all human knowledge." Despite this goal, Wikipedia remains inequitable with issues such as content gaps, lack of diversity in editorship, and systemic bias embedded in notability criteria. Humanities scholars whose research and teaching focus on writing, rhetoric, literacy, and language studies are uniquely positioned to contribute significant and balanced content to a wide range of vital general interest articles like Communication, Grammar, Language, Literacy, and Writing along with field-specific academic topics. Additionally, contributing to Wikipedia has the power to bolster the work scholars in the humanities are already doing to produce effective curriculum revisions at all education levels.
While there is powerful alignment in the educational missions and knowledge equity goals of Wikipedia with those of the academic humanities, there remains significant misunderstanding of and skepticism toward Wikipedia among scholars in the humanities. We are working to support a strong and stable culture of scholars who feel a sense of professional responsibility for improving Wikipedia as the main public knowledge resource in the world.
WikiProject Writing is the flagship project of the CCCCWI. It is a group of Wikipedia editors focused on developing content related to the fields of rhetoric, composition, technical communication, literacy, and language studies. In addition to increasing coverage about the teaching of writing as it pertains to all forms of communication, this project seeks to represent a full scope of content about these fields’ engagement with diversity, inclusion, and equity. Participants explore and cite both canonical terms, concepts, and research, as well as scholarship and activism composed by marginalized teacher-scholars, when creating and improving Wikipedia articles. This is a great space to collaborate with other scholars on key topics.
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edit- The Big Rhetorical Podcast's "Episode 96: Andrew Yim" (21:33)