LingWiki

What

WikiProject Linguistics advocates linguists – especially grad students – to democratise knowledge by editing Wikipedia pages. It is a very meaningful initiative as Wikipedia is one of the top places where the general public learns about linguistics.

Why

• As an academic(-to-be), I believe that academics should come down from our ivory tower, and actively reach out to the public by explaining our research in layman’s terms. This is one of my initial motivations to join LingWiki – to bridge the gap between scientists and the general public.
• As a linguist, I used to find it really challenging to explain linguistics to to non-linguists, partially because there are so many misconceptions about what linguists do among the general public. But if more people understand what we do as linguists, perhaps we will get questions like “so how many languages do you speak” less often.
• From the perspective of an educator: check out the #lingwiki campaign on Twitter
• LingWiki is an intellectual community where you get welcome messages like this:

How

• Linguistics Wikipedia Editathon (courtesy of Gretchen McCulloch)
• Wikitext cheatsheet: a markup language that is way easier than LaTeX
• Stub sorting: learn how to categorize linguistics articles for future editors
• Wikipedia in linguistics courses
• Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia (for scientists)
• Wikipedia: Education program

My LingWiki Milestones

• My Wikipedia user page: Linguisteacs
• Linguistics stubs and articles related to my areas of study
  • My first edit of linguistics article: Grammatical tense
• Biographies of my linguistics heroes, especially of female linguists
  • My first edits: Beth Levin, Angelika Kratzer, David Dowty
  • My first article is dedicated to Lisa Cheng (linguist)