Elizabeth explains Wikipedia’s “Women in Red” edit-a-thons, where editors work to turn red links (missing pages) into blue links, focusing on gaps in women’s, especially Black women’s, representation and the notability bias that can lead to women’s pages being challenged or rejected. She highlights the effort required to build articles and contrasts Wikipedia’s open, long-form editing and evolving norms with faster crowdsourced fact-checking, where groups average quick judgments. The episode reviews arguments for Wikipedia’s growing credibility through conflict, editor attrition, and institutional change, and discusses why academics still undervalue Wikipedia due to vandalism concerns and student plagiarism. She then covers a study suggesting crowds can rate flagged news as effectively as professional fact-checkers, while noting risks like bias and manipulation, and connects crowdsourcing to citizen science examples such as monarch butterfly tracking and iNaturalist urban biodiversity logging.

References

Monarch Watch. (2026). Monarch Watch tagging program. https://monarchwatch.org/tagging/

NPR. (2026, April 23). In cities, wild things are hiding everywhere if you put on your “nature eyes”. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/23/nx-s1-5787828/in-cities-wild-things-are-hiding-everywhere-if-you-put-on-your-nature-eyes