As one of the fastest-growing, crowd-sourced, open-access databases on the internet, Wikipedia presents a compelling platform for scholars to reach wider publics. Wikipedia is increasingly used by other platforms for cross-checking and verification and is increasingly being viewed as “an authoritative source of information” (“Unreliable Guidelines” 8). As a tool for public scholarship, Wikipedia can allow for more collaborative and participatory models of knowledge production. At the same time, it can also expose how its own democratic values might reify institutional and colonial power structures.

In its guidelines on reliable sources, Wikipedia deems that “academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources” (“Reliable sources”). If a page does not have reliable sources, it does not pass notability. Not passing notability criteria most often accounts for a page being deleted---a frustration increasingly voiced by contributors seeking to write on topics largely marginalized or underrepresented in scholarship. And yet, despite its insistence on reliable sources, a key finding of Art+Feminism’s Unreliable Guidelines report noted that Wikipedia’s very own reliability guidelines lack academic rigour (21). In a controversial assignment for his course “Lying About the Past,” T. Mills Kelly interrogated these very insecurities about Wikipedia’s reliability by asking students to generate hoaxes on Wikipedia pages--many of which went viral, and were later disproven by the Reddit community.

Scholars can contribute findings and research to bolster credibility of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedian-in-Residences are also becoming fixtures of some academic and cultural institutions, and the GLAM-Wiki Initiative seeks to support cultural institutions specifically through collaborative projects on Wikipedia. In her talk for “Wikipedia as Public Scholarship,” Amber Berson notes how edit-a-thons can bridge academic knowledge with community knowledge by sharing expertise in a more reciprocal exercise.