Wikimedia Projects as Key Elements of the Global Climate Literacy Landscape

As climate-related matters touch ever more aspects of ever more people’s lives, it is essential to provide the public with verifiable information that helps to understand climate issues and their ramifications, including potential solutions and the conditions under which they might or might not work. Wikimedia projects – i.e. Wikipedia and its sister sites like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons – can and do play an important role in building, strengthening and sustaining climate literacy: they provide a sizeable share of the global population with general reference information on a very broad range of climate-related topics, in a place where people and machines are looking for such information, in languages that they can understand, on an ongoing basis and in ways that allow essentially any individual or group to participate.

This contribution will provide a guided tour around how various climate issues and potential solutions are reflected in the content and in the workflows of various Wikimedia projects. Examples will be drawn from various domains of climate-related research and practice. The discussion will include biases and gaps in coverage as well as the handling of misinformation and other non-constructive contributions. It will also outline opportunities for actors in the climate solution and climate literacy space to embrace the collaborative nature of these platforms and to engage with their contents, communities or technology stack. Different forms of such engagement will be demoed.