User:Phoebe/climatetodo

I am interested in... Making some quick improvements Documenting climate change where you live Researching and writing about climate impacts Improving climate information in other languages Covering marginalized communities Improving accuracy and fact-checking Developing images and figures Addressing the maintenance backlog

=Getting started= You can contribute to Wikipedia in many ways. Here are some ideas for improving the climate change related articles.

Improving readability

 * Did you know many readers only read the first paragraph (the 'lede' or 'lead' section) of Wikipedia articles? Getting the lead right is thus an important task. Check out this list of articles where the article introduction needs to be rewritten.
 * Improve readability or grammar of articles

Identifying issues

 * Tagging articles with Citation Needed

Write about climate change in your city or other region
A lot more people read the articles about specific geographies than the general articles about climate change. By adding more contextually relevant information you can help connect climate change, which can be an abstract concept, with people’s sense of place.

For example, at the time of writing, the article about Miami doesn’t mention global warming at all. Yet, a quick google search shows that Miami is one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States, and the Wikipedia article is extensive. The Miami article should summarize this information and connect with the article about climate change in Florida.

Steps for contributing:


 * Find your local community’s Wikipedia article. You can search for the name of your city, county, state or province, or country.
 * Search within the article for the concept of “Climate Change” or “Global Warming” (Ctrl+F in Chrome).
 * If there is no mention, go to the “climate”, “geography” or "environment" section of the article.
 * In a separate tab, search Google or Google news, and search for articles describing the impact of climate change in your specific area.
 * Read the piece about how your local community will be affected by climate change, and add a summary to the article
 * Make sure to cite the source by clicking “Cite” in the visual editor, and generating a citation.
 * Click Save!

Contribute to a “climate change” by geography article
Moreover, different countries, regions and geographies are going to be affected by climate change differently. Working to expand the articles listed in Climate Change by Country or Region is a really valuable task. Click into the categories to find specific articles.

This is an intermediate editing activity, and may be harder than just adding citations or expanding your local article.

If the article doesn't exist for a country or major subdivision of a country, there is probably enough research to produce such an article and its most certainly notable under General notability guidlines. Google searches often produce a good overview of the international, survey sources for these topics, which can be supplemented by deeper research on the various issues identified by the internationally produced survey literature.

If you need hints on how to structure these articles, we have written a structure in our style guide.

Cover Climate Impacts by Industry
Each form of human activity which includes industry or transportation has environmental impacts:


 * Find articles which describe industry and other human activity and add information about the climate impacts. Categories for these industries can be found at: Category:Industries.
 * For example, see this expansion of the Seaweed Farming article
 * Or, for example, the article about Sneakers
 * Write about individual discrete events or infrastructure projects that are heavily influenced by climate change, drawing the connections. There is a significant opportunity to explore these topics as news happens. In many countries, major infrastructure projects or manufacturing facilities are being proposed that could have a significant impact on emissions one way or the other, e.g. oil pipelines or public transit expansion. Consider improving articles on these projects.
 * For example, see these edits to the Philadelphia International Airport article

By economic sector
Each form of human activity which includes industry or transportation has environmental impacts:


 * Find articles which describe industry and other human activity and add information about the climate impacts. Categories for these industries can be found at: Category:Industries.
 * For example, see this expansion of the Seaweed Farming article
 * Or, for example, the article about Sneakers
 * Write about individual discrete events or infrastructure projects that are heavily influenced by climate change, drawing the connections. There is a significant opportunity to explore these topics as news happens. In many countries, major infrastructure projects or manufacturing facilities are being proposed that could have a significant impact on emissions one way or the other, e.g. oil pipelines or public transit expansion. Consider improving articles on these projects.
 * For example, see these edits to the Philadelphia International Airport article


 * By economic sector
 * Improving the impact of climate articles through examples
 * Social impact
 * Help us map Climate Justice and Increase Global Representation
 * Write a biography
 * Write about a energy or industrial location

Write a Biography about Women Environmentalists
If you are up for a challenge, or are an experienced editor you might try creating a full Wikipedia article. There are several lists of environmentalists and climate change:


 * Missing Women Environmentalists on English Wikipedia

Write about climate change in the arts

 * Cover significant art, fiction and documentary works about the climate crisis, by improving content identified at in this category about fiction, on this list page, in this category on climate change in society, etc.

Write about sustainable architecture

 * Improve an article on sustainable architecture
 * Use photos of sustainable architecture, and use them to illustrate Wikipedia articles, describing their connection to sustainability

Biology, agriculture, and earth sciences

 * Improve an article in Category:Climate change and agriculture
 * Improve an article on bioenergy, biofuel, and biomass (which could perhaps use some merging).
 * Improve an article on the role of trees and forests in carbon sequestration
 * In an article on a species or other biological taxon, describe the effects of current climate change and the anticipated effects of future climate change.
 * Newsworthy events like environmental disasters, frequently have in depth coverage -- expanding these articles to include mention of their relationship to Climate change and Climate activism increases awareness among readers of that connection

Connecting sports to Climate Change

 * Write about the effects of extreme heat on summer sporting events
 * Write about the effects of climate change on ski resorts and winter sport

Translate articles related to Global Warming
Use the WMF Research piloted “Gap Finder” to find Global Warming-related articles into your language. Below we have seeded links that should help you find translations.

Here are some links to get you started:


 * Articles related to Global Warming that could be translated from English to Kiswahili

Translate a Woman’s biography related to Global Warming
The global environmental movement and climate science have a number of notable women leaders. Want to help translate articles about these women? WMF research extended the gap finder tool to help the community doing the WikiGap Challenge to find Women biography articles to translate.

Here are some links to get you started:


 * Women Biographies related to Global Warming that could be translated from English to Kiswahili
 * Women Biographies related to Greta Thunberg that could be translated from English to Kiswahili

Communicate effected underrepresented communities by industry or geography
Climate topics and environmental impacts of industries frequently disproportionately effect groups without political, social or economic power. Climate communication research highlights the importance of telling human-centered and human-health centered stories about climate change, and the Climate Justice movement advocate for integrated solutions that account for how climate change, its impacts, and its potential solutions could reinforce positions power and privilege. Highlighting the human and social impacts of these environmental issues is an important part of building effective awareness about the impacts of climate change.

To do these we recommend:
 * 1) Identify a environmentally problematic or carbon intensive industry
 * 2) Search for news stories covering the human impact and health impacts of that industry.
 * 3) Represent that impact for community members in a) the geographic communities related to that topic, b) core articles about the industries, or c) specific industrial sites, such as coalfields or oil refineries

See for example these edits about the human displacement effects of coal field fires in Jharia India or this edit describing effects of polutants from PetroChemical plants in St. James Parish Louisiana.

For further ideas, consider editing topics identified by the Climate justice task force.

Citation hunt
All Wikipedia articles need citations (references to published work) -- every fact and piece of information should have a reliable source. This means that finding and adding citations is an important task.

The easiest way to start is to add a citation to an existing article. If you are looking for good places to start, we recommend the “citation hunt” tool. Citation hunt suggests articles with content that are lacking a citation.


 * Citation Hunt for Climate Change Articles on English Wikipedia
 * Citation Hunt for Environment articles on English Wikipedia
 * Citation Hunt for Environmental Activists on English Wikipedia

How to add a citation?


 * 1) Let the Citation Hunt links above suggest a citation needed statements for you, and find one that you think you can research
 * 2) Go to the article, find the statement
 * 3) Click edit in the section header
 * 4) Add the source using the Cite button
 * 5) Remove the "Citation needed" template (highlight and backspace in Visual Editor, or remove the template which adds that tag (it looks like  ))
 * 6) Save the page.

Note: for climate change, these citations can sometimes be very technical. Skip the articles that you don’t think you can fix.

Improving technical articles with consensus reports
Wikimedia DC recently ran an edit-a-thon with the National Academies of Sciences with expert climatologists in the United States. You can find a list of suggested edits from some of their reports at the editathon page.

Images and figures

 * See WikiProject_Climate_change/Figures
 * Search Wikimedia Commons for appropriate images

Other tasks
There are hundreds of articles in the scope of the Wikiproject, that are part of the Backlog. Help us address other issues identified in the Backlog for Climate Change articles identified by Bambot. Note: most of these articles are focused on the science of climate change, so many of these tasks are not for beginners.