Helping Your Students Challenge Stereotypes about Scientists Through Wikipedia
Jörg Matthias Determann
A historian at a university in Qatar seeks to expand knowledge about science and religion by asking his students to edit the free encyclopedia.
A Meta-Wiki Page Header Image Designed by the Wikimedia Foundation for Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday
“Most scientists are atheists,” an undergraduate student of mine asserted toward the beginning of a history of science course I taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar in spring 2026. Intrigued, I wanted to find more about her sample. I asked her whether she thought that the scientists who were working on our own campus did not believe in God. She responded rather vaguely that she meant researchers “outside.” I quietly wondered how many physicists or astronomers she knew personally. I thus encouraged her and her fellow classmates, who all happened to be art history majors, to find out more about individual academics, not just in the past, but also in the present.
As Wikipedia is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, I saw this as a good opportunity for students to familiarize themselves with the online encyclopedia. Although Wikipedia has long been one of my go-to resources, my students preferred generative artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT for first looks into a new subject. I explained to them that whereas Wikipedia allows for relatively transparent exchanges between humans, the algorithmic workings of ChatGPT are mostly a black box. Moreover, the debates that can arise between Wikipedia editors mirror some of those in the history of knowledge we were studying. For one of my students’ assignments, I thus asked them to create a Wikipedia page about a twentieth- or twenty-first century scientist who does not yet not have one.
Although my course had a more global scope, most of my students ended up picking scientists who were based in Qatar for their projects. They included researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) as well as QatarEnergy. It turned out that none of them was known for espousing atheist views. On the contrary, they appeared visibly Muslim in their public profile images. In all the portraits the students were able to gather on the internet, the female scientists wore headscarves.
Although drafting a Wikipedia page does not necessarily take a long time, its publication might not be guaranteed within a short module. “Review waiting, please be patient,” was the message that my students got upon submitting their drafts. “This may take 8 weeks or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order.” There is also a good chance that a student’s first draft would be rejected. This was certainly the case in my course. However, I considered this experience a good exposure to peer review as one of the key mechanisms of modern science and, indeed, academic research more generally. A semester-long course, which covers 15 weeks, also gives enough time to go through such a process.
To save yourself time during the course, it might be worth familiarizing or refamiliarizing yourself with the editing features of the website. I have had an account for about ten years, since 2016. Coincidentally, I created it in order to publish an article about a Qatar-based academic as well, the philosopher and economist Karl Widerquist. Nevertheless, as Wikipedia’s graphical user interface keeps evolving, I also tested the current functions before assigning the creation of articles to my students. In case you or your students have never edited the encyclopedia before, you can find tutorials on YouTube and on Wikipedia itself.
In case you still need help, you might also be able to find an experienced Wikipedian at your institution who could give a demonstration in your classroom. I have been fortunate enough to have a colleague in my department, the English professor Jesse Ulmer, who asked the participants in freshman writing class to update and revise the Wikipedia article about Qatar already back in 2009.
In case there are no experts at all within the walls of your institution, you could connect with them at conferences. In my pedagogy, I was in part inspired by a roundtable at the 2024 H-Net Teaching Conference on the question of “How Students are Engaging in Critical Public and Digital Humanities Efforts on Wikipedia.” It was chaired by Helaine Blumenthal of Wiki Education, a spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia. One of the panelists, the medievalist Kathryn Jasper of Illinois State University, also blogged on the Wiki Education website about how she built a Wikipedia assignment around content gaps.[1]
If you are interested in exploring the pedagogical uses of Wikipedia in your classroom in greater depth, you can find plenty of scholarly literature. Wiki Education offers a long list of peer reviewed studies on the value of teaching with Wikipedia, divided into sections such as “Real-world impact,” “Perceptions in academia,” “Science writing for undergrads,” and “Student Learning Outcomes.” You may have guessed that there is also a Wikipedia article on “Wikipedia-based education” with a list of references. There are not yet many papers on science and religion specifically, although we do have substantial scholarship on science education more generally.[2]
Although one of my motivations behind using Wikipedia has been to reduce students’ reliance on generative AI, software like ChatGPT or Gemini can still be used to help with the drafting of an article. Texts and image generators even helped some of my students visualize what their Wikipedia articles could look like before it is published, mimicking the style and layout of the popular website. In two dedicated course meetings, we first discussed different drafts before the students submitted their pieces to Wikipedia.
Draft article about a Qatari scientist created by students of mine before submitting it to Wikipedia
In case creating their own Wikipedia articles is still too daunting for your students, you could encourage them to update an existing one. There are plenty of lesser known scientists whose pages can be expanded. Some of my students edited the page for Amal Al-Malki, the founding dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at HBKU and a scholar who taught courses on Islamic feminism and postcolonial theory.
Of course, even editing existing Wikipedia articles requires care, especially when assigning labels, whether religious or otherwise. In another course of mine, my students and I talked about the case of Omar M. Yaghi, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Born in Amman to a Palestinian refugee family, Yaghi held Jordanian, American and Saudi citizenship. He thus makes an excellent case for discussing which aspects of a scientist’s identity one should highlight in an encyclopedia. Such a conversation can take place even in a short seminar.
I do not blame my art history students for not being very familiar with many scientists and their religious views. Unfortunately, not enough scientists are household names and those who are often talk more about questions of nature rather than God. However, by creating and editing pages about Muslim chemists or physicists, for example, students can broaden public awareness of important individuals and challenge stereotypes about science and religion.
Finally, by engaging Wikipedia on a deeper level, students learn skills that can be transferred to other wikis that they encounter. Despite the growth of AI tools, including Grokipedia, human-generated encyclopedias are still widely used across different fields of knowledge. One example that might be of special interest to scholars of science and religion is the All Skies Encyclopaedia (ASE), a project of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Star Names, of which I am part. A wiki with a similar layout to Wikipedia, the ASE collects information on the cultural names of stars and constellations. That many ancient names for celestial objects have connections to religion does not seem to be a big problem for astrophysicists, whatever their personal faith. Maybe one of my own students will even use their knowledge of art history to contribute depictions of the constellations to the ASE one day.
[1] Kathryn Jasper, “How I Build My Wikipedia Assignment around Content Gaps,” Wiki Education, June 28, 2023, https://wikiedu.org/blog/2023/06/28/62723/.
[2] For example: Carlos G. Figuerola et al., “The Implications of Wikipedia for Contemporary Science Education: Using Social Network Analysis Techniques for Automatic Organisation of Knowledge,” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality, October 7, 2015, 403–10, https://doi.org/10.1145/2808580.2808641.
Jörg Matthias Determann teaches history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He thanks Anthony Nairn and Fraser Watts for their feedback on an earlier version of this piece.
