Mashable
- Mark Kaufman
An intensely devoted core keeps a bastion of climate science honest
Femke Nijsse, a climate researcher, made her first Wikipedia edit seven years
ago. In 2018, she started editing Wikipedia’s English
climate change webpage. Since then, she’s grown increasingly obsessed.
"I slowly got more addicted," said Nijsse, who recently submitted a Ph.D.
thesis in mathematics at the University of Exeter’s
climate systems group.
Nijsse has become the de facto leader (but certainly not ruler) of a small,
impressively devoted group of current editors to Wikipedia’s climate change
page. The article is either one of the first, or first, results that appear
when one searches the web for "climate change" or "global warming," resulting
in
over 6 million views in 2019
(this doesn’t include 135 other "climate change" pages written in different
languages).
It’s a hugely visible source of meticulously-vetted climate information,
during a time when
scientific misinformation spreads on the web
like a
furious 21st century California wildfire. The climate article, with hundreds of credible citations, counters the
stereotype that publicly-policed, collaboratively-edited Wikipedia pages are
inherently unreliable (though the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia projects
certainly
vary considerably
and shouldn’t be one’s sole source of information).
The seven-person core now editing the Wikipedia page (though others certainly
contribute!), four of whom spoke with Mashable, seeks to make climate science
graspable and available to everyone. The group has no tolerance for
unsubstantiated facts or biased sources.
"I'm an engineer by training and profession, and have taken a special interest
in communicating the basic facts and consensus about global warming and
climate change, largely because of the ghastly ignorance and manipulative
politicizing I have seen on Fox News and by the U.S. president," said a
Wikipedia editor who wished to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. (They’ll
be referenced as “anonymous editor.")
The
consensus among climate scientists, that humans are driving significant climate change, is robust,
if not overwhelming, though some powerful politicians claim (without evidence) there’s a genuine academic debate about what’s driving Earth’s current
warming.
The Wikipedia climate page distills the foundations of today’s climate
science, often citing comprehensive climate reports produced by hundreds of
scientists, like the
congressionally mandated U.S. Climate Assessment
(produced by over 300 experts) and reports from the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(whose Fifth Assessment Report included
831 experts from around the globe).
Maintaining, editing, and improving the climate change page is thankless,
unpaid work. And it never ends. Each year, more
heat-trapping greenhouse gases saturate the atmosphere. More climate impacts must be updated, more research assessed, and more
facts refined.
"There’s so much to be done and so few editors," said Nijsse.
Skin in the game
After working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 35 years, David
Tetta retired, moved to California, and suddenly had a lot of time on his
hands. While reading Wikipedia’s climate change page in 2019, he grew
concerned about the quality of the article.
"So I decided to start editing it," said Tetta. "It turns out it's a lot of
work."
That’s an understatement.
"You need to know the information," emphasized Tetta. "I read around 100 pages
of information to edit one sentence, or to significantly change a sentence or
two." And Tetta isn’t just editing sentences. He rewrote an entire section of
the page, the "Mitigation" section (meaning how to reduce or limit the impacts
of planetary warming). Tetta estimated he spent 90 hours doing that, which
included reading 3,000 pages of research.
With such a profound commitment, the writing, though not attributed to or
owned by him, becomes a momentous, compelling achievement. "Once you have skin
in the game, you feel like it’s your work," said Tetta.
In just over a year working on the climate change page, the anonymous editor
says they have spent hundreds of hours editing the page and collaborating on
the article's graphics. The page's visualizations show the ocean’s
relentlessly rising temperature,
skyrocketing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and beyond.
The page’s lack of important information about the different sources of carbon
emissions, which
keep rising each year, sparked another frequent contributor to the article, Jesse Murray, to start
editing.
It’s critical for people to know where, exactly, carbon emissions are coming
from, but the page didn’t adequately explain some important emission sources,
such as from steel and cement-making processes. (The giant cement industry
emits some 2.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. If it were a country,
the industry would be the
third biggest emitter on Earth.)
Murray, who is pursuing a master’s degree in statistical science at the
University of Oxford, wants his Wikipedia efforts to educate the public about
a human-made problem that’s
driving significant planetary change
(19 of the last 20 years have been the warmest on record.)
"I hope a layperson leaves [the page] with a basic understanding of the
problem," said Murray. "That human civilization emits — and is emitting more
every year — greenhouse gases that are deeply entangled with an industrialized
lifestyle. This, unfortunately, has been driving a rise in global average
temperatures."
The core team is clearly an ardent bunch. "We have some of the most
passionate, invested, devoted-to-public-knowledge contributors," said Alex
Stinson, a senior program strategist with the Wikimedia Foundation, which
hosts Wikipedia.
Stinson, who is also a zealous Wikipedia editor (though not of the climate
change page specifically) and includes himself as one of the "obsessed"
Wikipedians, emphasized that important contributions also come from the
majority of editors who aren’t so devout, but still pop in to flag bad
information or mark a citation. In sum, everyone’s efforts make Wikipedia an
encyclopedia. "That’s the only way Wikipedia works," said Stinson.
Nijsse, the page’s de facto captain, ultimately vets everyone’s edits or
suggestions to the climate page. It appears she doesn’t miss a day. "I try to
check every edit that is made," she said. "I check every day."
"It’s a heroic job what she's doing," said Tetta. "I admire her dedication."
Nijsse’s Wikipedian colleagues have bestowed her with a variety of shiny, though digital, Wikipedia awards, such as the "The Barnstar of Diligence" for her "painstaking research and
unflagging diplomacy."
"She’s really the guardian of the page," Tetta said.
Vigilant Keepers
One day, Tetta found that another editor, who usually edited sports pages,
went rogue and wrote "Global warming is a hoax" atop the climate
page. "I caught and reverted it," he said. "It was there for a few hours.
That’s how open source crowd-editing works."
But with ever-vigilant editors, namely the current group overseeing the
climate page, vandalism is easily spotted and cleaned up. Malicious edits
aren't hard to find: Each edit to the article is documented and visible to
everyone on the page’s history. "Any edit that is blatant vandalism or in some
way or another non-encyclopedic will quickly get removed," explained
Murray.
So, overall, there’s little incentive for vandalizing the climate page. Being
a jerk simply doesn’t pay off. What’s more, Wikipedia has given the climate
change page the status of "semi-protection," which makes it more difficult,
but not impossible, for random people to sign in and temporarily disrupt a
page (semi-protection requires editors to have an account for at least four
days and already to have made 10 Wikipedia edits).
If one looks back on the page's history, like in 2008 when the page didn’t
have semi-protection, vandalism and poor, biased edits were "a major problem,"
noted Nijsse.
The keepers of the page, however, don’t make furtive edits when no one is
looking. The real editing is more like a public discussion, where edits are
talked about (online) and nothing is hidden, explained Nijsse. You can
see the dialogue on the "Talk" page. The goal is to present readers with understandable, yet cold and hard
facts.
The climate editors avoid brand new research or anyone’s singular opinions.
Instead, they often rely on deeply vetted publications that synthesize
hundreds to thousands of studies, like the United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reports. "It’s really important that
Wikipedia remains neutral," Nijsse said. "The IPCC is a brilliant source for
us."
When they speak of their Wikipedia collaborations, the keepers say the system
is at times imperfect and contentious as they debate what information to
include, but overall the group churns out excellent work.
"More than once, there was this beautiful synergy as we were able to
pool together the knowledge advantages [expertise] and different opinions (on
what's important to include, etc.) of the editors," Murray said, describing
their efforts to write the page’s critical introductory paragraphs. "This
would result in a paragraph that each of us was very happy with and none of us
could have come up with alone."
Nijsse, however, will candidly point out flaws or potential problems with
anyone’s edits. The "guardian" of the page, who is also busy pursuing a Ph.D.,
probably has no choice but to speak frankly.
"I think your edits yesterday were a bit sloppy, not what I'm used [to] from
you," she
wrote
in September 2020, in response to an edit about a well-publicized
cloud study. "There are multiple problems with the sentence, and I'm not sure that the
sourcing is sufficiently good," Nijsse wrote in October 2020, referencing an
estimate of over 1 billion people becoming displaced by climate change. "I
think this is a strong deterioration," Nijsse recently said of a proposed
paragraph about air pollution.
The climate page keepers aren’t all climate researchers like Nijsse, but they
have a strong grasp of science, and stay attuned to new developments. "I've
found that this particular set of editors as a whole has been very
well-informed, intelligent, careful to accurately represent the science as
disclosed in reliable sources, and mutually respectful — more so than with
other random topics on Wikipedia," said the anonymous editor, who has edited
other pages.
The climate’s fate
Human-created climate change isn’t going away in our lifetimes. Those who
study the oceans know this all too well. The ocean, explained Josh Willis, a
NASA oceanographer, is the true keeper of climate change.
Over 90 percent
of the heat humans trap on Earth is soaked up by the seas.
It’s inevitable that the oceans will continue absorbing heat as humans turn up
the atmospheric temperature dial this century. (Even if global civilization,
hypothetically, completely stopped burning oil, gas, and coal right
now, Earth wouldn't stop warming for at least decades).
The consequences are ever-warming waters that
melt Earth’s great ice sheets,
raise sea levels,
acidify the water,
intensify hurricanes, and
make habitats for many sea creatures unlivable.
"It’s not going to stop anytime soon," said Willis, who has no involvement
with Wikipedia. "Our grandkids will still be watching the oceans warm."
|
Extreme flooding from Hurricane Florence in Wilmington, North
Carolina in 2018. Bloomberg Creative | Getty Images
|
Earth’s denizens, then, need freely accessible climate information to reckon
with these changes (along with serious terrestrial threats like
surging wildfires
and
extreme floods) and how to curb the
worst consequences of climate change.
The page is just one of many on Wikipedia that demonstrates the climate’s
fate, and the consequences of a warming globe. The Wikimedia Foundation counts
2,500 climate change-related pages, the likes of "Climate change in Africa" and "Climate change and agriculture," amounting to some 98 million views each year. But there’s still bounties
more to be done.
"Climate change is about every human activity on Earth," said Wikimedia’s
Stinson. He cites the Miami-Dade County Wikipedia article, which doesn't
acknowledge climate change. But the seas have big plans for Miami (octopuses have already washed into Miami parking garages). "There’s no mention of climate change anywhere in the article," said
Stinson. "Yet it's the city in the U.S. that will be most affected by sea
level rise. Wikipedia could be a front line to
'How does this connect to my reality?'"
A Miami or Miami-Dade County Wikipedia article might mention, citing NASA data
and the
state’s grim sea level rise projections, that the oceans have already risen by eight to nine inches since the late
19th century, and will inevitably rise more. "The oceans are coming to get
us," warned NASA’s Willis. "Climate change is ocean change."
To limit the advance of the seas, the intensification of storms, and beyond,
the world’s nations (infamously
except the U.S.) have agreed to limit Earth’s warming to below 2 degrees Celsius above
pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures. Stabilizing Earth’s temperatures at
some 2 C, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, above 19th-century levels, is critical, but
unfortunately an ambitious,
highly unlikely outcome
as
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere keep rising.
Big change is already afoot. In September, amid
California’s hottest September on record, the largest fires in Golden State history burned through profoundly parched
forests. Thick smoke blocked and manipulated sunlight, resulting in a
dystopian orange glow
over the San Francisco region.
"When you wake up to that, you feel like you’re living on another planet,"
said the devoted Wikipedian, Tetta.
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