Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Help reach out to subject-matter experts

One more thing which is often not thought about is helping to reach out to subject-matter experts. Most of us have somewhere in our personal network family, acquaintances, work colleagues, all kinds of experts on particular topics. And I don't just mean academic experts.

Anyone with professional or subject-matter expertise can potentially help Wikipedia, and you don't have to make them editors. You don't have to get them to edit Wikipedia. You can just connect their knowledge to a wiki article that needs that knowledge. You could ask them to read an article in their field of expertise and give their opinion, and then contribute their thoughts on the talk page like I mentioned.

Or you could connect someone who knows a lot about a particular region or a particular piece of local history, or a professor of mathematics, whoever you have access to, connect them to an editor who isn't an expert, but who is editing Wikipedia and have them work together on improving the coverage of a certain topic.

I mentioned this in particular because almost no one thinks of that, but if you just take a moment and think about some of the people you know and what they are real experts at, what they have some really specialized knowledge, you might be able to find ways of helping Wikipedia. And Wikipedia has a lot of experts on broad topics like mathematics or music. But if you know, for example, a local historian who is an expert on your region, it's quite likely Wikipedia doesn't have such an expert yet. So that's an example of someone you could help connect with Wikipedia, even if they themselves never edit the wiki personally.