Code for Africa Climate Change Project/Nigeria/Climate Denialism

Bridging The Gap:
Using Wikipedia To Fight Climate Denialism

Climate Denialism by state[edit]

Write about climate change in your state. A lot more people read articles about specific geographies than 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 Lagos doesn’t mention global warming at all. Yet, a quick google search shows that Lagos is one of the most vulnerable cities in Nigeria, and the Wikipedia article is extensive. The Lagos article should summarize this information.

Steps for contributing:[edit]

Find your state community’s Wikipedia article. You can search for the name of your city, state, 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!

Scientific research and fact-checking[edit]

Citation hunt[edit]

TIP: For help finding reliable sources about climate change, check out the resources section.

The IPCC publishes an authoritative summary of climate change’s impacts on the world. It is a systematic review of the best scholarship on climate change. If you haven’t tried reading the reports, they are very easy to read. However, citing the reports is a bit complicated. If you need help, there are preformatted citations on English Wikipedia..

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 lacks a citation.

How to add a citation?

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

Categorization[edit]

There are a lot of climate topics in Nigeria without the right category or no category at all. So you can help fix the corresponding categories.

You can activate the hotcat through your preference gadget. Once it's activated, you can be able to add categories to corresponding Wikipedia articles easily.

How to add a category?

Go to the article, and scroll down to find the category box
Click the plus sign
Add the corresponding category to it
Then click OK.