TL;DR: tweet linguistics and cognitive science wikipedia stubs to @wugology! 

Why do I want you to tweet me wikipedia stubs? Well, I feel like a major contributing factor to why scientific literacy is so low is because academic jargon is so hard. Both last quarter and this quarter I introduced my students to Simple Wiki and this TED talk on legal jargon. So, my campaign for simplicity has reached a total of 50 people? That’s a drop in the bucket. I just read Pamela Fox’s blog post on this topic and now I want to actually do something about this.

So, here’s the deal:

1. I know quite a lot about linguistics, and a fair amount about other topics in the cognitive sciences (anthropology, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and education).
2. Wikipedia needs more female editors!
3. I believe the topics in (1) should be accessible to everyone, and therefore there needs to be better Simple Wiki articles for them.
4. In order to solve (2) and (3), I can use (1) to write Simple Wiki articles!

Here’s a screenshot of the Simple Wiki article for Linguistics as of today:

See all the red links? That means there isn’t a Simple Wiki article for those topics (yet!). So, I can start there. But where next? That’s where you come in! If you see a Wikipedia stub (especially a Simple Wiki stub, but I’ll edit anything), tweet it at me and I’ll see what I can do to fix it! :)