A Tip for Mastering a New Subject Area
How editing Wikipedia can help you learn quickly and effectively.
When you’re new to a topic, getting your head around it can be overwhelming. There’s so much to read, so much history behind the topic, and often a lot of recent progress that might seem indecipherable at first glance. I frequently find myself with new projects, studying a new organism, phenomenon or method. This presents me with the challenge of having to get up to speed on a new subject area quickly. Fortunately my PhD supervisor introduced me to a great way of doing this during my undergraduate.
When you’re new to a topic, make the Wikipedia pages relevant to that topic your first stop.
A good Wikipedia page should:
- Summarise a topic at surface level in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand.
- Place the topic in its historical context, taking you through the major events in the past that have brought knowledge in that field to the point it is today.
- Take you through key topics you’d need to know for you to be considered generally familiar with the topic. It won’t get you to expert level, but it should point you to further reading that will set you on your way.
Read through the page and decide whether you think it was helpful or not. If it was helpful, great, you’ve found an excellent starting point and can move forward with a good introductory understanding. If not, make a note of the things you were frustrated by —an introduction you thought was too technical, sections you felt were missing, explanations you didn’t understand or thought were clumsy…
Once you’ve done this, take a deeper dive into the literature, but keep in mind improvements that you would make to those Wikipedia pages. Once you’ve done a bit of reading, go back and make those improvements. Keep doing this as you build expertise in your new topic area, but put a lot of time into it in the beginning.
This has a number of benefits:
- It helps other people who are new to the same topic. Your experience seeing the page as a beginner will help you write for other beginners.
- It helps you consolidate your knowledge because you have to communicate it to other people in a way that doesn’t plagiarise the original work you read.
- It helps broaden your knowledge because you’re tempted to improve the whole article, not just the bits that you already knew.
- If you include something in the Wikipedia entry that’s incorrect, there’s a good chance someone in the community will correct you. Any registered user can sign up to receive updates any time a Wikipedia page is edited. If a change is made, people who have worked on the page will go and check that the edit was appropriate, and correct it if not.
- Finally, it’s great writing practise. It’s one of the few places where you might try to explain something, and get an alert within the same day that someone else has tweaked your explanation to make it easier to understand/more accurate. This quick feedback from a range of people is so rare in academia, and something well worth capitalising on.
Try it for yourself
Editing Wikipedia for the first time can be intimidating, but there are some great resources available to get you started:
Some extra incentive
If you’re working in computational biology, and if you’re a student or trainee, there’s some extra incentive to start contributing to Wikipedia. Every year, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) runs a Wikipedia competition.
Entering this offers a few extra motivating elements:
- You have a timeline to work within.
- You know people from your field will read your edits as part of the judging process.
- Winners receive a cash prize (first prize is $500), and membership to the ISCB for a year.
I’ve entered this in the past, and have judged several competitions, and found it a really rewarding experience in both respects.
Participating was a really valuable experience. It feels a bit like writing a review, but it’s less time consuming, and you are guaranteed to get it published. Also, you can add to it over time, rather than having to choose a moment where you think you know everything you need to know on a topic (that time never comes).
Judging can be equally rewarding. Early in your career it’s great experience in acting a bit like a reviewer — you look at a person’s writing, assess its accuracy and the contribution it makes to the field. You also learn a lot about a range of computational biology topics, and get to see some great examples of how people explain complex topics to a broad audience.
Whether you’re brand new to a subject, or consider yourself quite knowledgeable, editing Wikipedia can improve your understanding. It’s also an effective way to reach a lot of people and help them grasp your subject better. If you’re looking for experience that will help you improve your writing and communication skills, this is a great opportunity.
