Getting started

You can contribute to Wikipedia in many ways. Here are some ideas for improving the climate change related articles.

Get started by making some quick improvements

Improving readability

Did you know many readers only read the first paragraph (the 'lede' or 'lead' section) of Wikipedia articles? Getting the lead right is thus an important task. Check out this list of articles where the article introduction needs to be rewritten. The lead section should provide a concise overview of the topic, and summarize the different parts of it. There are some detailed style guidelines that cover formatting. A common problem with lead sections is that they don't mention all the topics that are discussed in the body of the article, or that they are not very readable.
Improve readability or grammar of articles - if you find an article that is hard to understand because of the writing, or has poor grammar, this is an improvement you can make without knowing much about the subject.

Identifying issues

Tagging articles with Citation Needed. When you come across an article that cites a fact that doesn't have a reference, particularly if it seems possibly out of date or very specific, you can tag that sentence with citation needed. To do that, edit the source text of the article and put this code at the end of the sentence you want to tag: {{cn}}.

Write about climate change in a particular geography

Write about climate change in your city or other region

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

Steps for contributing:

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

Contribute to a “climate change” by geography article

Moreover, different countries, regions and geographies are going to be affected by climate change differently. Working to expand the articles listed in Climate Change by Country or Region is a really valuable task. Click into the categories to find specific articles.

This is an intermediate editing activity, and may be harder than just adding citations or expanding your local article.

If the article doesn't exist for a country or major subdivision of a country, there is probably enough research to produce such an article and its most certainly notable under General notability guidlines. Google searches often produce a good overview of the international, survey sources for these topics, which can be supplemented by deeper research on the various issues identified by the internationally produced survey literature.

If you need hints on how to structure these articles, we have written a structure in our style guide.

Writing about coastal communities and beaches

One of the most obvious, and persistent effects of climate change is sea level rise, which causes erosion and damage to beaches, ports and other coastal communities especially when connected with extreme weather events. Documenting these events and the connections with climate change is an easy and straight forward way to approach local geography articles, and to reach a surprising number of readers, especially during tourism season and extreme weather events. See for example this edit.

Beaches

To find beach articles, see Category:Beaches. For a list of beaches without links to sea level rise or coastal erosion see this Petscan. You can create a list of these beaches by pageviews based on the list from January 31, 2021 here.

Ports

To find port articles, see Category:Ports and harbors. For a list of port articles without links to sea level rise, coastal erosion or climate change see this Petscan list. You can create a list of these ports by pageviews based on the list from January 31, 2021 here.

Research and writing tasks

Cover climate impacts by industry

Each form of human activity which includes industry or transportation has environmental impacts:

Find articles which describe industry and other human activity and add information about the climate impacts. Categories for these industries can be found at: Category:Industries.
- For example, see this expansion of the Seaweed Farming article
- Or, for example, the article about Sneakers
Write about individual discrete events or infrastructure projects that are heavily influenced by climate change, drawing the connections. There is a significant opportunity to explore these topics as news happens. In many countries, major infrastructure projects or manufacturing facilities are being proposed that could have a significant impact on emissions one way or the other, e.g. oil pipelines or public transit expansion. Consider improving articles on these projects.
- For example, see these edits to the Philadelphia International Airport article

Climate change and agriculture

Improve an article in Category:Climate change and agriculture or add new content to the category
Add a section about the impacts of climate change in a particular geography or country to agriculture. To find these pages see this Petscan query or Category:Climate change by country this category. See Climate_change_in_Kenya for a good example of an article that integrates the climate impacts.
Add a paragraph or section to one of the articles about Agriculture by country about climate change or sustainable agriculture in those countries. Its important to highlight the gap between the current impacts of climate change and the adaptation practices needed for a sustainable future.
Add a paragraph or section about sustainability or climate adaptation to articles about specific crops by country -- like the by country articles -- regionally specific crops are going to have specific effects.

Crop specific context

Most articles about key crops have no significant mention of climate change or the effects of climate change. You use this Petscan Query of articles in the category "Crop" that have no mention of the impacts of climate change. You can see a rank order of pageviews based on the query of the topic in November 2022.

By economic sector

Each form of human activity which includes industry or transportation has environmental impacts:

Find articles which describe industry and other human activity and add information about the climate impacts. Categories for these industries can be found at: Category:Industries.
- For example, see this expansion of the Seaweed Farming article
- Or, for example, the article about Sneakers
Write about individual discrete events or infrastructure projects that are heavily influenced by climate change, drawing the connections. There is a significant opportunity to explore these topics as news happens. In many countries, major infrastructure projects or manufacturing facilities are being proposed that could have a significant impact on emissions one way or the other, e.g. oil pipelines or public transit expansion. Consider improving articles on these projects.
- For example, see these edits to the Philadelphia International Airport article

By economic sector
Improving the impact of climate articles through examples
Social impact
Help us map Climate Justice and Increase Global Representation
Write a biography
Write about an energy or industrial location

Write a biography about women environmentalists

If you are up for a challenge, or are an experienced editor you might try creating a full Wikipedia article. There are several lists of environmentalists and climate change:

Missing Women Environmentalists on English Wikipedia

Write about climate change in the arts

Cover significant art, fiction and documentary works about the climate crisis, by improving content identified at in this category about fiction, on this list page, in this category on climate change in society, etc.

Write about sustainable architecture

Improve an article on sustainable architecture
Use photos of sustainable architecture, and use them to illustrate Wikipedia articles, describing their connection to sustainability

Biology and earth sciences

Improve an article on bioenergy, biofuel, and biomass (which could perhaps use some merging).
Improve an article on the role of trees and forests in carbon sequestration
In an article on a species or other biological taxon, describe the effects of current climate change and the anticipated effects of future climate change.
Newsworthy events like environmental disasters, frequently have in depth coverage -- expanding these articles to include mention of their relationship to Climate change and Climate activism increases awareness among readers of that connection

Connecting sports to Climate Change

Write about the effects of extreme heat on summer sporting events
Write about the effects of climate change on ski resorts and winter sport

Working in other languages

Translate articles related to Global Warming

Use the WMF Research piloted “Gap Finder” to find Global Warming-related articles into your language. Below we have seeded links that should help you find translations.

Here are some links to get you started:

Articles related to Global Warming that could be translated from English to Kiswahili

Translate a Woman’s biography related to Global Warming

The global environmental movement and climate science have a number of notable women leaders. Want to help translate articles about these women? WMF research extended the gap finder tool to help the community doing the WikiGap Challenge to find Women biography articles to translate.

Here are some links to get you started:

Making sure marginalized communities are seen

Communicate effected underrepresented communities by industry or geography

This community knows a lot about how to work at a global scale quickly and reliably to achieve stunning results. It’s a skillset that the rest of the world, that the UN, that this museum, that humanity needs… My ask of you is to think of us… and to think of what you can add to this work on the global goals.

Michael Peter Edson, Wikimania 2019

Climate topics and environmental impacts of industries frequently disproportionately effect groups without political, social or economic power. Climate communication research highlights the importance of telling human-centered and human-health centered stories about climate change, and the Climate Justice movement advocate for integrated solutions that account for how climate change, its impacts, and its potential solutions could reinforce positions power and privilege. Highlighting the human and social impacts of these environmental issues is an important part of building effective awareness about the impacts of climate change.

To do these we recommend:

Identify an environmentally problematic or carbon intensive industry
Search for news stories covering the human impact and health impacts of that industry.
Represent that impact for community members in a) the geographic communities related to that topic, b) core articles about the industries, or c) specific industrial sites, such as coalfields or oil refineries

See for example these edits about the human displacement effects of coal field fires in Jharia India or this edit describing effects of polutants from PetroChemical plants in St. James Parish Louisiana.

For further ideas, consider editing topics identified by the Climate justice task force.

Scientific research and fact-checking

Citation hunt

TIP: For help finding reliable sources about climate change, check out our guide to sources. For citing IPCC reports, see our handy preformatted citations.

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 are lacking 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.

Images and figures

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Climate_change/Figures

Other tasks

There are hundreds of articles in the scope of the Wikiproject, that are part of the Wikipedia:Backlog. Help us address other issues identified in the Backlog for Climate Change articles identified by Bambot. Note: most of these articles are focused on the science of climate change, so many of these tasks require a strong grasp of the relevant science.

Further ideas may also be found in the pages of our historical task forces: