A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is the organization of a group of participants in a wiki established in order to achieve specific editing goals, or to achieve goals relating to a specific field of knowledge. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. Unrelated wikis have also used the term, for example OpenStreetMap. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by Smithsonian Magazine for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000".
On Wikipedia
Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For example, in 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration announced that it had entered into a partnership with, "to support sharing relevant Cochrane Evidence in Wikipedia’s health articles and to develop strategies to keep Wikipedia’s health-related content up to date, unbiased, and of high quality." Wikipedia has thousands of WikiProjects, primarily divided between specific topical areas and performing specific maintenance tasks. One task commonly performed by topical WikiProjects in Wikipedia is the assessment of the quality of articles that fall within that topic area. In Wikipedia and sister projects, WikiProject pages are located in project space, and the meta information regarding the association between the article and the WikiProject is usually included on the talk page of the article. WikiProjects provide an additional avenue for engagement between editors with similar interests, and have thereby been found to increase the productivity of such editors. In order to spur participation and concentrate effectiveness, WikiProjects in Wikipedia may engage in activities like having a "collaboration of the week", or designating one article to be improved to the point of achieving "featured" status. The WikiProject Council is a group of editors that assists with the development of active , and acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration. A 2008 academic study of Wikipedia concluded that participation in WikiProjects substantially improved the chances of an editor becoming an administrator, finding that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits, and concluding:
WikiProjects and assessments of article importance and quality
The English Wikipedia currently has over 2,000 WikiProjects, with varying degrees of activity. In 2007 the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub", followed by "Start", "C" and "B". Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, about 7000 are a featured article or a featured list. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. The articles can also be rated for importance by WikiProjects. Currently, there are 5 importance categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/unsure level. For a particular article, different WikiProjects may assign different importance levels. The WikipediaVersion 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table and bar-chart. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.
described the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in making Wikipedia a source of medical information relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that a project member "edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia", but also providing the caveat that "even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages".
