About meI'm a geographer. I hold three degrees in geography and am currently employed as a Assistant professor in geography. My BS emphasized GIScience, my master's degree is in applied geography, and my Ph.D. has a heavy public health leaning, employing quantitative geographic methods. As a professor, I love teaching courses on Geographic Information Systems, and my research passion is in GIScience theory. I consider my work under the branch of technical geography and have been involved in research involving a variety of spatial problems.
Motivation for Editing WikipediaI started editing Wikipedia to correct an error on the Spatial analysis page. Then, I used it to procrastinate real-world responsibilities while waiting for replies from journal reviewers, editors, and advisors. Since then, working on Wikipedia has motivated me to review literature and practice writing. In addition to forcing me to read papers on topics I'm working on, this helps encourage me to read material outside my narrow focus and older material central to geography. This has resulted in improvements to my professional writing, as I often find myself referencing material I would never have read otherwise. I recommend other grad students and researchers try this a few hours a week by either editing as they read and come across information that could be included or finding pages that require sources and hunting them down.
On a broader note, I believe it is the ethical responsibility of academics, cartographers, and subject matter experts in any field to improve the public-facing crowd-sourced literature when possible. This moves high-level academic knowledge into the sphere of public knowledge rather than hoarding it in the Ivory Tower, guild halls, or behind paywalls. As technology continues democratizing capabilities, ensuring the general public has access to the background information they need to employ the capabilities is essential. As many geographers know, others greatly misunderstand and misrepresent our discipline during this democratization process. Many disciplines have stumbled into the geography domain and rediscovered or appropriated our techniques, spreading our support thin. In a world dominated by specialists, broad generalist umbrellas like geography can be seen as redundant (a view I obviously reject), and while this is a problem for geography departments, it is a bigger problem when these techniques are misused and either accidentally or intentionally used to spread misinformation. When I first started editing Wikipedia, I found the state of representation of geography to be lacking, to say the least. The main page for geography was a mess, in my opinion, and many topics I consider incredibly important had no representation at all. While this is still largely the case, I hope to help promote the discipline and avoid the misuse of geographic concepts by improving geography pages. In the future, I hope activities like editing Wikipedia will be considered part of faculty outreach duties at universities.
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