Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Climate change

MainParticipantsPopular articlesRecommended sourcesStyle guideGet started
with easy editsTalk

New to Wikipedia editing process

I joined today (Monday17 June 2024) Wikipedia and am interested in contributing to its extensive climate crisis coverage. I would appreciate any suggestions or advice anyone may wish to offer please. Alfred Robert Hogan (talk) 17:19, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia Alfred! I am sure you will contribute a lot! Alexander Sauda/אלכסנדר סעודה (talk) 17:25, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

@Alfred Robert Hogan: It's best when starting out to look at changes previously made to an article, and make small changes that adopt a similar approach. Start with small, non-controversial changes. When in doubt, you can ask other editors about a particular question or suggestion, by posting on the article's talk page. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:52, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Woo hoo, great to have you on board! Thanks for dropping by and introducing yourself. In terms of suggestions,

1. Be bold - people's first contributions to Wikipedia are often their most valuable ones even though they often aren't perfectly formatted. I don't think it's important to look at the changes previously made to an article, which can be confusing. If you see an error, just fix it.

2. Include a citation to a reliable source for everything, immediately, and include page numbers if the source has more than 10 pages. Ensure every sentence has at least one citation.

3. Cite IPCC reports as much as you can. Don't sweat about the formatting of citations to IPCC reports initially - if you get it almost right we'll standardize it for you later.

4. Improve existing articles before you create new ones. For the most impact, spend most of your time on existing articles as new ones tend to get a lot less traffic.

5. Don't start by editing wp:Featured Articles (Climate change and Sustainable energy) as they are more difficult to improve.

6. If you run into any difficulty, you can ask questions here or at the wp:Teahouse.

7. If you want to start with non-controversial edits, look for outdated content and replace it with updated content from the same publisher. E.g. replace 2018 Our World in Data statistics with 2023 Our World in Data statistics. Nobody could possibly object to that and it really helps.

Cheers and welcome ! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 20:16, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Welcome.

What you could do: Describe climate change in a way that local people can relate to. Answer the question: What does climate change mean for me, the people in my town, my state, my country, my continent?

• Is data available for local climate change graphs such as and ?
• How has climate change effected local people? Which changes are positive? Which are negative?
• What are scenarios for the future? Can local people adapt? Will they have to relocate?

Uwappa (talk) 08:31, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Zero carbon v Net Zero house

Hello, WikiProject Climate change. You have new messages at Talk:Zero carbon housing.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Someone changed "zero carbon housing" to be also "net zero home" in June 2024. This conflates two different concepts. We already have a separate article for low-energy house -- 64.229.90.32 (talk) 21:46, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Moved to Talk:Zero carbon housing

64.229.90.32 (talk) 21:46, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Introduction

Hello! I am Amen Azoon I am new in this project! I want to contribute to climate editing in Wikipedia. I would appreciate any help! Thank you Amen 34571 (talk) 18:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Hello and welcome! Are there particular articles or topic areas you're interested in? We could use help pretty much everywhere :) Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:01, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

@Amen 34571: You may want to look above, in the above section titled "New to Wikipedia editing process", which has some helpful suggestions. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:38, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Discussion on PV Magazine at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard

People might be interested in the discussion on PV Magazine here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Is_pv-magazine.com_reliable? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:20, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Deeplink including questionmark: WP:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Is_pv-magazine.com_reliable? Uwappa (talk) 05:45, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

I just cited it - thank you Chidgk1 (talk) 12:11, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

University of Ghana edits

I mentioned this talk page to one of the students User talk:Bernard Opoku 1234#Greenhouse gas and climate change who is doing some stuff in case they have questions. But as there are several students I wonder whether there is a prof or anyone else we should mention this project to.

It seems https://wikiedu.org/about-us/ only cover US and Canada - don’t know if there is anything similar for Africa Chidgk1 (talk) 14:24, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Readings and References for WP Editors on different climate topics.

Hi all,

On the other side of a lot of work now, we went back and revised a table of topical readings/references for WP Editors that we had compiled as part of a Rapid Grant from Wiki Foundation. Our goal was to find overview readings/references for at least 10 main topics on climate actions (energy, food, transportation, personal....) to share - items that we can use to help structure WP articles or our own articles, or to be able to quickly answer questions about climate action topics. We based this idea off of the previous Africa climate project page's table of recommended references.

Luckily, one of our contractors, @resilientsage (Shoshana), came back after a year hiatus and took over the project from the first draft we shared. Shoshana is a trained researcher and has worked for the EPA on agriculture and food topics, and she (and I some) reviewed and edited the table to meet Wikipedia standards more strongly. Shoshana notes:

This reference list is for climate wiki editors (and wiki editors writing outside WP) to consider reading and conveniently have available to cite when adding to climate pages specific to topics, as well as to build upon (i.e., add articles into).

Under the column *Wikipedia Status*:

a) The sources listed as "Recommended for Wikipedia" are meant to be solid references about relevant topics and we believe likely to meet wiki community standards.

b) As examples and to consider using again, we have included select citations used in climate-related Wikipedia articles as “From Wikipedia”.

c) Because wiki standards are specific to context, we have also created a list of potential references that may be useful but are unclear as to whether suitable for potential inclusion/or that depend on context: i.e., the "To Be Discussed."

So, for instance, if you want to write about climate and transportation - there are some potential articles that might be of interest - just look for Transportation under the column Topics.

We really want this to be of help by being a starting point for discussion about key articles we can/should use, and for editors to add to, comment on, etc, as time goes by. I think the first step is to have @Clayoquot and any others interested look at the Google sheet, and then we can create a subpage under the Recommended Sources where this could be the start of a framework of resources we recommend each other read on particular action topics.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d3nGAncF973_pnmDknke8nGL_fMNxuoXmeMRYiH3Abk/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Cheers, Annette AnnetteCSteps (talk) 19:29, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Hi Annette. Sorry, I am not willing to spend more time working on initiatives to create lists of sources. I cannot justify further investing my volunteer time in a project that seems to be more about spreadsheets than about editing articles. I know your heart is in the right place. I think what Wikipedia needs most is for strong researchers and writers like you to edit articles. I could be totally wrong though - maybe someone else here will find this kind of spreadsheet useful enough for their work that they offer to review it. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 21:26, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Clayoquot. I didn't mean to automatically volunteer you. Just to let you know, the references for WP editors is actually a side part of the deliverable that we are providing. (another side was the climate action Quotables) - and were mostly because we already had the start of a key-articles database to help answer questions from our users and for our writers to refer to, and we thought it might be useful for you all. Learning your standards has been helpful to our writers as well. We tended towards primary science or popular lay articles to pass on to our readers, not secondary overview. So working with you as helped us.

Anyway, the main deliverable is the food/ag climate action article that we've written in my sandbox that I think you may have seen parts of? Now that my main editor is back after 8 months, we're making it more of an encyclopedic tone. We need to doublecheck it against work in WP that's been done in the meantime, but then we can either add it as a page, or more likely, put sections in existing pages. @resilientsage will do that comparison.

In the meantime, anyone else in taking a brief look at the articles? We can just add it as a link to a subpage at the bottom of Recommended Sources. Those who use it great - those who don't, no worries. There's a place for comments and additions, and we'll maintain it. Thanks. AnnetteCSteps (talk) 18:34, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Why are IPCC reports copyright?

Back in June I cut and pasted a bit from an IPCC report into Carbon sequestration and then inadequately tried to paraphrase it. So @Diannaa quite correctly warned me and hid the edits because of https://www.ipcc.ch/copyright/ In 2021 there was a suggestion at https://apps.ipcc.ch/eventmanager/documents/65/240320210608-INF.%206,%20Rev.%203%20-%20Progress%20Report%20-%20TG%20Data.pdf that AR6 be creative commons but I cannot find out why this was not done as a whole not just partly for data and images. Did anyone ever ask the IPCC why the reports are not under the same creative commons licence as Wikipedia? If not I will ask (but don’t hold your breath for a reply). Chidgk1 (talk) 18:41, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that would be so much better! (and paraphrasing content from IPCC reports is so hard; I struggle with that all the time) There was a previous discussion on this two years ago, see in the archive here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Archive_2#Petition_to_open_IPCC_6

I also spoke about it with User:Jonathanlynn who made some enquiries with the IPCC secretariat. It was a dead end though. I think they are worried/scared that someone could change the statements and graphs and give them different meaning and results. I think RCraig09 and Efbrazil have worked hard on making many of the IPCC graphs accessible for us by re-creating them from scratch in a way that the new graphs don't infringe copyright. This is a very laudable effort! EMsmile (talk) 09:47, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Merge or rename Instrumental temperature record?

I've started a discussion on the talk page of Instrumental temperature record: the proposal on the table is to either merge it into global surface temperature or to change its title so that it becomes clearer what's in the article (e.g. to drop the term "record" in the title). The article gets around 140 pageviews per day, tendency is increasing. Pageviews are here. Please join in the brainstorming here if you have time. Thanks! EMsmile (talk) 17:12, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Tonlé Sap#Requested move 10 July 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Tonlé Sap#Requested move 10 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Reading Beans 17:45, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Help the Wikimedia Foundation better understand how on-wiki collaborations work

The Campaigns team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in learning from diverse editors that have experience joining and working on WikiProjects, Campaigns, and other kinds of on-wiki collaboration. We need your help:

• Take a survey about your experience with collaborations: with this Google Form
• Share examples of Collaborations or WikiProjects that have worked for you: m:Campaigns/WikiProjects

Whatever input you bring to the two spaces will help us make better decisions about next steps beyond the current tools we support. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 4 September 2024 (UTC)