Wikipedia: with great power comes great (evolutionary) responsibility

Wikipedia is the main online, multilingual and collaborative open access encyclopedia, consulted daily by millions of people worldwide. The possibility of unsupervised and fragmented contributions can however lead to the spread of inexact information, thus mining its credibility and usefulness. This problem is particularly evident in the phylogenetic sections of various taxonomic pages of the Italian Wikipedia, which are often missing or less accurate than the corresponding English ones. For instance, in the Italian version there was no mention of the currently widely accepted phylogenetic hypotheses of Mandibulata (grouping most arthropods) and Toxicofera (grouping most squamates). In this project, developed within the course ‘Evolution and Phylogeny’ for the Master in ‘Evolutionary Biology’ (University of Padova), we revised and updated the Italian pages of Arthropoda, Cardamine, Chiroptera, Darwin finches, Diptera, Lepidoptera, Plantae, Rodentia, Squamata, Testudinata and Tunicata. We fixed obsolete classifications, incorporated or modified phylogenetic trees, and updated referenced information using recent scientific literature. Modifications were based either on the more accurate English Wikipedia, or on our own search into the specialist literature. Moreover, we fixed a technical bug in the input procedure of the ‘Clade template’ used in Wikipedia to draw modifiable trees. This project shows that reliable scientific knowledge can be easily transferred from the university to the non-academic world, for which Wikipedia represents the most accessible source of information. We advocate that such practice should become more widespread within universities, especially with regard to evolutionary studies.