Gorman also hopes to help provide more diversity in the people editing Wikipedia. Surveys suggest 90 percent of the site's editors are male, and 80 percent white.
"Providing content not yet found on Wikipedia, in areas that suffer due to our systemic biases, is vital work," he wrote, according the university.
Editing Wikipedia articles is already part of the curricula in environmental justice and cultural studies courses at Berkeley. The students will tackle existing articles on air pollution, urban agriculture and hydraulic fracturing.
But instead of their research only being read by instructors, the hope is that quality student research can now be accessed by a larger audience on Wikipedia.
"I'm not interested in students writing term papers that only I and the graduate-student instructor read," associate professor Dara O'Rourke said in a school news release. "That's not utilizing students' potential to the fullest."
