Have you seen the Wikipedia page for the Network in Canadian History and Environment lately? It’s not pretty – or up to date..

Of course there is lots of information that’s still true. We were “established in 2004 as a confederation of scholars working in the field of Canadian environmental history and Canadian-based scholars working in the fields of historical geography and environmental history, but focused on other regions of the world.” Our website offers web space for scholars to host and showcase their research^[1], we publish “a number of blogs in English and French that make Canadian environmental history more accessible to the wider public,” and the Nature’s Past podcast continues to feature interviews with authors about their research with the intention of disseminating their work to larger audiences.

But.. there’s also a lot that needs updating. Our membership is now over 1,000, and we’re based out of York University now, not the university formerly known as the University of Western Ontario. We provide in-kind support for a number of grants, but we no longer provide direct financial support for projects.

But honestly, that’s pretty much all there is on our Wikipedia page at present. It’s a bit sparse.

“Why don’t we get in there and update it,” you ask? Well, we’re not supposed to edit our own Wikipedia entry. According to their own definition, “Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.”

So we’re hoping that others might be interested and willing to do some of this work for us!

If you haven’t edited a page on Wikipedia before, you can use their helpful guide editing pages, or check out the video below:

If you are willing to edit our Wikipedia page, thank you! It means a lot to us. Before you begin though, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the work that was done to #FlipTheList during the summer of 2020 to diversify and enrich the list of environmental history books on Wikipedia, and consider how you might add content that reflects the contributions of BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ scholars and authors.

[1] For examples of these NiCHE project pages, check out The Manomin Research Project and The Silent Rivers of Oil Project.