
About me
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I'm Femke (pron: FEM-kuh, ⓘ), a senior lecturer in innovation, energy and climate at the University of Exeter who dabbles in complexity economics (university profile). My work focuses on modelling the transition to clean heat, transport and power. Before, I did a PhD in climate science.
Accurate and neutral information about climate change or other contentious topics can help us make informed decisions and make the topics less polarised. In a world where doubt is created on the neutrality of Wikipedia, we must make sure our text can stand up to scrutiny.
I'm passionate about making Wikipedia easier to understand. We're here to give "every single person on the planet [..] free access to the sum of all human knowledge". When we write overly complicated articles, we exclude many: teenagers, those with English as a second language, those without university degrees. Our editors are often highly educated and may overestimate the background knowledge and reading ability of a typical reader.
I support User:TatjanaBaleta, who works as a Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter, as part of my job. I will generally not edit directly for this project, but will be organising edit-a-thons as part of two modules I teach, and occasionally clean up edits from students.
I live with two zebra finches and a human.
Femke's challenges
[edit]Inspired by Wikipedia:Bilorv's Challenges, I've designed a set of challenged focused on making Wikipedia easier to read, accessible and to promote team work at User:Femke/Challenges. Come have a look, suggest improvements, and beat some challenges!
Editing interests
[edit]I started editing on the Dutch Wikipedia in 2013, mostly articles on physics, climate change and women in science (User page). Around 2018, I became active here, working on climate change and energy. As a picture can say more than a thousand words, I've dedicated some time to improving climate change graphs. I started an cross-language effort get climate denial removed after a BBC journalist found widespread misinformation.
Outside of climate / energy, I work on multi-system illnesses such as long COVID, after I became ill with the condition myself. From that I branched out to women's health more generally.
As an admin, you can sometimes find me at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions or doing other bits and pieces. I have successfully nominated eight folks for adminship and I'm always open to talk to anyone who might be interested, whether in the near term or slightly longer. You don't have to wait to be asked; there's only a small group of editors actively searching for new candidates.
Featured and good content
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Sustainable energy (with Clayoquot)
Climate change (saved at FAR)
Antarctica (saved at FAR with Devonian Wombat and Amitchell125)
Earth (saved at FAR)
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (
with Ward20 and The Quirky Kitty)
GA
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Sea level rise
Greta Thunberg
Climate sensitivity
Climate system
Paris Agreement
David Attenborough (with Lee Vilenski)
Tipping points in the climate system
Effects of climate change
Long COVID
Melvin Ramsay
Unrest (2017 film)
Grid energy storage
Air pollution
Polycystic ovary syndrome
2025 goals
[edit]- Work on more articles about prominent women, such as creating Judith Rosmalen
2026 goals
[edit]- Get endometriosis to GA
- Work together in the Vital Signs 2026 campaign to bring all top-importance articles in WikiProject Medicine to B-class or above. You can now sign up as a participant or as a co-organiser!
- Improve Wikipedia guidelines around accessibility. Start the WP:Collaborative Clarity in Complexity Contest to pair people up with and without topic expertise? Improve guidance at WP:MTAU, incorporating work from Escape from the ivory tower : a guide to making your science matter. Write an article on the book?
Software bugs that might get people blocked
[edit]Misrepresenting sources is a sure way to get blocked or tbanned. But they can happen on accident, especially if editors use our buggy software. When considering a block or ban based on sourcing, keep in mind these two possible sources of accidental errors.
- phab:T314228 / wish: the final citation in a paragraph does not get copied over in VE in Firefox. Same for citations in bullet points. Easy to mess up and have citations in the wrong location
- phab:T382446 / wish: when you put in the title of a source in the automatic source generator (where you normally put in a url), it will unexpectedly act as a search engine. There will always be a result, even if it has barely anything to do with the original title.
Essays and exercises
[edit]- Copyediting:
- Tony1's redundancy exercises have helped me write easier sentences
- Quick and ugly check to see if your writing is too difficult: The Hemingway App. A readability score (Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease) over >45 is fairly okay. Another rule of thumb: 4S: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, short articles.
- Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (science): use reviews, don't write them.
- Don't commit crimes against significant digits
- User:Femke/RfA criteria
- User:Femke/2024 admin election notes – notes on stats, content creation, AN(I) discussions, permissions, etc for the 35 candidates