*Okay, just a little piece of it: Wikipedia’s Solar Power in [country] pages. Wikipedia is famous for uniformity and coherence in certain categories, but it was missing there…so we charted a path to something better.
by Charlotte Shewchuk and Joshua Skov
One of the striking features of Wikipedia is the consistency of the experience across different pages within a given category. Want to know the population of Germany, Japan, or Namibia? That’s easy – you can find it in the same place on each respective country page. Want to see the roster of a French rugby team? Well, if you’ve seen one rugby roster, you know where to find any rugby roster. Interested in the origins of a given language? Once again, the format for the language page guides you to that spot in the same way each time. Every page type delivers knowledge in an efficient and predictable way, serving up a consistent experience.
Until it doesn’t. Sadly, not all of Wikipedia is as developed, consistent, and tidy as pages for countries, French rugby teams, or languages. Indeed, there are many messy pockets of Wikipedia because it’s a vast, crowd-sourced effort by volunteers. In some cases, they have immense potential for refinement, but no one has gotten around to it yet.
Wandering aimlessly…in the sun
Solar power pages represent one such pocket of knowledge and information. Renewable energy pages are common – admire the numerous pages for wind (e.g., Wind power in Denmark), solar (e.g., Solar power in Italy), and geothermal (e.g., Geothermal energy in Turkey) – but consistency is not guaranteed. This lack of consistency represents a missed opportunity, as the energy transition will surely require some coherence.
We settled on two main refinements, and a support change to a related page: an infobox for each solar power in country page; a consistent format for the introductory text on each page; and a change to the Solar power by country page.
Does that feel anticlimactic? Ah, if only you could travel back in time to when it was not so. Honestly, the solar pages were (and mostly still are) a complete mess. Indeed, per William Gibson’s famous assertion that “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” many solar power in country pages are still choppy, as of this writing.
But let’s not dwell on the past. Instead, let’s forge ahead to that unevenly distributed future by examining these changes that we’ve deployed and hope others will adopt as well.
Change #1: an infobox template
If the term infobox is unfamiliar, surely the species is not: a panel floating on the right-hand side of the top of a Wikipedia page, with key summary information. Wikipedia defines this term of art clearly: “An infobox is a fixed-format table usually added to the top right-hand corner of articles to consistently present a summary of some unifying aspect that the articles share.”
In case you’re not a Wikipedia user, some key points: these infoboxes exist all over the place, and they provide a way into understanding a complex pile of detail. Our goal in this case was to provide a home for key summary points that, in an instant, tell you a lot about a country’s solar energy generation. The “fixed-format” criterion emphasizes that, for a given family of pages, the summary information is most helpful if it is uniform across all pages in the family.
Sounds straightforward, but Wikipedia’s standards are tight, and the community’s adherence, deliberation, and patrolling are ruthless. The paragraph just after the quote above lays it out:
The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article. [source]
In other words, it’s straightforward…but also in the eye of the beholder. Faced with the question of what “unifying aspects” of solar power at the country level deserved inclusion, we chose the following elements:
- installed capacity
- annual generation
- capacity per capita
- share of total electricity generation
- global rank (by capacity)
That fourth data point (solar capacity per capita) required doing some math and finding a home for it, but you’ll see that below under #3.
Change #2: updated introductions
In addition to missing the snapshot and uniform visual experience of an infobox, the solar power pages have been without coherence or uniform introductory sentences and paragraphs. While circumstances differ considerably from country to country, the essential summary statistics are the same, and we sought to build some uniformity with those. We focused on:
- stating generation, generation percentage, and capacity
- Example from Mexico: “Solar power in Mexico contributes 27.55 TWh of generation to the Mexican grid, accounting for 7.6% of total electric power generation as of 2024. Mexico has 11.99 GW of installed capacity, up from 0.18 GW in 2016.”
- having something notable or interesting, such as notable legislation or national goals
- Example from Italy: “As of 2023, government plans are targeting solar PV capacity to rise to 79 GW by 2030.”
- noting trends in recent growth, e.g., how far the industry has come in the last decade.
- Example from Greece: “At the end of 2024, the installed capacity was at 9.6 GW, double the capacity compared to two years before.”
Ultimately, we made these changes to the pages for Greece, Spain, Italy, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Austria, Chile, Portugal, Turkey, and Mexico.
Change #3: augmenting the solar power by country page
Technically, the information in an infobox should, according to Wikipedia best practices, reside in the page itself. Our changes ultimately mostly adhered to this guidance (though it often required rewriting the opening paragraphs, as described above), with one exception: capacity per capita.
The amount of solar generation capacity per person (units: watts per capita) serves the purpose of an infobox in two ways. First, it is a tidy measure of the extent to which a country is participating in the energy transition, at least with respect to solar. Second, by being a per capita measure, it provides a degree of comparability across countries (and thus is a “unifying aspect” of the subject, in the language of Wikipedia).
However, it didn’t previously exist anywhere in Wikipedia. So…we made it.
That said, it was pretty easy. First, it’s a division problem, where the numerator and the denominator are already in other Wikipedia pages – an important facilitating factor, since all data must be sourced, so it would be a heavier lift to create a data point from scratch.
Second, and quite luckily, there was an obvious home for it: the Solar power by country page, and specifically the table titled Solar statistics by country in 2024. We simply created a column titled “capacity per capita” and added it to this table, where it makes perfect sense, alongside the other data that is used in the infobox.
Challenges at the boundary of ‘solar’
We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, but there are some important limitations to this effort. They’re especially worth discussing here because they point out the inherent challenges of taking a complex topic with messy boundaries and summarizing bits of it across heterogeneous circumstances.
We focused entirely on utility-scale photovoltaics. This is consummately reasonable – utility-scale solar plants represent the vast bulk of solar capacity – but it’s still an arbitrary boundary. Several messy edges are worth mentioning.
First, there is a whole world of distributed solar out there. This includes rooftop solar at both the residential and commercial scales. In most countries and regions, rooftop solar is small compared utility-scale solar.
There’s an additional scale, often labeled as community solar in the United States, that is by default included in our totals but which one might wish to disaggregate, as it is typically a distinct regulatory phenomenon. And the scale is truly distinct: at the end of 2024, the U.S. had roughly 3,400 community solar projects representing roughly 7.8 GW, with the vast majority falling between 1 GW (very large for a rooftop project) to 5 GW (smaller than the low end of utility-scale). Wikipedia’s community solar page provides considerable detail. We did not treat it separately.
One might also disaggregate by solar technology. Although we’re in the midst of an extended boom consisting overwhelming of monocrystalline and polycrystalline photovoltaics, with a smattering of so-called “thin-film” technologies such as cadmium-telluride (CdTe). Furthermore, there has been optimism in the past about concentration solar power or CSP (even though it’s now pretty much dead, I encourage you to read about Ivanpah), and some start-ups and observers are predicting a big future for perovskites (which I find easy to obsess about, though for commercial purposes they’re years away at best). These nuances were out of scope.
Where do things go from here? Please help!
So, where next? First and foremost, adoption: we hope that the Wikipedia community will adopt our improvements. Anyone can order up our new infobox template, which is the whole purpose of making it a template in the first place. And we’ve provided enough examples of improved opening sections that, with a little effort, others should be able to jump in and replicate the improvements elsewhere. (We’re also building out a how-to manual here.)
Second, improvements. We had one major change that we didn’t get to: an infobox summary metric for growth. Maybe we’ll get to it, but it would be great if someone else did it.
The otherwise excellent main table on solar power by country page (Solar statistics by country) really should have a column that summarizes growth. Many countries have experienced solar booms in recent years, sometimes extending for years, and this should be captured here. Our idea: the five-year growth rate. The European Union’s total installed solar capacity grew 133% between 2019 and 2024, an annual rate of about 17%, while China’s grew 330%, or 29% annually. Using a five-year number summarizes the recent past without overemphasizing a single year-on-year result, which is can be tilted by a recession, a trade war, or a global pandemic. In short, this metric would complement the rest of the infobox with a perspective that takes time to glean from the rest of a page.
Third, consistency and completeness. Yes, our few changes translate into a significant improvement in user experience. With new infoboxes and better introductions, these pages give readers the punchlines quickly. Still, when you look at dozens of these ‘solar power in’ country pages, there’s one inescapable conclusion: it’s chaos out there.
The resolution to this chaos would come from deploying the same sections in every ‘solar power in’ country page and providing meaningful detail in each section. The status quo is a disappointing Swiss cheese, with many pages missing sections entirely and many more with totally inadequate versions of them. While not all countries’ solar sectors have achieved scale that warrants detailed treatment, the large majority would benefit from substantive versions of at least solar potential, installation (or generation), and policy.
We had two entertaining episodes that capture some of the challenge of resolving this chaos.
- First, we spiced up the inboxes with solar irradiation maps (like the ones you see in the banner at the top), but in one case (Italy), a Wikipedia editor revoked our deployment of the map in the infobox, stating that a map of solar irradiation was merely about physical potential, while the article we were editing concerned solar energy generation – related, but clearly distinct.
- Second, we initially hyperlinked the years cited in the infoboxes to send readers to the Solar Power by Country page, However, another Wikipedia editor complained that one can’t know where a hyperlinked year will send you (it could go anywhere!). Thus, the editor claimed, this would violate the Principle of Least Astonishment (tldr: “a component of a system should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave”). Wikipedia considers this to be one of its core principles, so…no go.
Is this obstinate purism or helpful adherence to rules? You decide – but either way, it’s part of the landscape of updating these pages, and it means that any updating effort requires more planning and care than initially meets the eye.
Our conclusion: let’s get good at energy knowledge…together
Ultimately, this was a successful experiment, and we hope others will be inspired to find ways to contribute to energy knowledge on Wikipedia and beyond. The success of the energy transition will hinge to some degree on our collective understanding of the challenges before us, and the seemingly limitless technological power at our fingertips still requires some curation of the underlying data. Now there’s one little corner of Wikipedia with some of that curation – we hope you’ll jump in and join us!
Update: A friendly Wikipedia user recently deployed our infobox in twelve (!) additional Solar Power in [country] pages, including the pages for Bulgaria, Japan, Brazil, .
Charlotte Shewchuk is a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, with a major in Business Administration and minors in Environmental Studies and Economics. Joshua Skov is a Professor of Practice in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, and Academic Director of the Center for Sustainable Business Practices.
