Three Reasons Why Earth Scientists Should Edit Wikipedia - Eos
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If you are a researcher who is looking to communicate science more broadly, an easy step involves
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
is a frequent first stop for researchers, students, and the public. The world’s largest free encyclopedia,
Wikipedia
is also one of the
largest websites
in terms of traffic.
If you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.
Here’s the important thing: Page views of
Wikipedia
are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.
Editing
Wikipedia
is a way to show your notable work to more people, who, in turn, may benefit, use, or be interested in your research topic. I am not an expert
Wikipedia
editor, and my suggestion for researchers to edit
Wikipedia
is not novel [e.g.,
Bateman and Logan,
2010;
Bond,
2011;
Logan et al.,
2010], but I do want to discuss the benefits and present some (personal) data to convince you of the value of editing.
Here are three reasons you should edit Wikipedia.
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1. Your Research, out from Behind a Paywall, Gets into Public View
As an online encyclopedia,
Wikipedia
is a venue for summarizing previously published research, and therefore, editing it is a form of public outreach and science communication. The article with your brief edits could be the only written place on the Web that isn’t behind a paywall, where people can read about recent scientific work, making it more visible to scientists and nonscientists alike.
To make this point about increased visibility more quantitative, I show in Figure 1 a time series of monthly page views (users only, not bots) for four
Wikipedia
articles relevant to my primary research. Figure 1 also shows the page views of my research website and article views for a recent open-access journal article of mine for comparison. The log scale demonstrates just how many people peruse some
Wikipedia
pages versus primary sources.
Fig. 1. Monthly page views for
Wikipedia
show the large audience compared with page views of the author’s personal website and page views of a 2014 open-access journal article by the author. Note the logarithmic
axis. Credit: Evan Goldstein
2. Editing Articles Is Quick and Easy
I want to stress that editing pages is not overly time-consuming.
Logan et al.
[2010] offer simple and clear guidance about editing
Wikipedia
. In addition to compiling a
list of frequently asked questions
about editing,
Wikipedia
itself maintains extensive literature on
common mistakes
as well as
guidance
about what
Wikipedia
is and is not.
The Wiki Education Foundation also maintains resources for instructors to
integrate editing
Wikipedia
into the classroom
. I have touched upon only a few of the available resources on
Wikipedia
editing; there are many more.
3. Editing Provides an Opportunity to Connect and Network
Wikipedia
is a gateway to scientific literature [
Taraborelli,
2016]. Citations of your work in
Wikipedia
not only increase the visibility of research but also connect
Wikipedia
to your journal article. If you have an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (
ORCiD
; many journals now require this), you are also eligible for an
Impactstory
profile. Impactstory aggregates the Web links (from a variety of venues) to all works listed in your ORCiD account.
Information on usage can allow you to connect to people who are interested in your research but won’t be citing it in peer-reviewed literature.
As a result, mentions of your research on
Wikipedia
appear on your Impactstory profile. This information on usage (via Twitter, blogs,
Wikipedia
, etc.) can allow you to connect to people who are interested in your research but won’t be citing it in peer-reviewed literature. I would add that if you are an early-career scientist or student, these nontraditional research mentions may have professional benefits (such as networking).
Don’t Game the System
In addition to these benefits, I also want to mention a caveat.
There is a danger that some academic
Wikipedia
editors will attempt to “game” the research metrics system, tending toward outsized self-promotion as opposed to sharing notable new science with the public.
Wikipedia
provides information about
conflict of interest and self-promotion
to inform editors and prevent these issues.
Guidance on these topics is also given by
Logan et al.
[2010].
A Warm-up to More
Editing
Wikipedia
pages does not require a large time commitment but can have a significant effect on the
communication of science
because of
Wikipedia
’s large number of page views. Editing can be incorporated into your scholarly life as a “warm-up” exercise for scholarly writing, and I can imagine that a lab- or department-wide edit-a-thon could be a valuable and fun event.
In summary, I urge you to consider editing
Wikipedia
as public outreach, to get research into the hands of people who could benefit from your newfound knowledge.
Acknowledgments
I thank E. Janke, E. Lazarus, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback.
References
Bateman, A., and D. W. Logan (2010), Time to underpin Wikipedia wisdom,
Nature
468
(7325), 765, doi:10.1038/468765c.
Bond, A. L. (2011), Why ornithologists should embrace and contribute to Wikipedia,
Ibis
153
(3), 640–641, doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.2011.01135.x.
Logan, D. W., et al. (2010), Ten simple rules for editing Wikipedia,
PLoS Comput. Biol.
(9), e1000941, doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941.
Taraborelli, D. (2016), Wikipedia’s role in the dissemination of scholarship, figshare,
doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.4175343.v2
—Evan B. Goldstein (email:
[email protected]
@ebgoldstein
), Department of Geological Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Citation:
Goldstein, E. B. (2017), Three reasons why Earth scientists should edit
Wikipedia
Eos, 98
. Published on 27 January 2017.
Text © 2017. The authors.
CC BY 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
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