Most scientists are in the fortunate position of having access to a wide body of literature, and experience in using inline citations to support their writing. Since unverified content may be removed from Wikipedia at any time, provide supporting citations for every statement that might be challenged by another editor at some point in the future.
Whenever possible, give preference to secondary sources such as reviews or book chapters that survey the relevant primary research over research articles themselves. Wikipedia's accessibility makes each of its scientific articles an excellent entry point for laypeople seeking specialist information.
By also providing direct hyperlinks to reliable, freely accessible online resources with your citations biological databases or open-access journals, for example , other editors can quickly verify your content and readers have immediate access to authoritative sources that address the subject in greater detail. Many people are tempted to write or edit Wikipedia articles about themselves.
Resist that urge. If you are sufficiently notable to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia, eventually someone else will write an article about you. Remember that unlike a personal Web page, your Wikipedia biography is not yours to control.
A lovingly crafted hagiography extolling your many virtues can rapidly accumulate information you would rather not be publicized. You may already have a Wikipedia biography, but it contains factual inaccuracies that you wish to correct. How do you do this without breaking the rules? Wikipedia's guidelines encourage you to provide information about yourself on the associated discussion page, but please permit other editors to add it to the article itself.
Think twice, also, before writing about your mentors, colleagues, competitors, inventions, or projects. Doing so places you in a conflict of interest and inclines you towards unintentional bias [12]. If you have a personal or financial interest in the subject of any article you choose to edit, declare it on the associated discussion page and heed the advice of other editors who can offer a more objective perspective.
Writing about a subject about which you have academic expertise is not a conflict of interest [12] ; indeed, this is where we can contribute to Wikipedia most effectively. When writing in your area of expertise, referencing material you have published in peer-reviewed journals is permitted if it is genuinely notable, but use common sense and revisit Rule 7. Occasionally you may interact with another editor who clearly does not share your expertise on the subject of an article.
This can often prove frustrating for experts and is the basis of much academic angst on Wikipedia [1]. On such occasions, remember that you are assessed only on your contributions to Wikipedia, not who you are, your qualifications, or what you have achieved in your career. Your specialist knowledge should enable you to write in a neutral manner and produce reliable, independent sources to support each assertion you make. If you do not provide verification, your contributions will be rightly challenged irrespective of how many degrees you hold.
All articles in Wikipedia should be impartial in tone and content [13]. When writing, do state facts and facts about notable opinions, but do not offer your opinion as fact. Many newcomers to Wikipedia gravitate to articles on controversial issues about which people hold strong opposing viewpoints.
Avoid these until familiar with Wikipedia's policies see Rule 3 , and instead focus on articles that are much easier to remain dispassionate about. Many scientists who contribute to Wikipedia fail to appreciate that a neutral point of view is not the same as the mainstream scientific point of view.
When writing about complex issues, try to cover all significant viewpoints and afford each with due weight, but not equal weight.
For example, an article on a scientific controversy should describe both the scientific consensus and significant fringe theories, but not in the same depth or in a manner suggesting these viewpoints are equally held. Wikipedia can be a confusing place for the inexperienced editor. There is also increasing commercial shenanigans, with companies and enterprising public relations people sweeping through Wikipedia to pepper pages with mentions of corporate entities and specific brands, which all provides extra work for the volunteer editors.
The general message with Wikipedia is that here, on the face of it, is what we know. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Some mischievous rewriting of history is inevitable, but editors are vigilant when it comes to party political grime artists.
Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? How good is the historical writing? What are the potential implications for our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the general public? Writing about Wikipedia is maddeningly difficult. Because Wikipedia is subject to constant change, much that I write about Wikipedia could be untrue by the time you read this. An additional difficulty stems from its vast scale.
I cannot claim to have read the million words in the entire Wikipedia, nor even the subset of articles as many as half that could be considered historical. He recruited Sanger, age thirty-one, who was finishing a Ph. It now has more than ten times that number. Sanger designed Nupedia to ensure that experts wrote and carefully vetted content. In part because of that extensive review, it managed to publish only about twenty articles in its first eighteen months.
In early January , as Sanger was trying to think of ways to make it easier for people without formal credentials to contribute to Nupedia, a computer programmer friend told him about the WikiWikiWeb software, developed by the programmer Ward Cunningham in the mids, that makes it easy to create or edit a Web page—no coding html hypertext markup language or uploading to a server needed. But the Nupedia editors viewed the experiment with suspicion; by mid-January Sanger and Wales had given it a separate name, Wikipedia, and its own domain.
Very swiftly, Wikipedia became the tail that swallowed the dog Nupedia. In less than a month, it had 1, articles; by the end of its first year, it had 20,; by the end of its second year, it had , articles in just the English edition. By then it had begun to spawn foreign-language editions, of which there are now , from Abkhazian to Klingon to Zulu, with the German edition the largest after English.
By late the tech boom was over, and Bomis, like most other dot-coms, was losing money and laying off employees. It had almost a half million articles by its third anniversary in January ; it broke the million mark just nine months later.
More than fifty-five thousand people have made at least ten contributions to Wikipedia. Its goals go no further. Historians may find the last exclusion surprising since we value original research above everything else, but it makes sense for a collaboratively created encyclopedia. And someone whose expertise rests on having done extensive original research on a topic gets no particular respect. Wikipedia articles rarely ascend to the desired level of neutrality, but the npov policy provides a shared basis of discourse among Wikipedians.
But search engines make it relatively easy to catch both forms of plagiarism, and it does not seem to be much of a problem in Wikipedia. The gfdl and gpl deviate most surprisingly from conventional intellectual property rules by giving you the freedom to use the text however you wish. But your new version must give credit to Wikipedia and allow others to reuse and refashion your revised version.
In fact, multiple versions of Wikipedia content have sprouted all over the Web. Or it might provide the basis for tools that would enable you to search intelligently through quantities of undifferentiated digital text and distinguish, say, between references to John D. Rockefeller and those to his son John D. Rockefeller Jr.
As Daniel J. What kind of respect, for example, do you owe a contributor who defaces other contributions or attacks other contributors? How do you ensure that entries are not continually filled with slurs and vandalism when the wiki allows any person anyplace to write whatever he or she pleases in any Wikipedia entry? We began [recalled Sanger] with no or few policies in particular and said that the community would determine—through a sort of vague consensus, based on its experience working together—what the policies would be.
Over time, however, rules proliferated. But Wikipedia acquired laws before it had police or courts. Although Sanger lost this battle, he may have won the war. Wikipedia gradually developed elaborate mechanisms for dealing with difficult people.
It evolved intricate rules by which participants could be temporarily or even permanently banned from Wikipedia for inappropriate behavior. The Wikimedia Foundation, which controls Wikipedia, has a five-member board: two elected members plus Wales and two of his business partners.
All of this works surprisingly well. To be sure, Wikipedia can be a bewildering and annoying place for newcomers. Consensus and democracy fail at times. But other entries—even ones in which dedicated partisans such as the followers of Lyndon LaRouche battle for their point of view—remain open for anyone to edit and still present a reasonably accurate account. Wikipedia has created a working community, but has it created a good historical resource? Are Wikipedians good historians?
As in the old tale of the blind men and the elephant, your assessment of Wikipedia as history depends a great deal on what part you touch. Unfortunately, the blind man reporting from those nether regions would return shaking his head in annoyance. Dozens of standard topics—the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, the Harlem Renaissance, woman suffrage, the rise of radio, the emergence of industrial unionism—go unmentioned.
Other entries in the United States history series are worse. The entry on women leaves out the Nineteenth Amendment but devotes a paragraph to splits in the National Organization for Women now over the defense of Valerie Solanas who shot Andy Warhol. The to entry only briefly alludes to the Spanish-American War but devotes five paragraphs to the Philippine war, an odd reversal of the general bias in history books, which tend to ignore the latter and lavish attention on the former. The essay also plagiarizes one sentence from another online source.
The 4,word essay on the history of U. Part of the problem is that such broad synthetic writing is not easily done collaboratively. Equally important, some articles do not seem to have attracted much interest from Wikipedians.
The essay on the interwar years has had only edits, about one-seventh the number of interventions in the article on fdr. Participation in Wikipedia entries generally maps popular, rather than academic, interests in history. Biographies of historical figures offer a more favorable terrain for Wikipedia since biography is always an area of popular historical interest.
Moreover, biographies offer the opportunity for more systematic comparison because the unit of analysis is clear-cut, whereas other topics can be sliced and diced in multiple ways. But even to assess the quality of biographical writing in Wikipedia requires some context.
The comparison is unfair—both publications have had multimillion-dollar budgets—but it is still illuminating, and it sheds some favorable light on Wikipedia. In coverage Wikipedia currently lags behind the comprehensive American National Biography Online, which has 18, entries, but exceeds the general-interest Encarta.
Of a sample of 52 people listed in American National Biography Online, Wikipedia included one-half, but Encarta only about one-fifth. The American National Biography Online profiles were also more detailed, averaging about four times as many words as those in Wikipedia.
Relying on volunteers and eschewing strong editorial control leads to widely varying article lengths in Wikipedia. It devotes 3, words to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, more than it gives to President Woodrow Wilson 3, but fewer than it devotes to the conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche 5, ; American National Biography Online provides a more proportionate from a conventional historical perspective coverage of 1, words for Asimov and 7, for Wilson.
It ignores the still-living LaRouche. Of course, American National Biography Online also betrays the biases of its editors in its word allocations: Would nonhistorians agree that Charles Beard deserves twice as many words as the reformer and New Deal administrator Harold Ickes?
They are more likely to be English-speaking, males, and denizens of the Internet. Such bias has occasioned much discussion, including among Wikipedians.
The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the British television show Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair. But the largest bias—at least in the English-language version—favors Western culture and English-speaking nations , rather than geek or popular culture. Perhaps as a result, Wikipedia is surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U. In the 25 biographies I read closely, I found clear-cut factual errors in only 4.
Most were small and inconsequential. Frederick Law Olmsted is said to have managed the Mariposa mining estate after the Civil War, rather than in And some errors simply repeat widely held but inaccurate beliefs, such as that Haym Salomon personally loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American government during the Revolution and was never repaid.
In fact, the money merely passed through his bank accounts. Both Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica offer up the same myth. Again, some are small or widely accepted, such as the false claim made by Roosevelt supporters during the election that fdr wrote the Haitian constitution or that Roosevelt money was crucial to his first election to public office in The lack of a single author or an overall editor means that Wikipedia sometimes gets things wrong in one place and right in another.
The Olmsted entry has him correctly forming Olmsted, Vaux and Company in at the same time that he is incorrectly in California running Mariposa. The entry on Andrew Jackson Downing says that Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in even though the cross-referenced article on Vaux has them accurately winning the design competition in To find 4 entries with errors in 25 biographies may seem a source for concern, but in fact it is exceptionally difficult to get every fact correct in reference works.
To compare different language versions of Wikipedia, Pew Research Center drew on data from stats. For the data regarding the top pages by language, we compiled and analyzed hourly raw page count files posted by Wikimedia. Additional analysis was performed using data compiled by Wikitrends , an independent site run by Johan Gunnarsson and based on data from Wikipedia. These lists of the most popular pages in also demonstrate the international popularity of American television shows and movies.
Despite the explosion of content and Web traffic in dozens of languages, the English version is still by far the biggest and most popular. It had approximately 97 billion page views — more than six times that of Japanese, the next most popular version. The versions in three other languages, Spanish, German and Russian, had more than 10 billion page views.
Further illustrating the gap in Web traffic, the most visited article on the English version, List of deaths by year , alone had more page views In , China blocked access to the Chinese version in anticipation of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of In the years since, the Chinese government has vacillated between blocking parts of the site and allowing access.
In , it was discovered that congressional staffers had been editing pages to make changes to political biographies. That was just one instance in a long-running list of episodes where Wikipedia posts had become a battleground for partisans or others with agendas.
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