Zoe Corbyn’s article for The Guardian (UK), titled Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics, and the followup discussion on Slashdot got me thinking about my own Wikipedia edits.
The article quotes Dario Taraborelli, a research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation, as saying “Academics are trapped in this paradox of using Wikipedia but not contributing,” Huh? I’m really wondering what man-in-the-street wrote all the great stats stuff out there. And what’s the paradox? I use lots of things without contributing to them.
Taraborelli is further quoted as saying “The Wikimedia Foundation is looking at how it might capture expert conversation about Wikipedia content happening on other websites and feed it back to the community as a way of providing pointers for improvement.”
This struck home. I recently went through the entry for latent Dirichlet allocation and found a bug in their derivation. I wrote up a revised derivation and posted it on my own blog.
But why didn’t I go back and fix the Wikipedia? One, editing in their format is a pain. Second, as Corbyn’s article points out, I was afraid I’d put in lots of work and my changes would be backed out. I wasn’t worried that Wikipedia would erase whole pages, but apparently it’s an issue for some these days. A real issue is that most of the articles are pretty good, and while they’re not necessarily written the way I’d write them, they’re good enough that I don’t think it’s worth rewriting the whole thing (also, see point 2).
If you’re status conscious in a traditional way, you don’t blog either. It’s not what “counts” when it comes time for tenure and promotion. And if you think blogs don’t count, which are at least attributed, what about Wikipedia? Well, encyclopedia articles and such never counted for much on your CV. I did a few handbook type things and then started turning them down, mainly because I’m not a big fan of the handbook format.
In that sense, it’s just like teaching. I was told many times on tenure track that I shouldn’t be “wasting” so much time teaching. I was even told by a dean at a major midwestern university that they barely even counted teaching. So is it any surprise we don’t want to focus on teaching or writing encyclopedia articles?
I think that a modest amount of time improving WikiPedia articles is a reasonable investment.
I started the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admissible_decision_…
and did the earlier editing; the need for such an article was that there were red links that had no target. Others have contributed and improved the article (the complete history is not long).
Of course, I am retired and I can "waste" my time any way I want. But if I were still young, I would spend some of my time this way. But I would be judicious.
Yes, I have to say that the quality of the statistical articles on wikipedia are great. A wonderful resource with accurate graduate level content.
Given your level of recognized expertise, the odds of your work being backed out are pretty low.
I have not contributed that much to wikipedia (just a few corrections), but then again I have not found a lot that is missing. After checking just now I found that there is no page on the mid p-value, so I guess not everything is covered.
What about assigning wikipedia expansions/reworks/edits as student assignments? You teach some concepts, then say, OK your research projects are to rework page X, make the explanation better, add examples, find appropriate citations. The students present their proposed material to the professor who approves and/or recommends future work. If there isn't enough of a project for the whole class then a couple of people get wikipedia projects and the rest get traditional projects. Infeasible?
Probably Intellectuals in general, not necessary academics, are the ones who edit.
Woha! I am surprised you do not mention StaProb, the Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies (and supported by Springer, through the efforts of John Kimmel). This is an academic wiki solving the issues of (a) being erased by an anonymous jerk [the author decides on accepting co-authors], (b) being unsure of the contents [each entry is refereed], (c) having trouble with editing [LaTeX only, oops!, I forget you are not a big LaTeX fan!], (d) getting no reward [you can list your entries on your CV]. The on-line encyclopedia is still in its infancy and its interface requires some improvement, but still… It's worth advertising!
Well, I doubt if expert contribution can be "driven" through some sort of a "do it for the sake of science" reasoning. Although, there are several people who are doing it already, for me (an (?)expert in my discipline, but I hardly restrict my editing to my expertise), the whole process should be at least weakly satisfying (if not immediately beneficial).
That said, what can be achieved through a massive amateur collaboration is already done. What is needed now is the touch of the expert. Even merely leaving comments/pointers to articles on talk pages is sufficient, if not re-editing the entire article.
Part of the issue is structural.
If Wikipedia wants to be an aggregator, then it should automate search on the web, and make it possible to edit the resulting data it finds.
Also, as the OP said, the Wiki format is old. It needs to be improved for efficiency. Lots of ways to do that.
Wikipedia has no effective method for conflict resolution. It may be a fine resource for well-established facts, but for anything remotely controversial it is pretty useless.
Academics are not focussed on well-established facts but are more interested in the cutting edge of their discipline where controversy is normal and, indeed, healthy. We have well-established mechanisms for exchanging and criticising ideas. In science we also have mechanisms for winnowing out bad ideas and leaving in the good ones. The system isn't perfect, but it works a lot better than anything Wikipedia can manage.
I think the underlying issue is that academics may contribute to Wikipedia articles, but they discourage students from using them as sources for research, so while reliable information may be available, there is no way for users to distinguish between "most reliable" -i.e. academic writing and the "least reliable" of the man on the street. It looks like Wikipedia is attempting to change this by feeding the "expert conversation" in to related Wiki articles, thereby stamping them with the approval of the academic community.
@Ian: I'd be more worried about being backed out if I rewrote a whole article. Or if I changed the underlying parameterization of a distribution. I always make simple local edits when there's something easy to fix or to add.
@Xi'an: I love LaTeX and wish it was easier to put on this blog. On WordPress, the LaTeX plugin is awesome. I don't like editing in Wikipedia's text box and remembering all their syntax. I know I could cut and paste into emacs and back. And now that I have a Mac, it's actually easier to edit these text boxes because they support many of the emacs commands.
I wouldn't get involved with statprob.com because of this clause in the Statprob license: "I assign to Springer the exclusive right to any commercial exploitation of the article." I'm not even sure what that means for a piece of writing. Then they release it under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. As a former non-academic and a continuing part-time non-academic, this is way too restrictive for anything I produce and contribute for free. I think academics should rebel too. They're asking you to give them something for free that they can use commercially but you can't! Are only computer scientists are worried about these kinds of licenses? I won't even review for a source that's not open access any more.
@jsalvatier: I think that's a great idea. I'm a huge fan of making student projects as real as possible. All the contests out there are probably good for students, too.
@Andres: You're absolutely right. I take a very broad view of "academia" as basically anyone who's interested in the academic side of subjects. I definitely want to include the amateurs in the French sense.
As a non-academic, I also wish more academics would do book reviews on amazon.
Herbert Gintis does and his reviews are super helpful:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2U0XHQB7MMH…
I can understand the reasons people don't however.
I'm a Wikipedian (i.e. a totally amateur, non-academic person who edits just about every day, when I can).
I just wanted to say that while it's true that it would preferable if you were able to participate (and that inability is clearly not your lack of initiative or interest — there are barriers) the solution you found for pointing out the error is just fine by Wikipedia. If there are academics who feel totally unable to edit themselves, then there are lots of other ways to help.
Publishing reliable, especially peer reviewed and published, material is one first big step: amateur editors rely very much on academic sources!
Another one is not only publishing corrections and source material, but pointing out errors and links to correct sources on the discussion page of articles, which you can see by clicking the "Talk" button at the top navigation. Half the work of editing is research, so anything academics can do to point others to good material is very helpful.
Last but definitely not least, encouraging your young, tech-savvy students to participate directly in Wikipedia as producers of information, not just consumers, will not only help Wikipedia, but it's going to teach them to be much more skeptical consumers of information. Which is something I think we all can appreciate in the Internet age.
My main reason for not doing more edits on the Wikipedia is that regular users have minimal power to settle disputes with moderators.
Case in point, I wrote an article on the at the time coach of the University of Montana football coach, Bobby Hauck. I come back ten minutes later, article deleted as non-notable. Report article, justify why article notable in talk page. Ten minutes later, article deleted. Bobby Hauck finally got his article six months later when I mentioned this. A moderator from India heard the story, wrote a fine article, and there is currently a much changed article on Mr Hauck, now head football coach at UNLV.
I've had grammatical edits reverted by non-native English speakers. I've had terrible edits (I make mistakes) that I've made stick around for way too long. I suspect that quite a few academic articles have been written, onto to get hit with delete tags based on notability or 'what Wikipedia is and isn't tags.'
Bob,
I came across this great discussion, hope you don't mind if I chime in.
First of all, I agree that the quote about the paradox lacks some context. What I was telling the Guardian for this interview is that (based on my personal experience in the social sciences) it's very common among academics to use Wikipedia as a universal reference to look up basic concepts or notions relevant to one's research or teaching. In many cases Wikipedia entirely replaced the need of handbooks or basic reference works (I think it was Richard Dawkins who said he couldn't remember the last time he looked up something in an actual encyclopedia). My point on using vs. contributing to Wikipedia is perfectly captured by the example you give above: how come people do not feel compelled to fix inaccuracies or improve the quality of a Wikipedia article, if fixing that article is just one click away, and if Wikipedia is the resource academics (or their students) are already massively using on a daily basis? How come people prefer to blog instead of improving WP articles? This is one of the actual motivations behind the survey and the comments in this thread are a good example of what we hope to understand through this study.
This being said, you are right – there are certainly lots of things you use that you do not contribute to. But as an academic you consume *and* produce knowledge, and it's just natural to ask why Wikipedia is not capturing a larger share of your knowledge production. One cannot expect academics to contribute to Wikipedia at a large scale just for the sake of it, as in "I use it, therefore I should contribute it". The most urgent problem – apart from the technical and social barriers that you all mention – is how to credit Wikipedia contributions and how to find the right set of incentives for experts to participate. Until evaluation agencies and funding bodies take into account the fact that time spent on improving a Wikipedia article is as valuable as time spent, say, reviewing journal or conference papers, we won't see droves of academics participating. But the minimal condition for this to happen is to make sure contributors can actually showcase (and be credited for) their contributions. The way in which you can do this at the moment in Wikipedia is not straightforward.
@Prashanth, your point about the "touch of expert" is a good one. The kind of model we are currently looking at is the one of the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates contents about species from a variety of sources (including Wikipedia) and have these contents reviewed by its own expert contributors. Is there a way to surface these reviews and comments and feed them back to the community to help improve the quality of the original articles? If this became possible, we would have an effective and lightweight solution to obtain expert reviews without the need of committing busy researchers to become full-fledged Wikipedia editors.
@jsalvatier assigning Wikipedia edits as part of student assignments is already happening. On top of the initiative of the Association for Psychological Science mentioned in the Guardian article, there is a very promising initiative that involves several US universities in improving the quality of Wikipedia articles on US Public Policy by making this part of students assignments: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_…
We need to understand if this model can be generalized to other academic fields.
I'm a Wikimedian and a philosophy student: one thing it would be really useful for academics and scientists to do is even if they don't want to edit Wikipedia, is to post inaccuracies, as well as potential starting points for improvement, on the talk page. When I find a page that has something that looks dodgy but I'm not comfortable enough to edit it, often posting on the talk page with my concerns has prompted an enthusiastic amateur editor to dig deeper and sort it out.
And remember: a lot of the people hidden behind those anonymous pseudonyms are intelligent, knowledgeable smart people, and some of them are experts or very knowledgable amateurs in their fields. Unfortunately, they often don't get as much attention as the trolls and troublemakers.
The other thing to remember is that however much academics complain about Wikipedia, students will continue to use it (mostly smartly: for instance, if I'm thinking about reading a long academic book, I'll skim the author's Wikipedia page to get a rough idea what it's about, much as one might read a summary-type review in a journal, but I won't take the Wikipedia article as gospel, I'll go and get the book from the library and read it).
One thing Wikipedia should do is only allow edits from people which actually have an account on Wikipedia. Most vandalism come from people only identified via IP addresses.
Interesting from Slashdot:
"Lianna Davis writes in Watching the Watchers that Michel Aaij has won tenure in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama in part because of the more than 60,000 edits … he's written for Wikipedia. … Aaij felt that his contributions to Wikipedia merited mention in his tenure portfolio and a few weeks before the portfolio was due two of his colleagues suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under 'research' as well as well as 'service.'"