Journal to Require Authors to Create Wikipedia Pages
December 16th, 2008Posted by: admin
Nature News notes an interesting development. The journal RNA Biology will require authors submitting to a particular section to also submit Wikipedia pages that will summarize the work. These pages will be peer reviewed by the journal prior to publication. One such page is already online. There is no explicit connection on that Wikipedia page between the page and the journal. Perhaps that is to encourage other people to contribute to the page, which can be edited by anyone. While some scholars have essentially opted out of the journal publishing system to put their work online, this is a step towards combining, or at least connecting, the two venues for academic publishing. A question worth pursuing as this initiative moves forward is to track how often these pages are viewed, and what information can be derived about visitors to those pages.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I often rely on wikipedia for basic general knowledge in areas in which I am weak, but I have to admit that it is difficult, sometimes, discerning the wheat from the tares. While a lot of useful information is made easily available by wiki sites, so too is misinformation. I think that this policy may be considered as means to provide more and more rigorously verified information, but I feel it will feed the clutter of wikipedia as much as anything.
December 17th, 2008 at 8:47 am
I think making the connection to the journal much more explicit could address some of these concerns. Otherwise, it’s not particularly clear that the implied expertise of the knowledge in the pages would be well communicated.
December 17th, 2008 at 11:27 am
If I were an author in RNA Biology, I would never want the connection between my article and the page to be explicit. If it were, then it would be my reputation that was sullied when some wikivandal edited in crap about Sarah Palin jpgs or whatever. In essence, if anyone can edit the page, I do not want my name attached. Even if you regard my vandalism example as extreme, what if your research rival edits the page to call into question all of the results from your paper, and does so in a way that you feel is unfair to your work? What can you do?
I am not sure that requiring Wikipedia page creation is a good idea at all, even if it is anonymous. I do appreciate the need for scientists to do a better job of making their work accessible to lay people. But to me it seems like a better way to democratize knowledge is by reducing costs and barriers to existing scientific literature. Stuff like PLoS comes to mind. Maybe they should just require a “Lay Abstract” for every paper.
December 17th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
While I’m in favor of the PLoS journals, they are still journals. Even with lay abstracts, it seems more likely that an average reader that is seeking out something about a scientific topic will start with Google (and not with Google Scholar).
Curt’s concerns about the editing of Wikipedia are important. However, all pages in Wikipedia have a history tab where you can visit all previous versions. I wish it was larger and I wish that Wikipedia readers had a clue about it. That would go a long way to weeding out the use of bad, incorrect or otherwise useless pages.