I agree it's a good thing overall. I'm just alerting us to the potential
problem it might create. I note it might not just be the academics
themselves. In Australia at least, institutional research rankings are
heavily based on citation counts. Our "Excellence in Research Assessment"
(ERA) process creates massive institutional pressure to track down every
possible citation, much of which is done by the library and admin teams. And
with Wikipedia, it's so easy to create a new citation . it's hard to believe
some people won't be tempted .
Are we able to extract the user names associated with adding links to
academic papers? Some time downstream analysis of that data might be
interesting, especially if there do appear to be clusters of cited papers
with common author names added by the same user name or IP address. There's
almost certainly a publication in that! :-)
But as I say, so long as the papers are actually relevant where they are
cited in Wikipedia, this is not a bad thing for Wikipedia if academics do
decide to promote their work that way.
Kerry
_____
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aaron
Halfaker
Sent: Saturday, 7 February 2015 1:25 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l]
Altmetric.com now tracks Wikipedia citations
I agree that we could be doing something interesting with the social
dynamics of Wikipedia editing by releasing this dataset -- and that some new
problems may result. However, I think that it's much better to have too
much academic interest than not enough. With a little AGF and diligence, we
ought to be able to deal with this problem like we've dealt with quality
control concerns in the past. Academics have to be very careful about their
reputation, and it's hard to cite your own unnecessarily without giving up
who you are since your name's going to be on the paper.
Either way, this is a useful dataset for library sciences work and it's
public anyway. We're just making it easier to work with. Honestly, that's
how I got started working in this space -- helping someone get data for
their own research.
-Aaron
On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 5:50 AM, mjn <mjn(a)anadrome.org> wrote:
I agree it's not a new worry, but it might change the nature of the
problem a bit, and is worth at least being vigilant about. I did have a
similar idea some years ago, to compute an "impact factor" for
being-cited-on-Wikipedia, but after discussing it with some colleagues,
didn't do so specifically because of the worry that it would encourage
more gaming of Wikipedia citations. Of course it's inevitable that
someone would eventually do it, but I still think it was probably right
on balance to not push that date forward.
Regarding the SEO analogy, the external links on Wikipedia are on
average not the best part of Wikipedia, so it's not a very heartening
The citations for now are not nearly as spammy as the external links
are, and I hope it stays that way!
It's of course not new that there is an incentive to spam citations.
Even without explicit Wikipedia-citation-tracking, there are incentives
to spam marginally relevant citations in order to increase perceived
prominence. Maybe being in a Wikipedia article will get your paper in
front of more grad students who will end up citing it "for real" after
encountering it on Wikipedia, etc. A direct citation count feels like
it's likely to exacerbate that, since now removing an irrelevant
citation to someone's article is a direct attack on their metrics!
Though it's possible the actual effect on editing patterns will be
small.
From a research perspective, the new datasets of
citations might be
interesting to track over time, and correlate back to editors, to
see if
there are any interesting (or "interesting") patterns.
-Mark
--
mjn |
http://www.anadrome.org
Oliver Keyes <ironholds(a)gmail.com> writes:
And SEO spammers will add themselves, too! This is not
a new problem.
On Thursday, 5 February 2015, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Do I understand this correctly? That Wikipedia articles that cite
> academic publications will be included in citation count now (at least
for
> altmetrics). While that's great recognition
for Wikipedia as a corpus of
> scholarly work, does that mean Wikipedia will be overrun with academic
> authors adding citations to their academic papers in any Wikipedia
article
> they can get away with in order to improve their
citation counts for
their
> CVs?
>
>
>
> I note that generally we can spot self-citation because the two papers
> will have an author name in common, but with the ability to edit
Wikipedia
> anonymously and pseudonymously means that we
cannot spot self-citation.
>
>
>
> While judging research purely on citation counts is a deeply flawed
method
> of assessment, nonetheless it is a reality and the
pressure on folks to
> "game" the system is tremendous given the role it can play in
appointment,
> tenure, promotion and grant applications.
>
>
>
> On the positive side, we might be able to get rid of a lot of
> citation-needed tags.
>
>
>
> Kerry
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org');
> [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
>
<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org');
]
> *On Behalf Of *Pine W
> *Sent:* Friday, 6 February 2015 8:13 AM
> *To:* Wiki Research-l; Raymond Leonard; Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration
> [Public]; North American Cultural Partnerships
> *Subject:* [Wiki-research-l]
Altmetric.com now tracks Wikipedia citations
>
>
>
> FYI:
>
>
http://www.altmetric.com/blog/new-source-alert-wikipedia/
>
> Pine
>
> This is an Encyclopedia <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> * One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock
of
> our past, in which we must delve The well of our
future, The clear water
we
> must leave untainted for those who come after us,
The fertile earth, in
> which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands, And the
broad
> fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward
knowing how much we do
not
> know. -Catherine Munro *
>
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