Hi everyone,
I am writing a report on science in Wikipedia and other projects of
Wikimedia (especially Wikibooks and Wikiversity). A question which
interests me in particular is: who is actually contributing to the
articles? With "who" I am asking especially for the educational level of
the contributors, but also other aspects such as gender and age might be
of interest, of course.
The context of this question is that I am wondering if there are maybe
more "full-time experts" taking part in Wikipedia as one might guess. So
far I found examples for both: Undergraduates taking care of major parts
of scientific fields at Wikipedia (see e.g. Keim 2007) and active
full-time scientists contributing to the encyclopaedia (see e.g. Huss et
al. 2008; Butler 2008).
I would appreciate any help. Thank you.
René
References:
Butler, D., 2008, /Publish in Wikipedia or perish/; Website; Nature News
<http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081216/full/news.2008.1312.html>.
Huss, J. W., Orozco, C., Goodale, J., Wu, C., Batalov, S., Vickers, T.
J., Valafar, F. und Su, A. I., 2008, A Gene Wiki for Community
Annotation of Gene Function, /PLoS Biology/ /6(7)/, e175
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0060175 >.
Keim, B., 2007, News feature: WikiMedia, /Nat Med/ /13(3)/, 231-233
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm0307-231 >.
--
René König
Sociology student at the University of Bielefeld, Germany
Research assistant at the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA)
of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS)
Strohgasse 45, 5
A-1030 Vienna
Tel. (Office): +43-(0)1-51581-6597
Homepage: renekoenig.eu
Project "Interactive Science"
(for more information please see
www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/interactive)