On 10 July 2014 19:44, Jennifer Gristock <gristock@me.com> wrote:

If a researcher has new results in a particular field, a published, surprising research finding that confounds expectations, I think it might be understandable why they might feel most passionate and most knowledgeable about those new findings and might want to share them inside a Wikipedia article.

That is all I said. I did not say they could not contribute.

I do think that it would be very strange to insist that a researcher can't insert a fact and a (self-citing) reference into an article because that would be a COI. But if that is how it is, then I would like to know. And I also feel that if one of the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation is to encourage more academics to edit Wilkipedia, then having a clear policy on this is rather important, and these questions that I am asking here is me trying to find out what the policy and technical data-crunching possibilities are with respect to self-citing and student/colleague citing.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/mar/29/wikipedia-survey-academic-contributions

The mission, of course, is not to collect "facts" as such. Some people would say that it is to produce "articles". I have fought endlessly against that view: the point is to improve a piece of hypertext. 

On the public engagement front, the single "finding" is what you can read in Nature, New Scientist, and similar publications (talking now about science). Wikipedia qua publication does a rather different job in science: to support the general reader by bridging the gap between what, say, a 16-year-old learns in a science lesson, and the frontier of research. The frontier by itself doesn't make great encyclopedic content, unless the exposition of its background is up to standard. (A standard comment about upscale science documentaries is that people switch off at the third unfamiliar idea being brought into play.) 

The major problem is probably that the "cascade" of ideas doesn't usually extend in a unbroken way from school level up to what graduate students have to acquire. This is one reason that appreciation of "summary style" matters to this discussion. Where a recent finding illustrates what is going on in a field, perhaps the illustration matters more (unless it's a breakthrough ... another story then ... Higgs boson for example).

Example: I was fairly outraged to read in the paper a columnist saying the recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics were given too much money, because few people could understand what they had done. Well, I started the page about that at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize_in_Mathematics

And the point to me is that all the links are blue. In principle people can study up using Wikipedia on current advances. 

What academics in any field can do to help Wikipedia, and themselves, is to help dispel the idea that top people in their field are over-rewarded if one year they earn 40% of what a Premier League footballer might get.

So, is adding a research finding "helpful" in that sense? Depends how it is done. Context, due understatement, fairness to others in the field, expository skill ...

Charles