I think inthe first place Wikipedia gets its academic relevance through the publicrelevance it de facto has. Wikipedia became the most popular encyclopedia andis a very important source of information for many people. That includesscholarly knowledge which leads to a kind of public pressure. The highrelevance and importance that Wikipedia has among the public can hardly beignored by scholars. Whatever somebody might think about the principles andquality of Wikipedia, nobody can ignore the high relevance this encyclopediahas, I believe. If for example somebody from outside the scientific community wants to getinformation about Neuroscience there is a high chance that he will simplysearch with Google for that term which will almost for sure lead him to theWikipedia article on Neuroscience. Therefore this article might be the first impressiona person gets about the discipline.

Soregardless of the functional principles of Wikipedia and the conflicts they causefor scholarly communication (e.g. the not clearly visible authorship, the lackof quality control etc.), Wikipedia has at least a high PUBLIC relevance andmaybe already a quite significant relevance in academics. A study by the GermanHIS shows for example that the majority of German students uses Wikipedia as aninformation source and generally believe that it is a trustful source. Also inresearch there seems to be a growing relevance. The Journal “RNA Biology” forinstance, wants its authors to publish abstracts of their articles in Wikipedia(Nature commented that with the title: “Publish in Wikipedia or perish”). At the sametime Wikipedia needs scholarly expertise to enhance its quality, which is whythe Wikimedia Foundation is trying to motivate scholars to engage themselves inthe projects. This is why I believe there is this kind of “forced marriage”. Ofcourse there are many conflicts between academics and Wikipedia but in the endboth cannot really ignore each other. I know colleagues who are absolutelyagainst Wikipedia and they have good reasons. But this won´t stop people to useit.

Wikibooksand Wikiversity do not have this high public relevance yet, so they do notforce scholars so much to react. At the same time they offer interesting possibilities forscholarly communication which Wikipedia doesn´t have: For example, originalresearch is possible in Wikiversity, Wikibooks allows a more obvious authorshipetc. However, from our observation it seems that these projects do not have ahigh relevance for scholarly communication yet.

So to putin a nutshell, I believe that the driving force of scholarly engagement is thepublic success of Wikipedia, which the other projects don´t really have yet. Thereforethey play a minor role for scholarly communication so far (which might change of course). I hope Icould clarify my point a bit and didn´t cause even more confusion ;) Best,

René

Thanks,Cormac

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