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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