Hi,
In this GigaScience piece, I'm arguing, that "We are the 1% in terms of knowledge access privilege; developing Wikipedia, the common good of humanity, is our moral obligation", and trying to figure out why academics still frown upon Wikipedia. https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/8/12/giz139/5651107
Besides a shameless self-promo, I'm also genuinely curious what your experience with persuading people in Academia that what you do is legit is.
best,
dj
--
_____________________________________________________________
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/28_4liQwIiNQmYh0G9FjIw5_4xyXPU6AQlm3IeESnn...]https://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl
Dariusz Jemielniak, Ph.D., Full Professor, head of MINDShttps://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/
(Management in Networked and Digital Societies), Kozminski University
associate faculty Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Societyhttps://cyber.harvard.edu, Harvard University
Recent articles:
* Jérôme Hergueux, Dariusz Jemielniak (2019) Should digital files be considered a commons? Copyright infringement in the eyes of lawyershttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2019.1616019?fbclid=IwAR1Wskn7Bwnhko05SS-frOc6TiAuxPzPSWGo5_50Xu6NiNdxnDfxeleF-PM, The Information Society, 35(4): 198-215 * Dariusz Jemielniak, Gwinyai Masukume, Maciej Wilamowski (2019) The Most Influential Medical Journals According to Wikipedia: Quantitative Analysishttps://www.jmir.org/2019/1/e11429/pdf, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21 (1), pp. e11429 * Dariusz Jemielniak, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Agata Stasik (2018) Anecdotal evidence: understanding organizational reality through organizational humorous taleshttp://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/HUMOR-Anecdotal-evidence-understanding-organizational-reality-through-organizational-humorous-tales.pdf HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 31: 3. 539–561. * Dariusz Jemielniak, Maciej Wilamowski (2017) Cultural Diversity of Quality of Information on Wikipediashttp://crow.kozminski.edu.pl/papers/cultures%20of%20wikipedias.pdf Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68: 10. 2460–2470.
Congrats, Dariusz!
To anyone interested in exploring the main question Dariusz presented further, the following article is recommended -
To those who have academic access and want to review online - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13614533.2012.740439 To those who don't, here is the bibliographic reference (Also attached the PDF) - Bayliss, G. (2013). Exploring the cautionary attitude toward Wikipedia in higher education: Implications for higher education institutions. *New Review of Academic Librarianship*, *19*(1), 36-57.
I still think we've made major steps forward in the past decade. Actually, I'd say that these days, we are in the same place with Wikidata and Academia, as we were about a decade or so with Wikipedia. But that's a whole other discussion. :)
Cheers, Shani.
----------------------------------------------- *Shani Evenstein Sigalov*
* Lecturer, Tel Aviv University. * PhD Candidate, School of Education, Tel Aviv University. * Azrieli Foundation Research Fellow. * OER & Emerging Technologies Coordinator, UNESCO Chair https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495 on Technology, Internationalization and Education, School of Education, Tel Aviv University https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495.
* Member of the Board of Trustees https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/shani-evenstein-sigalov/, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/. * Chairperson, The Hebrew Literature Digitization Society http://www.israelgives.org/amuta/580428621. * Chief Editor, Project Ben-Yehuda http://benyehuda.org.
+972-525640648
On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 12:04 AM Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
Hi,
In this GigaScience piece, I'm arguing, that "We are the 1% in terms of knowledge access privilege; developing Wikipedia, the common good of humanity, is our moral obligation", and trying to figure out why academics still frown upon Wikipedia. https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/8/12/giz139/5651107
Besides a shameless self-promo, I'm also genuinely curious what your experience with persuading people in Academia that what you do is legit is.
best,
dj
--
[ https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/28_4liQwIiNQmYh0G9FjIw5_4xyXPU6AQlm3IeESnn... ]https://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl
Dariusz Jemielniak, Ph.D., Full Professor, head of MINDS< https://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/%3E
(Management in Networked and Digital Societies), Kozminski University
associate faculty Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society< https://cyber.harvard.edu%3E, Harvard University
Recent articles:
- Jérôme Hergueux, Dariusz Jemielniak (2019) Should digital files be
considered a commons? Copyright infringement in the eyes of lawyers< https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2019.1616019?fbclid=Iw..., The Information Society, 35(4): 198-215
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Gwinyai Masukume, Maciej Wilamowski (2019) The
Most Influential Medical Journals According to Wikipedia: Quantitative Analysishttps://www.jmir.org/2019/1/e11429/pdf, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21 (1), pp. e11429
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Agata Stasik (2018)
Anecdotal evidence: understanding organizational reality through organizational humorous tales< http://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/HUMOR-Anecdotal-evi... HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 31: 3. 539–561.
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Maciej Wilamowski (2017) Cultural Diversity of
Quality of Information on Wikipedias< http://crow.kozminski.edu.pl/papers/cultures%20of%20wikipedias.pdf%3E Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68: 10. 2460–2470. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Congrats, Dariusz!
To anyone interested in exploring the main question Dariusz presented further, the following article is recommended - To those who have academic access and want to review online - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13614533.2012.740439 To those who don't, here is the bibliographic reference - Bayliss, G. (2013). Exploring the cautionary attitude toward Wikipedia in higher education: Implications for higher education institutions. *New Review of Academic Librarianship*, *19*(1), 36-57. I tried adding a PDF, but seems it's not allowed on this list, so contact me privately if you'd like me to send it to you.
Dariusz, to your question, yes, I agree we still have lost of work to do, but I still think we've made major steps forward in the past decade. Actually, I'd say that these days, we are in the same place regarding Wikidata integration into Academia, as we were about a decade or so with Wikipedia. But that's a whole other discussion. :)
Cheers, Shani.
----------------------------------------------- *Shani Evenstein Sigalov*
* Lecturer, Tel Aviv University. * PhD Candidate, School of Education, Tel Aviv University. * Azrieli Foundation Research Fellow. * OER & Emerging Technologies Coordinator, UNESCO Chair https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495 on Technology, Internationalization and Education, School of Education, Tel Aviv University https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495.
* Member of the Board of Trustees https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/shani-evenstein-sigalov/, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/. * Chairperson, The Hebrew Literature Digitization Society http://www.israelgives.org/amuta/580428621. * Chief Editor, Project Ben-Yehuda http://benyehuda.org.
+972-525640648
On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 12:04 AM Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
Hi,
In this GigaScience piece, I'm arguing, that "We are the 1% in terms of knowledge access privilege; developing Wikipedia, the common good of humanity, is our moral obligation", and trying to figure out why academics still frown upon Wikipedia. https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/8/12/giz139/5651107
Besides a shameless self-promo, I'm also genuinely curious what your experience with persuading people in Academia that what you do is legit is.
best,
dj
--
[ https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/28_4liQwIiNQmYh0G9FjIw5_4xyXPU6AQlm3IeESnn... ]https://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl
Dariusz Jemielniak, Ph.D., Full Professor, head of MINDS< https://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/%3E
(Management in Networked and Digital Societies), Kozminski University
associate faculty Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society< https://cyber.harvard.edu%3E, Harvard University
Recent articles:
- Jérôme Hergueux, Dariusz Jemielniak (2019) Should digital files be
considered a commons? Copyright infringement in the eyes of lawyers< https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2019.1616019?fbclid=Iw..., The Information Society, 35(4): 198-215
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Gwinyai Masukume, Maciej Wilamowski (2019) The
Most Influential Medical Journals According to Wikipedia: Quantitative Analysishttps://www.jmir.org/2019/1/e11429/pdf, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21 (1), pp. e11429
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Agata Stasik (2018)
Anecdotal evidence: understanding organizational reality through organizational humorous tales< http://nerds.kozminski.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/HUMOR-Anecdotal-evi... HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 31: 3. 539–561.
- Dariusz Jemielniak, Maciej Wilamowski (2017) Cultural Diversity of
Quality of Information on Wikipedias< http://crow.kozminski.edu.pl/papers/cultures%20of%20wikipedias.pdf%3E Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68: 10. 2460–2470. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On 03/12/2019 23:04, Dariusz Jemielniak wrote:
Besides a shameless self-promo, I'm also genuinely curious what your experience with persuading people in Academia that what you do is legit is.
Thanks for the piece Dariusz, To your (legitimate) argument abour Wikipedia as challenging the academic authority, I'd add the reciprocical distrust between both worlds. It's in fact a difficult sociological position being a wikipedian in academia AND an academic in wikipedia. The norms and practices may seem similar, but they are actually quite different. For example, you cannot import your medals (be it number of publications or number of edits) from one world to the other. Actually, you're more often than not told to chose your side. Hence, the difficulty to establish fruitful contacts. Of course, some succesful attemps do exist, but the general mood is still distrust.
Thanks for initiating this interesting conversation with your paper, Darius.
As a retired professor and researcher and now active Wikipedian, I have a foot in both camps.
Wearing my academic hat, the concerns I have are the ease of vandalism, the risk of subtle vandalism (I agree obvious vandalism will be recognised as such by the reader), how quickly a Wikipedia article can change from good to bad, neutral to biased etc. Although as an insider to Wikipedia, I know about the Cluebot, the Recent Change Patrol, watchlists, etc, but to the outside world there does not appear to be any system of review, and I would have to admit that our methods of detecting vandalism are far from perfect. When I go away on holidays, particularly if I don't take my laptop, I stop watching my watchlist. Then when I get home and try to catch up on my watchlist (an enormous task), I am stunned to find vandalism some weeks old in articles. Am I the only active user watching that article? It would seem so. We have a tool (left-hand tool bar when you are looking at any article in desktop mode) that reports how many users (but not which users) are watching an article but for privacy no value is reported if there are less than 30 watchers (it says "less than 30"). Yet what difference does it make if there are 51 or 61 watchers or "less than 30" if the users are inactive or are active but not checking their watchlist. Since none of us (except developers) can gain access to the list of users watching any page, we have no way of measuring how many articles are being checked by others following changes, how quickly are they checked or are they checked it all? So I think we need a better "reviewing" system and one more visible to the reader if we want to gain respectability in academic circles. We also need to prevent as much vandalism as we can (why do we have "5 strikes until you are blocked" policy?, let's make zero tolerance, one obvious vandalism and you're blocked).
My 2nd point of difference is this. When I publish an academic paper, I put my real name and my institution name on it, and with that I am risking my real world reputation and also that of my institution. That's a powerful motivator to get it right. What risk does User:Blogwort432 take to their real world reputation? Generally none. The user name is not their real name. Even if blocked or banned, we know they can pop up again with a new user name or be one of the myriad IP addresses who contribute. One of the reasons I edit with my real name is precisely because I put my real world reputation on the line (assuming you believe my user name is my real name of course) and that's a powerful motivator for me to write good content AND to be civil in discussions. It's easy to be the opposite when you hide behind the cloak of a randomly-chosen user name or IP address. Also real world identities are more able to be checked for conflict of interest or paid editing ("so you work for XYZ Corp and you've just added some lavish praise to the XYZ article, hmm"). I think we would have a lot more credibility if we moved to having real world user names (optionally verified) and were encouraged to add a short CV (which is currently discouraged) so your credibility as a contributor could be assessed by readers.
3rd point. Many academics have attempted to edit Wikipedia articles and got their edits reverted with the usual unfriendly warnings on their User Talk page. When they reply (often stating that they are an expert in this field or whatever claim they make), they usually get a very unfriendly reaction to such statements. I can't imagine that academics who have tried to contribute to Wikipedia and experienced hostility or seen their edits reverted for reasons they did not understand or did not agree with are likely to run around saying that Wikipedia is as good as the academic literature.
I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to:
1. make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of interests) 2. as many contributors as possible should be real-world verified and invited to upload their CV or link to one on another site (if we don't want them on Wikipedia User pages) 3. demonstrate we have a comprehensive, fast and effective review of changed/new content -- wouldn't be good if we could point to an edit in the article history and see who reviewed it and how quickly that happened (and have gross statistics on how many reviewed, how quickly, and tools that tell us what articles aren't being properly reviewed, etc), 4. eliminate vandalism (well, reduce it substantially)
Or at least demonstrate we are moving towards these goals.
Personally I think some of the "norms" of Wikipedia may have served us well in the early 2000s but don't serve us so well today. To my mind moving towards real-world named accounts and then real-world verified accounts as a "norm" will make us better contributors and if we rate-limited pseudonym and IP accounts, we would at least reduce the amount of vandalism we currently have to deal with from IP accounts and new user accounts, and make it harder for the sockpuppets to return, etc. I think we can find ways to do this without eliminating the privacy needed by a small number of contributors with legitimate fears about persecution.
Kerry
Kerry Raymond, 04/12/19 08:52:
I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to:
- make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of interests)
Yes, but I would argue the easiest and most impactful way for academics to help Wikipedia is to release their works with a free license. It's gratis and only takes a few minutes with proper tools: https://dissem.in/ https://blog.okfn.org/2017/10/26/how-wikimedia-helped-authors-make-over-3000...
In an ideal world the two things are not incompatible or even in competition, but in practice you're likely to have limited attention and time from an academic so you probably have to prioritise.
Federico
Hoi, Free licenses are not always possible, it is not as if a single scientist is the only one signing a paper and determining the license. What helps a LOT is for scientists to be open about their work, have a public ORCiD record so that we can import the data in Wikidata (the vagaries of Wikidata permitting).
That is the start. We can then add papers for for instance a Willem Hanekom a prolific scientist working on a TBC vaccin, a member of the South African Academy of Science who works for the Gates Foundation.. (by inference we learn the science that is in the Gates Foundation). Thanks, GerardM
On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 10:02, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Kerry Raymond, 04/12/19 08:52:
I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to:
- make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of
interests)
Yes, but I would argue the easiest and most impactful way for academics to help Wikipedia is to release their works with a free license. It's gratis and only takes a few minutes with proper tools: https://dissem.in/
https://blog.okfn.org/2017/10/26/how-wikimedia-helped-authors-make-over-3000...
In an ideal world the two things are not incompatible or even in competition, but in practice you're likely to have limited attention and time from an academic so you probably have to prioritise.
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Gerard Meijssen, 04/12/19 11:23:
Free licenses are not always possible, it is not as if a single scientist is the only one signing a paper and determining the license.
Nearly everyone can deposit at least some of their works as preprints under a free license.
What helps a LOT is for scientists to be open about their work, have a public ORCiD record so that we can import the data in Wikidat
Having the work open access in open repositories is often the first step to also have metadata about them in open data. Sure, researchers could learn to be librarians/cataloguers and wikipedians in addition to doing their research; most won't, though.
Federico
If it’s of any interest, my new book (forthcoming 2021) is called “Should you believe Wikipedia?” and a draft of the title chapter is here: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/bruckman-believe-wikipedia-draft2019.pdf
Maybe useful to share with skeptical friends. It explains social epistemology and applies that to the internet.
— Amy
Hi all
just in case this might be interesting to some: Meghan Duffy, an evolutionary ecologist at University of Michigan blogged about her experience of using Wikipedia in her teaching. It's a couple of years old already but still useful I think; see
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/using-wikipedia-in-the-class... and https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/follow-up-to-my-cautionary-t...
cheers Gregor
Am Mi., 4. Dez. 2019 um 13:08 Uhr schrieb Federico Leva (Nemo) < nemowiki@gmail.com>:
Gerard Meijssen, 04/12/19 11:23:
Free licenses are not always possible, it is not as if a single scientist is the only one signing a paper and determining the license.
Nearly everyone can deposit at least some of their works as preprints under a free license.
What helps a LOT is for scientists to be open about their work, have a public ORCiD record so that we can import the data in Wikidat
Having the work open access in open repositories is often the first step to also have metadata about them in open data. Sure, researchers could learn to be librarians/cataloguers and wikipedians in addition to doing their research; most won't, though.
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Dear All,
I am also very interested in this topic. I am from academia, with computer science background. In the last two years, I have spent most of my “free research time” to understand the reasons, why Wikipedia has not become a significant publication venue in science. I came to similar conclusions to Kerry and Darius, especially in the context of the review system. There should be a simple way to present how much content is verified. For example, through the font color (and size) of each paragraph.
Involving more students to write Wikipedia articles is challenging; however, we are not far from the future when machines will be able to “read” the scientific publications, and automatically generate content (for Wikipedia) with reasonable quality. I do not think the current review system is prepared for this. Probably there is no simple solution, we also made several game-theoretical analyses of this problem, and much more reviews should be attracted.
Furthermore, I think there are some practical issues as well: for example, researchers are not familiar with the markup language used in MediaWiki. Visual editor partially solves this problem; however, a latex editor would make Wikipedia way friendlier for a large group of researchers. The MediaWiki markup and latex seems quite similar, so we started to implement a markup-latex converter. We hope to release the code soon.
Best János http://lendulet.tmit.bme.hu/lendulet_website/?page_id=291
On 2019. Dec 4., at 7:52, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for initiating this interesting conversation with your paper, Darius.
As a retired professor and researcher and now active Wikipedian, I have a foot in both camps.
Wearing my academic hat, the concerns I have are the ease of vandalism, the risk of subtle vandalism (I agree obvious vandalism will be recognised as such by the reader), how quickly a Wikipedia article can change from good to bad, neutral to biased etc. Although as an insider to Wikipedia, I know about the Cluebot, the Recent Change Patrol, watchlists, etc, but to the outside world there does not appear to be any system of review, and I would have to admit that our methods of detecting vandalism are far from perfect. When I go away on holidays, particularly if I don't take my laptop, I stop watching my watchlist. Then when I get home and try to catch up on my watchlist (an enormous task), I am stunned to find vandalism some weeks old in articles. Am I the only active user watching that article? It would seem so. We have a tool (left-hand tool bar when you are looking at any article in desktop mode) that reports how many users (but not which users) are watching an article but for privacy no value is reported if there are less than 30 watchers (it says "less than 30"). Yet what difference does it make if there are 51 or 61 watchers or "less than 30" if the users are inactive or are active but not checking their watchlist. Since none of us (except developers) can gain access to the list of users watching any page, we have no way of measuring how many articles are being checked by others following changes, how quickly are they checked or are they checked it all? So I think we need a better "reviewing" system and one more visible to the reader if we want to gain respectability in academic circles. We also need to prevent as much vandalism as we can (why do we have "5 strikes until you are blocked" policy?, let's make zero tolerance, one obvious vandalism and you're blocked).
My 2nd point of difference is this. When I publish an academic paper, I put my real name and my institution name on it, and with that I am risking my real world reputation and also that of my institution. That's a powerful motivator to get it right. What risk does User:Blogwort432 take to their real world reputation? Generally none. The user name is not their real name. Even if blocked or banned, we know they can pop up again with a new user name or be one of the myriad IP addresses who contribute. One of the reasons I edit with my real name is precisely because I put my real world reputation on the line (assuming you believe my user name is my real name of course) and that's a powerful motivator for me to write good content AND to be civil in discussions. It's easy to be the opposite when you hide behind the cloak of a randomly-chosen user name or IP address. Also real world identities are more able to be checked for conflict of interest or paid editing ("so you work for XYZ Corp and you've just added some lavish praise to the XYZ article, hmm"). I think we would have a lot more credibility if we moved to having real world user names (optionally verified) and were encouraged to add a short CV (which is currently discouraged) so your credibility as a contributor could be assessed by readers.
3rd point. Many academics have attempted to edit Wikipedia articles and got their edits reverted with the usual unfriendly warnings on their User Talk page. When they reply (often stating that they are an expert in this field or whatever claim they make), they usually get a very unfriendly reaction to such statements. I can't imagine that academics who have tried to contribute to Wikipedia and experienced hostility or seen their edits reverted for reasons they did not understand or did not agree with are likely to run around saying that Wikipedia is as good as the academic literature.
I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to:
- make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of interests)
- as many contributors as possible should be real-world verified and invited to upload their CV or link to one on another site (if we don't want them on Wikipedia User pages)
- demonstrate we have a comprehensive, fast and effective review of changed/new content -- wouldn't be good if we could point to an edit in the article history and see who reviewed it and how quickly that happened (and have gross statistics on how many reviewed, how quickly, and tools that tell us what articles aren't being properly reviewed, etc),
- eliminate vandalism (well, reduce it substantially)
Or at least demonstrate we are moving towards these goals.
Personally I think some of the "norms" of Wikipedia may have served us well in the early 2000s but don't serve us so well today. To my mind moving towards real-world named accounts and then real-world verified accounts as a "norm" will make us better contributors and if we rate-limited pseudonym and IP accounts, we would at least reduce the amount of vandalism we currently have to deal with from IP accounts and new user accounts, and make it harder for the sockpuppets to return, etc. I think we can find ways to do this without eliminating the privacy needed by a small number of contributors with legitimate fears about persecution.
Kerry
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org