On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125899/

January 7, 2011 Wikipedia Comes of Age By Casper Grathwohl

Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press.

I was particularly struck by

How is that happening? Take the case of a project undertaken by the academic music community. In 2006 a large group of musicologists began discussing, on an academic listserv, their students' use of Wikipedia. One scholar issued a challenge: Wikipedia is where students are starting research, whether we like it or not, so we need to improve its music entries. That call to arms resonated, and music scholars worked hard to improve the quality of Wikipedia entries and make sure that bibliographies and citations pointed to the most reliable resources. As a result, Oxford University Press experienced a tenfold increase in Wikipedia-referred traffic on its music-research site Grove Music Online. Research that began on Wikipedia led to (the more advanced and peer-validated) Grove Music, for researchers who were going on to do in-depth scholarly work. The rise in Grove traffic alerted me to the music Wikipedia project, but I assume that other such projects that have passed me by yielded similar positive results.

They are far from the first group to notice such traffic advantages. It's kind of sad that group after group keeps rediscovering this - you would think that the SEOs wouldn't be the only ones to appreciate the value of Wikipedia linking them.