A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have tested the possibility of predicting the number of seasonal influenza-like illness (ILI) in the U.S. using data about the traffic to a selected number of Wikipedia entries related to influenza. [1]
They compared their models against the prediction of Google Flu Trends (GFT), one of the earliest and most famous web-based tools for predicting the evolution of seasonal influenza disease patterns. Gold standard for comparison were the public data released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The accuracy of GFT is increasingly under question by several authors, culminating in a recent Science commentary piece about the promises and perils of Big Data for prediction of real-world phenomena. The authors start from this observation and submit that Wikipedia searches may be less subject to the biases that affected GFT, and test this hypothesis in the present work. They find that their model is more accurate than GFT, and was able to predict the peak week of the influenza season more often. Another undoubted advantage of Wikipedia compared to GFT, the authors argue, is its public availability, which makes the present model open to public scrutiny.
A study titled "Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open-access publishing" [2] examined academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and open-access journals for academic publishing through a survey of 120 academics carried out in late 2011 and early 2012. The study comes from the same authors who published a similar paper in 2012, reviewed here, which suffered from a major basic fallacy: Wikipedia is not the place to publish original research academic work. The authors, unfortunately, seem to ignore no original research policy when they write: "There are in general three models in the current movement towards open-access academic publishing: pushing traditional journals towards open access by changing policies; creating open-access journals; and using existing online open-access venue Wikipedia" and "we surveyed academics to understand their perspectives on using Wikipedia for academic publishing in comparison with open-access journals". In the final discussion segment, the authors do acknowledge the existence of the OR policy, where they suggest that certain types or academic papers (reviews) are similar enough to Wikipedia articles that integration of such articles into Wikipedia could be feasible. The authors do provide a valuable literature review noting prior works which analyze the peer-review system in Wikipedia, perceptions of Wikipedia in academia, and related issues (through said review is partially split between the introduction and discussion section).
The study provides some interesting findings regarding academics' view of the benefits of Wikipedia-style peer review and publishing. Most respondents (77 percent) reported reading Wikipedia, and a rather high number (43 percent) reported having made at least one edit, with 15 percent having written an article. Interestingly, as many as four respondents stated that they were "credited for time spent reviewing Wikipedia articles related to their academic careers" in their professional workplaces. The more experience one had with Wikipedia, the more likely one would see advantages in the wiki publishing model. Most common advantages listed were cost reductions (40 percent), timely review (19 percent), post-publication corrections (52 percent), making articles available before validation (27 percent) and reaching a wider audience (8 percent). Disadvantages included questionable stability (86 percent), absence of integration with libraries and scholarly search engines (55 percent), lower quality (43 percent), less credibility (57 percent), less academic acceptance (78 percent) and less impact on academia (56 percent).
54 percent of respondents were aware that Wikipedia had a peer-review process and about third of these considered it to be less rigorous than that of scholarly journals; none of the respondents demonstrated any significant experience with the specifics of how Wikipedia articles are reviewed, suggesting that their involvement with the Wikipedia is rather limited. 75% of the survey respondents did not feel comfortable having others edit their papers-in-progress, and over 25% expressed concern about the lack of control over changes made post-publications. Majority of respondents did not also feel comfortable with their work being reviewed by Wikipedians, with the most common concern being unknown qualifications of Wikipedia editors and reviewers.
Perhaps of most value to the Wikipedia community is the analysis of suggestions made by the respondents with regards to making Wikipedia more accepted at the universities. Here, the most common suggestion was “making the promoted peer-reviewed articles searchable from university libraries” and in general, making it more easy to find and identify high quality articles (some functionality as displaying the quality assessment of an article in mainspace already exists in MediaWiki but is implemented as opt-in feature only).
The authors conclude that the academic researchers’ increased familiarity with either open access publishing or wiki publishing is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment and professional status. Overall, this study seems like a major improvement over the authors' 2012 paper, and a valuable paper addressing the topics of the place of Wikipedia in the open publishing movement and the relationship between Wikipedia and academia.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue - contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have tested the possibility of predicting the number of seasonal influenza-like illness (ILI) in the U.S. using data about the traffic to a selected number of Wikipedia entries related to influenza. [1]
They compared their models against the prediction of Google Flu Trends (GFT), one of the earliest and most famous web-based tools for predicting the evolution of seasonal influenza disease patterns. Gold standard for comparison were the public data released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The accuracy of GFT is increasingly under question by several authors, culminating in a recent Science commentary piece about the promises and perils of Big Data for prediction of real-world phenomena. The authors start from this observation and submit that Wikipedia searches may be less subject to the biases that affected GFT, and test this hypothesis in the present work. They find that their model is more accurate than GFT, and was able to predict the peak week of the influenza season more often. Another undoubted advantage of Wikipedia compared to GFT, the authors argue, is its public availability, which makes the present model open to public scrutiny.
A study titled "Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open-access publishing" [2] examined academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and open-access journals for academic publishing through a survey of 120 academics carried out in late 2011 and early 2012. The study comes from the same authors who published a similar paper in 2012, reviewed here, which suffered from a major basic fallacy: Wikipedia is not the place to publish original research academic work. The authors, unfortunately, seem to ignore no original research policy when they write: "There are in general three models in the current movement towards open-access academic publishing: pushing traditional journals towards open access by changing policies; creating open-access journals; and using existing online open-access venue Wikipedia" and "we surveyed academics to understand their perspectives on using Wikipedia for academic publishing in comparison with open-access journals". In the final discussion segment, the authors do acknowledge the existence of the OR policy, where they suggest that certain types or academic papers (reviews) are similar enough to Wikipedia articles that integration of such articles into Wikipedia could be feasible. The authors do provide a valuable literature review noting prior works which analyze the peer-review system in Wikipedia, perceptions of Wikipedia in academia, and related issues (through said review is partially split between the introduction and discussion section).
The study provides some interesting findings regarding academics' view of the benefits of Wikipedia-style peer review and publishing. Most respondents (77 percent) reported reading Wikipedia, and a rather high number (43 percent) reported having made at least one edit, with 15 percent having written an article. Interestingly, as many as four respondents stated that they were "credited for time spent reviewing Wikipedia articles related to their academic careers" in their professional workplaces. The more experience one had with Wikipedia, the more likely one would see advantages in the wiki publishing model. Most common advantages listed were cost reductions (40 percent), timely review (19 percent), post-publication corrections (52 percent), making articles available before validation (27 percent) and reaching a wider audience (8 percent). Disadvantages included questionable stability (86 percent), absence of integration with libraries and scholarly search engines (55 percent), lower quality (43 percent), less credibility (57 percent), less academic acceptance (78 percent) and less impact on academia (56 percent).
54 percent of respondents were aware that Wikipedia had a peer-review process and about third of these considered it to be less rigorous than that of scholarly journals; none of the respondents demonstrated any significant experience with the specifics of how Wikipedia articles are reviewed, suggesting that their involvement with the Wikipedia is rather limited. 75% of the survey respondents did not feel comfortable having others edit their papers-in-progress, and over 25% expressed concern about the lack of control over changes made post-publications. Majority of respondents did not also feel comfortable with their work being reviewed by Wikipedians, with the most common concern being unknown qualifications of Wikipedia editors and reviewers.
Perhaps of most value to the Wikipedia community is the analysis of suggestions made by the respondents with regards to making Wikipedia more accepted at the universities. Here, the most common suggestion was “making the promoted peer-reviewed articles searchable from university libraries” and in general, making it more easy to find and identify high quality articles (some functionality as displaying the quality assessment of an article in mainspace already exists in MediaWiki but is implemented as opt-in feature only).
The authors conclude that the academic researchers’ increased familiarity with either open access publishing or wiki publishing is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment and professional status. Overall, this study seems like a major improvement over the authors' 2012 paper, and a valuable paper addressing the topics of the place of Wikipedia in the open publishing movement and the relationship between Wikipedia and academia.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue - contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
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