Celia's

Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours Wednesday to protest the [US] Stop Online Piracy Act, founder Jimmy Wales announced on Monday.

In doing so, Wikipedia joins a long list of web companies such as Reddit and Mozilla that are taking similar measures against the proposed legislation...BTW. comScore estimates the English Wikipedia’s web traffic at 25 million daily visitors worldwide.

The Wikimedia Foundation has commissioned a new small-scale study to examine the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia articles. This study, currently being undertaken by Epic, a UK-based e-learning company, and Oxford University, employs greater rigor than the Nature study, involves academics and scholars, and will examine more than just English language entries, and subjects other than solely science. Our hope is that the study’s findings will inspire and inform more extensive, independently funded research related to the quality of information found in Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects.

This project will explore methods to define a baseline for the quality of Wikipedia entries and to help the community identify shortcomings, as well as strategies to address them. Wikipedia has several advantages over commercially available online encyclopedias – it is freely accessible to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it is available in over 270 languages, and it is updated at remarkable speed, relying on the ability of a vast number of non-paid contributors rather than the academic credentials of a few paid experts. However, errors do exist and concerns have been raised that articles may be colored by contributors’ personal opinions or misunderstandings. A comparative analysis of the quality of Wikipedia’s articles and other popular alternatives is crucial to identifying avenues for improvement

Findings will be presented in April, 2012

Read the Complete Blog Post

Additional Details About the Project

Note: We look forward to reading the result but do have a few questions about the research.  Here are a few of them.

1. The entry is accurate but important facts are missing or have been removed (for any number of reasons) by an editor even though they are accurate. Will accuracy over time be measured? An entry might be accurate on Monday but by Friday it could have been updated with inaccurate information or an editor removed valid material. Of course, the opposite is also true.
2. Long tail entries. While entries on popular or major topics are getting constant review what about long tail entries that are not as popular in terms of readers but still might contain important information those who do access the entry. Are these entries being reviewed on a regular basis? For example: we often find outdated/inaccurate information is biographical entries. Are biographical entries being reviewed on a regularly scheduled basis?  For example, all biographical entries for people with the last name beginning with the letter B are (at the least) reviewed  in January and July.
3. How will Wikipedia decide which entries to review?

From the Study Details Page:

Each student and expert academic will be asked to review two pairs of articles in their relevant subject domain and native language. In each pair, one article will be a Wikipedia entry and the other will an article from a popular alternative online encyclopedia. The students and expert academics will not be aware of the source of the articles. The articles will assessed for a number of factors relating to the quality of the article. These will include comprehensiveness, accuracy, verifiability by references and objectivity. Articles will be rated using a survey tool specially designed for the study. The participants will be asked to justify their judgments, citing relevant references, and suggest appropriate corrections.

+ Will reputation of a source also be considered or only that the citations can be verified?
+ Will “popular alternative online encyclopedias” be general encyclopedias or include subject-focused publications?

The percentage of all American adults who use Wikipedia to look for information has increased from 25% in February 2007 to 42% in May 2010. This translates to 53% of adult internet users.

Education level continues to be the strongest predictor of Wikipedia use. The collaborative encyclopedia is most popular among internet users with at least a college degree, 69% of whom use the site. Broadband use remains another predictor, as 59% of those with home broadband use the service, compared with 26% of those who connect to the internet through dial-up. Additionally, Wikipedia is generally more popular among those with annual household incomes of at least $50,000, as well as with young adults: 62% of internet users under the age of 30 using the service, compared with only 33% of internet users age 65 and older.

In the scope of general online activities, using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (done by 47% of internet users) or rating a product, service, or person (32%), but is less popular than using social network sites (61%) or watching videos on sites like YouTube (66%).

Complete Report (HTML)  PDF (9 pages)

Table: Demographics of Wikipedia users & Graph: Wikipedia users, 2007 - 2010

From The Resourceshelf  Resourceblog on the 10th anninversary of Wikipedia. Here are a few videos, articles, and lists from a variety of sources:

+ Video: "Decade of Thanks!" from Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales

+ Happy 10th anniversary, Wikipedia! by Sue Gardner, Executive Directory, Wikimedia

+ Articles From Various Sources Compiled by Wikipedia's Director of Communications, Jay Walsh

+ "Wikipedia at 10: 'It's what the web is for'" (via The Telegraph)
An interview with Jimmy Wales.

+ "Wikipedia celebrates 10th anniversary" (via SF Chronicle)

+ Video/Text: "Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia too complicated for many" (via BBC News)

Lists

+ "The 10 Biggest Hoaxes in Wikipedia's First 10 Years" (via PC World, Network World)

+ "Top 10 Wikipedia Moments" (via Time)

* Wikipedia celebrated its ninth birthday.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/15/another-year-wiser/

* More than 800 patents issued by the US in 2009 cited one or more Wikipedia articles, an increase of 59% from 2008.
http://patentlibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/01/wikipedia-citations-in-patents-up-59.html

From: SPARC Open Access Newsletter

The online encyclopedia is about to hit 3m articles in English – but growth is stalling as 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists' fight for control...[More]

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist

If you have students who are tempted to use the Wikipedia as their primary research tool you might want to show them the following video:

http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/02/wikipedia-tutorial-video.html

And, please read the comments. CW

"VisualWikipedia is a visual, intuitive, and interactive web interface to encyclopedic knowledge/information. It is designed to provide a fun place to learn stuff in an efficient manner. Please watch the following video to get a good sense of how to use it...

All article text... is from Wikipedia...All videos and video thumbnails s... are from YouTube... VisualWikipedia.com is a completely separate entity from wikipedia.org with no association with it." [From website]

A review from Pandia

Few online resources provoke as much controversy in the library community as Wikipedia. Some librarians hate it, arguing that since anyone can edit it, it can’t be trusted. Others love it, because it is fast, easy to use, and a good starting point for research. With such a conflicted relationship, there’s no clear answer as to where (or whether) Wikipedia belongs in libraries. We librarians are not sure what we should do with it...[more]

Libraries Contributing to Wikipedia

University of North Texas:
http://tinyurl.com/4ga837

University of Washington:
http://tinyurl.com/25qzxf

Villanova University:
http://tinyurl.com/4v4ltn

Alternative Options

Repositories of Primary Sources:
www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html

The California Digital Library:
www.cdlib.org

Digital Collections Online:
www.lib.uconn.edu/online/DigitalCollections

OAIster:
www.oaister.org

Digital Library Federation Digital Collections Registry: http://dlf.grainger.uiuc.edu/DLFCollectionsRegistry

More Information on Editing

Broughton, John. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA, Pogue Press, 2008. 502 pp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Wikipedia:Contributing_to_Wikipedia

Librarians wishing to become involved in Wikipedia should join the group of librarian editors
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Wikipedia:WikiProject_Librarians).

Reasons to Contribute to Wikipedia

• Reverse the trend of decreasing traffic to library websites

• Create a more scholarly environment

• Reach new and potential library users

 From Infotoday Vol. 32 No. 5 — Sep/Oct 2008

1. Powerset
2. Wikiwix
3. AskMeNow
4. Similpedia
5. Gollum
6. Qwika
7. WikiMindMap
8. Wikiwax
9. Lexisum
10. Ask.com & SearchMash

Bonus site: Wikirage

iLibrarian blog 

This Wikipedia is a lot smaller than the main one — a little under 27,000 articles. Even though this is the Simple English Wikipedia, the concepts here are anything but simple; topics include physics (though there have apparently been some issues with the quantum physics page), engineering, several religions, and philosophy.

There’s a fairly busy SimpleTalk forum here, and a School Gateway Page for students wanting to access and edit this Wikipedia.

Research Buzz 

This 73 minute podcast features the 4th Annual Robert C. Heterick Jr. Lecture, given by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. The lecture is entitled, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies". 

 http://connect-cdn.educause.edu/files/gbayne_jenkins.mp3  [33.47 mg]

Emblematic of the new participatory cultures and the emerging practices of collective intelligence, Wikipedia has drawn fire from academic institutions and traditional gatekeepers. Using segments from a forthcoming documentary about the Wikipedia movement produced by MIT's Project NML, this session will discuss how educators might use Wikipedia to introduce students to the ways that new forms of cultural production and knowledge sharing are reshaping the research process.