WikiProject

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A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration.

Contents

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. [1] Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by Smithsonian for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". [2]

On Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue.

Wikipedia has thousands of WikiProjects, primarily divided between specific topical areas and performing specific maintenance tasks. [3] [4] One task commonly performed by topical WikiProjects on Wikipedia is the assessment of the quality of articles that fall within that topic area. [5] In Wikipedia and sibling projects, WikiProject pages are located in project space, [3] and the meta information regarding the association between the article and the WikiProject is usually included on the talk page of the article. [5]

WikiProjects provide an additional avenue for engagement between editors with similar interests, and have thereby been found to increase the productivity of such editors. [6] In order to spur participation and concentrate effectiveness, WikiProjects on Wikipedia may engage in activities like having a "collaboration of the week", [7] or designating one article to be improved to the point of achieving "featured" status. [8] The WikiProject Council is a group of editors that assists with the development of active WikiProjects, and acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration.

A 2008 academic study of Wikipedia concluded that participation in WikiProjects substantially improved the chances of an editor becoming an administrator, finding that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits, [9] and concluding:

Merely performing a lot of production work is insufficient for "promotion" in Wikipedia. Candidates’ article edits were weak predictors of success. They also have to demonstrate more managerial behavior. Diverse experience and contributions to the development of policies and WikiProjects were stronger predictors of RfA success. This is consistent with the findings that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy [10] and that coordination work has increased substantially. [11] [12] [...] Participation in Wikipedia policy and WikiProjects was not predictive of adminship prior to 2006, suggesting the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination.

WikiProjects and assessments of article importance and quality

In 2007, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. [13] [ self-published source? ] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, about 7,000 (0.16%) are a featured article or a featured list. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. [14] [15] According to research in 2021, WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has the most quality content in terms of good articles and featured articles. This is unusual, due to the project's narrow scope and member count of only around 100. [16]

The articles can also be rated for importance by WikiProjects. Currently,[ when? ] there are five importance categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/unsure level. For a particular article, different WikiProjects may assign different importance levels.

The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table and bar-chart.

Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. [17] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. [18]

1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
Top
High
Medium
Low
???
  •   Featured articles
  •   Featured lists
  •   A-class articles
  •   Good articles
  •   B-class articles
  •   C-class articles
  •   Start-class articles
  •   Stub articles
  •   Lists
  •   Unassessed articles and lists

WikiProject Medicine

WikiProject Medicine was formed in 2004 to improve coverage of medicine-related topics. [19] [20] [21]

A 2011 review of the project's efforts praised it for assessing most medical articles on Wikipedia (at that time about 25,000), at the same time remarking that only around 70 have been assessed as high quality. [19] The first use of Wikipedia medical content in formal medical education was in 2011. [22] A 2014 study found that the frequency of Wikipedia medical topics referenced in medical publications has increased over time since 2010, in spite of recommendations discouraging doctors from using Wikipedia, with the majority provided as definitions or descriptions. [23]

A 2016 review written by Wikipedians [a] stated that the number of high quality articles had improved to about 80. [24] The review praised the efforts of the volunteers, but said that participation levels are too low to promise any significant improvements in the thousands of lower-quality articles, calling for more medical practitioners to volunteer. [24] [b] The review also said that readability (complexity) of Wikipedia articles may be too high for its intended audience, and encouraged the Wikipedia volunteers to review this aspect. [21]

CBS News described the role of WikiProject Medicine in content about the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that while "hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages". [25] James Heilman told CBS News, "I do not recommend people trust Wikipedia blindly. I think doing so would be silly. Yet, you know, people shouldn't trust other sources of information blindly, either." [25]

According to a review written by a Wikipedia contributor and advocate, [c] [d] as of 2020, Wikipedia is among the world's most accessed resources for health information by the public, patients, students, and practitioners. [22]

Notes

  1. ↑ "Competing interests: All authors have contributed to Wikipedia articles. TS, DD, MH and JH are current participants in WP:MED. JH is a former and current member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. All authors are on the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine. TS is on the editorial board of PLOS Genetics." [24]
  2. ↑ The article processing fee was covered by a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation had no involvement in the study design, the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, writing the report, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. [24]
  3. ↑ The author is a Wikipedia contributor and advocates for Wikipedia authorship to health workers, students, and faculty at McMaster University." [22]
  4. ↑ "The Author declared in the cover letter being awarded a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation whose funding would cover this publication if accepted. Financial Disclosure section and Competing Interests section should be updated accordingly (in competing interests, I believe Author could specify having obtained the grant -after- completing and submitting this work)". [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cochrane (organisation)</span> British nonprofit for reviews of medical research (formed 1993)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Wikipedia</span> English-language edition of Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

<i>The BMJ</i> British peer-reviewed medical journal

The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, published by BMJ Group, which in turn is wholly-owned by the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMJ has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Previously called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988, and then changed to The BMJ in 2014. The journal is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA). The current editor-in-chief of The BMJ is Kamran Abbasi, who was appointed in January 2022.

Ganfyd was a medical wiki and online medical wiki encyclopedia, created in November 2005 by a group of doctors and medical students working in the United Kingdom. The site has been the subject of academic exposition into emerging methods of disseminating medical information and more specifically, the restricting of editors within an open collaborative wiki environment. This model has subsequently been copied by other medical wikis, but some attempts to improve on the model, such as Medpedia have failed. In 2010, Paula Younger noted it as a laudable attempt to make medical information freely accessible and authoritative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reliability of Wikipedia</span>

The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy S. Bruckman</span> American professor (born 1965)

Amy Susan Bruckman is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's TR100 awardees, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.

Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:

  1. Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.
  2. Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
  3. Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.

Wikipedia has been studied extensively. Between 2001 and 2010, researchers published at least 1,746 peer-reviewed articles about the online encyclopedia. Such studies are greatly facilitated by the fact that Wikipedia's database can be downloaded without help from the site owner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GroupLens Research</span> Computer science research lab

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert E. Kraut</span> American social psychologist

Robert E. Kraut is an American social psychologist who studies human-computer interaction, online communities, internet use, group coordination, computers in organizations, and the role of visual elements in interpersonal communication. He is a Herbert Simon University Professor Emeritus of Human-computer Interaction at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Sara Beth (Greene) Kiesler is the Hillman Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a program director in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences at the US National Science Foundation, where her responsibilities include programs on Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, Smart and Connected Communities, and Securing American Infrastructure. She received an M.A. degree in psychology from Stanford in 1963, and a Ph.D., also in psychology, from Ohio State University in 1965.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health information on Wikipedia</span>

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has, since the late 2000s, served as a popular source for health information for both laypersons and, in many cases, health care practitioners. Health-related articles on Wikipedia are popularly accessed as results from search engines, which frequently deliver links to Wikipedia articles. Independent assessments have been made of the number and demographics of people who seek health information on Wikipedia, the scope of health information on Wikipedia, and the quality and reliability of the information on Wikipedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Heilman</span> Emergency physician and Wikipedia editor

James M. Heilman is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender bias on Wikipedia</span> Gender gap problem in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects

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Aric Sigman is a British psychologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic</span> Wikipedias response to a global pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was covered in Wikipedia extensively, in real-time, and across multiple languages. This coverage extends to many detailed articles about various aspects of the topic itself, as well as many existing articles being amended to take account of the pandemic's effect on them. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects' coverage of the pandemic – and how the volunteer editing community achieved that coverage – received widespread media attention for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and speed. Wikipedia experienced an increase in readership during the pandemic.

In Wikipedia and similar wikis, an edit count is a record of the number of edits performed by a certain editor, or by all editors on a particular page. An edit, in this context, is an individually recorded change to the content of a page. Within Wikimedia projects, a number of tools exist to determine and compare edit counts, resulting in their usage for various purposes, with both positive and negative effects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disputes on Wikipedia</span>

Disputes on Wikipedia arise from Wikipedians disagreeing over article content or internal Wikipedia affairs, which can be discussed on talk pages, as well as from user misconduct. Disputes may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit wars", and may escalate into dispute resolution efforts and enforcement. Wikipedia editors may dispute numerous articles within a contentious topic that reflect debates and conflicts in society, based on ethnic, political, religious, and scientific differences.

References

  1. ↑ Laudato, Anthony (May 24, 2020). "The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information". CBS News.
  2. ↑ Daley, Jason (March 15, 2016). "How a College Student Led the WikiProject Women Scientists". Smithsonian Magazine.
  3. 1 2 Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it (2008), p. 213.
  4. ↑ Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. pp. 165–175.
  5. 1 2 Huijing Deng, Bernadetta Tarigan, Mihai Grigore, Juliana Sutanto, "Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis", HCI in Business: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9191 (July 21, 2015), p. 64–75.
  6. ↑ Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 207, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  7. ↑ Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 38, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  8. ↑ Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 85, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  9. ↑ Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (2008). "Taking up the mop". Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 3441. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. ISBN   978-1-60558-012-8. S2CID   5868576.
  10. ↑ Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy". Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 1101. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. ISBN   9781605580111. S2CID   15211227.
  11. ↑ Kittur, Aniket; Suh, Bongwon; Pendleton, Bryan A.; Chi, Ed H. (2007). "He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 453–462. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240698. ISBN   978-1-59593-593-9. S2CID   17493296.
  12. ↑ Viegas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin; Kriss, Jesse; van Ham, Frank (2007). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia". 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07). pp. 575–582. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.210.1057 . doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.511. ISBN   978-0-7695-2755-0. S2CID   5293547.
  13. ↑ Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment
  14. ↑ Poderi, Giacomo (8 April 2009). "Comparing featured article groups and revision patterns correlations in Wikipedia" . First Monday . doi: 10.5210/fm.v14i5.2365 . Retrieved July 13, 2010.
  15. ↑ Fernanda B. Viégas; Martin Wattenberg & Matthew M. McKeon (July 22, 2007). "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Archived from the original (PDF) on Oct 31, 2007. Retrieved October 30, 2007.
  16. ↑ Jemielniak, Dariusz; Rychwalska, Agnieszka; Talaga, Szymon; Ziembowicz, Karolina (September 2021). "Wikiproject Tropical Cyclones: The most successful crowd-sourced knowledge project with near real-time coverage of extreme weather phenomena". Weather and Climate Extremes. 33: 100354. Bibcode:2021WCE....3300354J. doi: 10.1016/j.wace.2021.100354 .
  17. ↑ Poderi, Giacomo, Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles, Master thesis, University of Maastricht, October 2008.
  18. ↑ Lindsey, David (April 5, 2010). "Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's featured articles". First Monday. 15 (4). Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
  19. 1 2 Trevena, L. (2011-06-08). "WikiProject Medicine" . BMJ. 342 (jun08 3): d3387. doi:10.1136/bmj.d3387. ISSN   0959-8138. PMID   21653617. S2CID   206893220.
  20. ↑ James, Richard (October 2016). "WikiProject Medicine: Creating Credibility in Consumer Health" . Journal of Hospital Librarianship. 16 (4): 344–351. doi:10.1080/15323269.2016.1221284. ISSN   1532-3269. S2CID   79020792.
  21. 1 2 Murray, Terry (2015-03-03). "WikiProject Medicine making progress". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 187 (4): 245. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-4982. ISSN   0820-3946. PMC   4347770 . PMID   25646285.
  22. 1 2 3 4 Smith DA (2020). "Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review". PLOS ONE. 15 (2): e0228786. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1528786S. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228786 . PMC   7028268 . PMID   32069322.
  23. ↑ Bould MD, Hladkowicz ES, Pigford AA, Ufholz LA, Postonogova T, Shin E, Boet S (March 2014). "References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature". BMJ. 348: g1585. doi:10.1136/bmj.g1585. PMC   3944683 . PMID   24603564.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Shafee, Thomas; Masukume, Gwinyai; Kipersztok, Lisa; Das, Diptanshu; Häggström, Mikael; Heilman, James (2017-11-01). "Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future". J Epidemiol Community Health. 71 (11): 1122–1129. doi:10.1136/jech-2016-208601. ISSN   0143-005X. PMC   5847101 . PMID   28847845.
  25. 1 2 Laudato, Anthony (May 24, 2020). "The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information". CBS News . Retrieved April 3, 2023.
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