Academics can help shape Wikipedia
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
(0)eLetters
eLetters is a forum for ongoing peer review. eLetters are not edited, proofread, or indexed, but they are screened. eLetters should provide substantive and scholarly commentary on the article. Embedded figures cannot be submitted, and we discourage the use of figures within eLetters in general. If a figure is essential, please include a link to the figure within the text of the eLetter. Please read our Terms of Service before submitting an eLetter.
Log In to Submit a ResponseNo eLetters have been published for this article yet.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
11 August 2017
Copyright
Submission history
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Article Usage
Altmetrics
Citations
Cite as
- Thomas Shafee et al.
Export citation
Select the format you want to export the citation of this publication.
View Options
Check Access
Log in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS Members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
- Become a AAAS Member
- Activate your AAAS ID
- Purchase Access to Other Journals in the Science Family
- Account Help
More options
Purchase digital access to this article
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
A conflict of interest plays a key role in shaping Wikipedia
Thomas Shafee, et al., wrote an article entitled "Academics can help shape Wikipedia" (1). As of 13 August 2017, total wiki pages is 42,640,127, total users is 31,466,095, and English articles is 5,451,777 where total admins is 1,251 (2). The total article text size in English Wikipedia is depicted in Figure (3). Conflict of interest is one of Wikipedia's least understood and yet most cited behavioral guidelines (4). Conflicted editors or paid editors (5) who do choose to contribute should declare their interests, both on their user pages and on the talk page of any article they edit, be sure to write in a neutral tone, cite reliable, third-party published sources, and beware of unintentional bias (4). One detailed study from 2012 found that new editors often find that their first contributions to the site are quickly rejected by more experienced users, which directly correlates with a drop in the likelihood that they will continue to contribute to the site (6). Although the total article text size has been increasing, the number of active editors has been declining (7).
In order to be a collective human knowledge platform, growing pains for Wikipedia should be alleviated by managing open collaboration community without biases.
References:
1. Thomas Shafee, et al., Academics can help shape Wikipedia, Science 11 Aug 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6351, pp. 557-558
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_article_size_in_gigabytes.png
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:An_interest_is_not_a_conflict_of...
5. https://securitygladiators.com/paid-editors-bad-thats-wikipedia-hunting/
6. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/
7.https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editors_on_English_Wikipe...