Wikipedia is, oddly, quite isolated from academia. As we all know, Wikipedia is one of the world’s most relied-on sources of knowledge. Academia is one of the greatest producers of knowledge, I hope we can agree, and moreover academia also includes many of the world’s top experts on well-established knowledge. So one might expect that academics would be frequent Wikipedia contributors! But when I, as a working scientist, visit an article on one of the topics that I am most expert in, I frequently see an article that lacks important facts and is poorly organized. Indeed, for many scientific topics, the Introduction section of many of the journal articles written by my colleagues provides a better overview than the corresponding Wikipedia entry.
In the domain of scholarly publishing, another area I work in, Wikipedia coverage is also fairly patchy. Until a few months ago, for example, there was no Wikipedia article on CRediT. During one of our Contributorship Collaboration videocall hackathons, the absence of a Wikipedia article was pointed out. When at one point I found myself alone in one of these calls, I used the time to draft an article. I posted my draft to Wikipedia, but because Wikipedia no longer lets just anyone create a new article, my article ended up in a queue of candidate articles that are periodically evaluated for inclusion. My article was initially fairly short and didn’t include anything about limitations or criticisms of CRediT. This, I think, is why it was initially rejected. Wikipedia’s editor had picked the “Submission reads like an advertisement” template when he rejected it, which I found a bit mortifying, but I quickly added a “Criticism and limitations” section, and the article was accepted. As always with Wikipedia, additions and improvements are welcome!
On the general issue of the shortfall of academic contributions to Wikipedia, various projects are trying to do something about that. The academic journals WikiJournal of Science, WikiJournal of Humanities, and WikiJournal of Medicine, for example, were created in part to encourage academics to contribute to Wikipedia (I serve as an associate editor at the WikiJournal of Science). When a scholar submits a candidate Wikipedia article to one of these journals, an associate editor will send it out for peer review, in the same way as more conventional academic journals do. If the article passes peer review (typically after some revision) as a worthwhile contribution to Wikipedia or replacement of an existing article, it is then both published in the journal and copy-pasted into Wikipedia, as a new or replacement Wikipedia article.
Because the WikiJournals are fully-fledged scholarly journals, indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals, Scopus, and other databases thanks to CrossRef, academics are likely to get more career credit by publishing in them than by directly editing a Wikipedia article. This helps incentivize academics to contribute, although the real incentive should be the wide readership that Wikipedia receives, including by the LLMs that people today increasingly get their information from. By the way, the Wikimedia infrastructure that Wikipedia and the WikiJournals use does not include support for CRediT – but as only the “Writing – Original Draft” and “Writing – Review and Editing” categories are likely to be relevant to the creation of a Wikipedia page. CRediT is of course, not the most appropriate tool for every publishing context, as Wikipedia can now tell you!
