Research talk:Impact of Wikipedia on Academic Science

Comment

Good luck with your project! Newjerseyliz (talk) 23:09, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Part ii

I am involved with the PLOS Topic Pages that you cite as your model for part ii, and would like to help with setting up a corresponding workflow. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:14, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Control groups

In a way, parts i and ii serve as controls of each other, but have you thought about using other instances of "information available from X" to trace how the scientific literature may have been affected? I am not aware of research in this area (not my field) but I suspect there has been some, e.g. by historians of science or the Web, and I think it may provide some useful background for finetuning the components of your project. For an interesting use case, consider the story about how the myth about the myth (yes, multiple layers here) about spinach and iron spread — pointers here. The criminologist who wrote this up also has a strong opinion about Wikipedia (example). -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 11:13, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Crawlers

I am interested in how you plan to trace the influence of Wikipedia coverage on scholarly coverage of a given topic. If you plan (as I assume) to crawl a large chunk of the scholarly literature in a way similar to Google Scholar, then that tool would likely be of good use way beyond the initial scope of your project. For instance, it would become possible to address the issues raised in the #Control groups section above, or some altmetrics could be developed as to how certain sources of information contribute to the spread of information (or even mis-information, as in the spinach example cited above). On the other hand, if you plan to crawl Wikipedia(s), then I would be interested in the corpus of scholarly references that you find in there, as it may be helpful for finetuning a project that I am working on - marking how open those references are. In that spirit, by the way, I hope that your dissemination involves open channels as the default - I find it very frustrating that most of the wiki research we cover in the Research Newsletter is not publicly accessible, let alone freely licensed. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 11:18, 4 December 2013 (UTC)