Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life

In his 2003 essay E O Wilson outlined his vision for an “encyclopaedia of life” comprising “an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth”, each page containing “the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.” Although the “quiet revolution” in biodiversity informatics has generated numerous online resources, including some directly inspired by Wilson's essay (e.g., "http://ispecies.org":http://ispecies.org, "http://www.eol.org":http://www.eol.org), we are still some way from the goal of having available online all relevant information about a species, such as its taxonomy, evolutionary history, genomics, morphology, ecology, and behaviour. While the biodiversity community has been developing a plethora of databases, some with overlapping goals and duplicated content, Wikipedia has been slowly growing to the point where it now has over 100,000 pages on biological taxa. My goal in this essay is to explore the idea that, largely independent of the efforts of biodiversity informatics and well-funded international efforts, Wikipedia ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has emerged as potentially the best platform for fulfilling E O Wilson’s vision

Scholia and scientometrics with Wikidata

Scholia is a tool to handle scientific bibliographic information in Wikidata. The Scholia Web service creates on-the-fly scholarly profiles for researchers, organizations, journals, publishers, individual scholarly works, and for research topics. To collect the data, it queries the SPARQL-based Wikidata Query Service. Among several display formats available in Scholia are lists of publications for individual researchers and organizations, publications per year, employment timelines, as well as co-author networks and citation graphs. The Python package implementing the Web service is also able to format Wikidata bibliographic entries for use in LaTeX/BIBTeX.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Scientometrics 201

Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.Comment: 34 Pages, 3 Figures, 15 Table

“The Sum of All Human Knowledge”: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on the Content of Wikipedia

Wikipedia might possibly be the best-developed attempt thus far of the enduring quest to gather all human knowledge in one place. Its accomplishments in this regard have made it an irresistible point of inquiry for researchers from various fields of knowledge. A decade of research has thrown light on many aspects of the Wikipedia community, its processes, and content. However, due to the variety of the fields inquiring about Wikipedia and the limited synthesis of the extensive research, there is little consensus on many aspects of Wikipedia’s content as an encyclopedic collection of human knowledge. This study addresses the issue by systematically reviewing 110 peer-reviewed publications on Wikipedia content, summarizing the current findings, and highlighting the major research trends. Two major streams of research are identified: the quality of Wikipedia content (including comprehensiveness, currency, readability and reliability) and the size of Wikipedia. Moreover, we present the key research trends in terms of the domains of inquiry, research design, data source, and data gathering methods. This review synthesizes scholarly understanding of Wikipedia content and paves the way for future studies

Wikipedia and institutional repositories: an academic symbiosis?

A study of citations from Wikipedia articles to documents in institutional repositories showed that although the number of citations was small in relation to the number of documents (citations made to the repositories were 0.35% of the number of documents in the repositories) institutional repositories were a useful source of research information to support Wikipedia articles. 35% of citations were for background information, and 65% were citations supporting specific points, for example: scientific or historical facts, expression of a consensus, attribution of an idea, a convenient summary, the source of a classification, or to give an academic cast to a popular culture article. The types of documents cited reflect the range of academic publishing: 22% of citations were to PhD Theses, 15% to Master level theses, 21% to journal articles, 17% to conference papers, and 11% to technical or working papers. Although the materials in the repositories were overwhelmingly in English, 35% of citations were made from non-English versions of Wikipedia, indicating that institutional repositories play a role in making research available across national and language barriers. Although Wikipedia has been viewed with suspicion by academia the study indicates a potential symbiosis between Wikipedia and academic research in institutional repositories

Wikipedia and institutional repositories: an academic symbiosis?

A study of citations from Wikipedia articles to documents in institutional repositories showed that although the number of citations was small in relation to the number of documents (citations made to the repositories were 0.35% of the number of documents in the repositories) institutional repositories were a useful source of research information to support Wikipedia articles. 35% of citations were for background information, and 65% were citations supporting specific points, for example: scientific or historical facts, expression of a consensus, attribution of an idea, a convenient summary, the source of a classification, or to give an academic cast to a popular culture article. The types of documents cited reflect the range of academic publishing: 22% of citations were to PhD Theses, 15% to Master level theses, 21% to journal articles, 17% to conference papers, and 11% to technical or working papers. Although the materials in the repositories were overwhelmingly in English, 35% of citations were made from non-English versions of Wikipedia, indicating that institutional repositories play a role in making research available across national and language barriers. Although Wikipedia has been viewed with suspicion by academia the study indicates a potential symbiosis between Wikipedia and academic research in institutional repositories