Wikipedia is without any doubt the most successful online encyclopedia in the world. Many million people are reading the information every day but only a small fraction is motivated to contribute to the project. This mismatch is surprising because after adding new information to an article it is for sure, that somebody else will read it. So Wikipedia provides an additional value over a normal weblog in which in the worst case, newly created content is perceived by anybody.
The main reason why somebody isn't uploading content to Wikipedia is because the pipeline is hard to understand. It is simply not predictable if a certain sort of content is wanted by wikipedia or not. Some tutorials were written in the past how to participate at Wikipedia but the amount of newbies who likes to read these tutorials is low. That chance is high, that only the existing wikipedia authors are interested in edit in the project and apart from this closed circle nobody else is motivated to learn how Wikipedia is working internally.
Somebody may argue, that this situation has to be changed and that everybody can become a Wikipedia author. According to the raw numbers, this wishful thinking stays in contrast to the reality. Even the english wikipedia which is the largest project wasn't able to increase the amount of authors but they have become smaller over the years. Basically spoken, 99% of the world population isn't interested in the project at all, but they are happy with reading the existing content without become part of the project.
Even if the situation looks bad there is need to iimprove the Wikipedia project and add new articles. The reason is, that for many important topics no information is provided yet and somebody has to write all the missing information. So the question is, how to do so?
Today's Wikipedia works entirely with references at the end. These references are more important than the article itself. So the first question is, which sort of sources has to be selected? In the information age there are different sources available: online forums, books, youtube clips, weblogs, private websites and academic journals. From a technical point all these sources can be added into an article, and there are real life examples available in which exactly this was done. But let us describe the situation from a more conservative perspective. The most valuable sources for a wikipedia article are printed books and printed academic journals.
This excludes youtube clips, amateur websites and online forums and accepts only content which was written for university students and very important which was peer reviewed. peer review is a step before a book or journal gets printed.
Websites like plos (which is an electronic journals) and Academia.edu (which is an academic social network) are never printed but they are electronic only academic websites. From a conservative standpoint, electronic only publications are not peer reviewed so they are not allowed as a wikipedia reference. This makes it easier to define what a good source for wikipedia is:
It is either a printed book or a printed academic journal.
Now it is possible to describe the workflow how to create a new paragraph for a wikipedia article. First some references are identified. Then notes are taken from these references. Then the notes are converted into full text. In the next step the wiki syntax is ended and last but not least the paragraph is uploaded to Wikipedia.
This is the overall workflow how to update Wikipedia as an author. Sure, the pipeline is very complicated and it is done only by people who are already familiar with the project. But this is how Wikipedia is working. Every information not available in a printed book or printed journal can't be added to Wikipedia.
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