How to write Wikipedia articles?

 

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.

Understanding how Wikipedia works

Instead describing the website from it's own perspective the better idea is to take a birds eye perspective and observe what the role of Wikipedia in a capitalist context is. The education sector which includes universities, private owned libraries and book publishers is operating as a for profit business. That means, a book publishers likes to earn money and a university takes the money from the students to pay the rent of the building. If the management of a book publisher is doing everything right, the company generates revenue and is able to pay all the bills. This is equal to run a successful business.

Some companies, which are less then 10%, are not managed good enough. The financial situation looks bad, and in the past some wrong decision were made by the top management. That means, the company doesn't generate a profit but a loss. And here comes Wikipedia into the game. What Wikipedia is doing is to meet universities and unprofitable book publishers to explain them the benefit of free knowledge. For example, if an academic book publisher goes into bankruptcy, the content which was generated by the employees has no value anymore and can be transferred to the Open educational resources platform. And if a university with a long tradition is no longer able to pay the bills, the former professors and students are angry against their institution and they are invited to contribute to the Wikipedia website with their knowledge.

Basically spoken, Wikipedia is not a successful company but it's some kind of failed project which is feed with negative information. Between a well running academic publisher and Wikipedia there is a large gap and this gap is a good idea, because the book publisher has understand what capitalism is about. The idea of capitalism is to make profit, to earn money and to grow. It's about become rich and famous and be competitive on the market.

To understand what the difference between success and failure is, we have to describe the mechanism of the value chain. A normal company for example a university, gets money from the students and pays the money to the professors. That means that the professor is paid for his work. If the professor is doing a good job and the university is attractive to the students, the company is able to increase it's profit. In contrast, WIkipedia and Open Science in general isn't operating under such constraint. Basically spoken, WIkipedia is an anti-cooperation.

Let us listen, what the Commercial Manager of Swets has to say about the future of academic publishing. Swets was a dutch content broker for libraries which runs into bankruptcy in 2014:

quote: “The pressure is high. We expect more and more from them. Nobody likes to change really. But if you bring change in a positive way, that's important.”, source “Swets Enjoys Change: Changing the view”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BgD0FcSCY

Why Wikipedia is wrong

The main problem with Wikipedia is, that the project is not focussed on getting famous and earning money. In contrast to established universities like Stanford and respected academic publishers like Elsevier the primary concern is not to increase the monetary value but to provide information for nothing. That means, Wikipedia isn't a success machine but it's the opposite. It's a community of loosers.

The reason why the Elsevier company aren't contributing free medical content to Wikipedia is because Elsevier has understood how capitalism works. It has to do with earning money, become rich and famous and stay on top of the wave. Wikipedia is doing the opposite. They are doing everything wrong and as a result it is respected by no one. Ask authors to write an article for free and putting high quality content under a CC-BY license is some kind of anti-pattern in academic excellence.

The only way to interact with WIkipedia is to boycott the project. Or at least to stay away from it. If a university is announcing an intensive partnership with Wikipedia this is equal that this university is in trouble. They have no future in the education business and have lost the competition with other universities.

Creating DOI spam in Wikipedia

Hello world,

today i'd like to show how to use a bibtex converter for insert DOI spam into the wikipedia. What we need as input is a long bibtex file which contains a lot of bibliographic references.



This file is copy&pasted into the Bibtex-converter which was written in the famous Javascript language.



The resulting text is copied&pasted into the sandbox.

Forking a Wikipedia article

Instead of putting the fork online a more easier to explain version is hold only a local copy. The advantage is, that in such a case no copyright problems can occurs, because downloading information is always allowed, only the upload of information can produce trouble.

In the following tutorial a local fork of the AIMA article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach is created. Because it has to do with Artificial Intelligence and the article is not very long, so it's a great choice for experimenting a bit. The first thing to do is to create in a working directory a git project:

git init

Then the AIMA article from 2004-03-31 (an early version of the stub) is copied into the folder and the commit is created.

cp /remote/AIMA-article2004-03-31 aima.txt

git add --all && git commit -m "init"

The file doesn't has a date as a name, but it's simply call aima. The different versions are tracked by the git tool, but not by the programmer. Right now, the git repository contains of a single file which was downloaded from the Wikipedia server.



It's time for forking the file. This isn't done by creating a new git branch, but the fork is managed by the user himself. This provides a greater control of the fork and the upstream version:

cp aima.txt aimafork.txt

gedit aimafork.txt

The aimafork.txt file is edited by the user, he adds a new paragraph with criticism about the book. The user writes down, that the book is too expensive for the normal student.



In the meantime, the users in the Wikipedia project have updated the AIMA article. They are not aware, that in the local fork a new chapter was added, but they are following their own strategy. The updated upstream version is copied into the working directory and overwrites the previous version. It's important that before doing so the git commit command was executed. So that it's possible to go back into the timeline to a a previous point.

git add --all && git commit -m "add chapter criticism"

cp /remote/AIMA-article2004-03-31 aima.txt

git add --all && git commit -m "new upstream version"

The open question is how to merge the upstream version with the forked-version? Merging is equal to concatenate different files:

cat aima.txt >> aimafork.txt

git add --all && git commit -m "cat upstream to fork"

gedit aimafork.txt

git add --all && git commit -m "clean up the fork"



After the upstream and the fork file are combined and all the sections are ordered, the aimafork.txt file is in a great condition.It contains all the latest information from the upstream plus the extra chapter written in the fork. The procedure is repeated over and over again. Which means:

1. download the upstream version into the local repository

2. cat the upstream to the fork

3. clean up the fork

4. improve the fork with new sections

What the user is doing is to maintain two versions in parallel, he has access to the upstream version and to his local fork at the same time. The self created fork is more advanced than the upstream version because it contains of more information. It's the same article about the AIMA book but which was improved by a single user.

Wikipedia is restructuring it's portals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Archived_debates/September_2019

Wikipedia contains of the mainpage, which has a large amount of traffic and from the main page the users are directed to subpages, called portals. There are portals about art, mathematics, physics and sports. Since around August 2019 there was a discussion started to delete all portals. Or to be more specific, all the 500 portals are discussed individual to keep them or delete them.

The reason for deletion is mostly the same. The page view of the portals is low, the last edit was made 5 years ago, and the interaction on the portal page is low. A similar concept to portals are wikiproject which are also subpages to coordinate the efforts about the same topic, for example about computer science. Some of the wikiprojects were deleted too, but it seems that the deletion energy is focussed first on portals.

The discussion can be described from a more abstract point of view. If the portals and wikiprojects are gone, where is the place to discuss about new articles, maintainance and peer review request? There is a place, called “request directory”. In that domain, all the domains (art, sport, science, film) are combined under a single page. That means, in the article request page, the different subjects are combined: mathematics has a subsection, literature has one and so forth. According to the pageviews, such maintenance pages are used very often by the users.

The deletion of the former portal pages is a major step in the development of Wikipedia. On the first look a portal make sense. It helps to combine different articles under a single page. The concept is comparable to a specialized library. That means, under the term “computing” only computer experts are discussing how to write content from that domain. So it's surprising that this concept has failed.

In the deletion debate, only the majority of users is pro deletion. In contrast to normal deletion debate the opposite opinion is very low. So the prediction is, that in 2020 all the other portals and perhaps the wikiprojects too gets deleted.

To understand how the meta section is working we have to take a look at the remaining Wikiproject computerscience, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer_science

Right now, the Wikiproject wasn't deleted, so it's a good time to observe the idea behind it. SImilar to a portal, a Wikiproject aggregates the efforts for a single domain. It described how many high quality and low quality articles are available in the domain of computer science, and it has a to do list.

The to do list contains of sections for article request, cleanup, expand existing articles, infoboxes, photo request and stubs. There is a also a list of participants who have put their username into a list as an indicator that they are motivated to contribute to the wikiproject.

The perhaps most important part of the Wikiproject computerscience is the to do list which includes article request, cleanup and so on. The interesting point is, that every wikiproject has such a list. But the list is filtered by the domain. The more general idea is, to take a look at the Wikipedia wide general to do list, which contains the same categories and combines all the domains in a single page.

So we can say, that portals and wikiprojects are obsolete and will be replaced by the general to do list to maintain all the domains like computer science, sports, films and so on.

specialized library

How can it be, that in the year 2005 many hundred of portals were established in the WIkipedia and now the same community is motivated to delete all of them? It's about how to organize knowledge outside the Wikipedia project. Suppose, there is no Internet available and a classical library is used to create an article about a subject. In the university domain, a specialized library was the normal way in doing so. The advantage of a specialized library is, that it provides only a small number of books in a single building. This reduces the costs. It's possible to create a specialized library with printed books about a single topic for example computer science. The amount of journals, books and dissertations about this subject is small. It's possible to collect all of them and put them into the library.

This was the workmode before the Internet was invented. If somebody was interested in getting an overview about the topic or likes to create a new paper, he was going to a specialized library. This was without any doubt the motivation in 2005 to establish portal pages in the Wikipedia. It copies the well working principle from the offline world.

In 2019 the situation is different. Most information are stored online, and specialized printed libraries are under pressure. What the experts users in the university are doing to today is to visit a general library and use Internet for getting access to specialized papers. The same is true for Wikipedia users. Most of them are working with fulltext search engine to get the information they need. The most used entry page is not a specialized search engine for a certain domain, but a search engine works by entering the needed keyword. The same search engine allows to browse in different subjects. This makes a domain specific portal obsolete.

Expanding WIkipedia

In the self description, a portal provides an entry page for a domain, which is adressed to the readers, and a wikiproject is part of a portal to coordinate the effort of editors to improve the articles. The idea is, that it's not possible to coordinate the maintainance of all the 5 millions articles in the Wikipedia, so the task is split into domains likes art, history, science and music.

A large scale project is Wikiproject history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_History SImilar to other other wikiproject it looks a bit inactive. But we are ignoring the low traffic and take a look what the self-understanding of the project is. The project goals are to improve the history articles in the Wikipedia by creating new ones, expanding old ones and improve the quality if needed. Also the goal is to serve as a central discussion point and to answer queries from the reference desk.

The interesting fact is, which kind of topic is offtopic at the history wikiproject. Everything outside the domain of history. That means, if somebody likes to expend an article about robotics he won't get help in the history project. This is logical but it explains what a possible bottleneck is. But let us go back to the goals. Create new articles and improve the quality of existing one is an important task in Wikipedia. It's not possible to ignore this goal but this would be equal to a failure of the Wikipedia in general. So the question is how to do this task more efficient?

The best way in doing so by formulating requests from the environment. That means, a user tries to find an article about a subject, is disappointed because the article is missing and then he formulates a request like “i need an article about topic abc. Please create one or explain to me, why the topic isn't available in WIkipedia”. There are two options how to handle such requests. One option is to focus on the subject or to focus on the request in general. A wikiproject is focus on the subject. That means, if a user formulates a request about a missing article from the subject history he has to ask the history section, and if he likes to read something about computer science, he has to go to a different wikiproject.

The more efficient way for interaction is a centralized request page, in which all the domains are combined. For doing so, the existing portals and wikiprojects have to be deleted, while the request directory should be improved and become more user friendly. A centralized request desk allows to improve all the articles in the Wikipedia.

Making Wikipedia more accessible to the public

Introducing Wikipedia in the year 2019 to a wider audience is no longer needed. The website has reached the top10 of the Alexa statistics and can be called a success. Similar to encyclopedic projects in the 18th century, Wikipedia has adopted the latest technology and tries to enlighten the society.

Around the Wikipedia project there is a major concern, which is located not in the content itself, but in the documentation what Wikipedia is about and how to contribute to the project. The problem is, that many help pages are created and additionally in the academic literature a large amount of papers about the Wikipedia were written. It seems, that even for bibliographic experts, it's hard to explain what Wikipedia is and in which direction the project will evolve in the future.

The literature about Wikipedia can be divided into two groups. The beginning was dominated by papers about the project itself, and it's comparison to existing encyclopedia projects like Britannica. SInce 2010 a new sort of papers was written which is focussed on the conflicts in the project. Introducing this sort of text needs a detailed explanation.

In general, there are two options available to describe a project. The first idea is to assume, that Wikipedia is a blackbox which can be communicated to the outside world. The second idea is, to describe Wikipedia as a living system which is powered by internal conflicts. A typical example for a conflict is an edit war, banning a user from the project or deleting an article. The interesting fact is, that smaller wikis which are created by a single admin, doesn't have these sorts of conflicts. In a single user Wiki, the only possible conflict is available between the human user, and the mediawiki installation. For example, the user tries to format a heading in bold, but the syntax parser produces an error.

In the Wikipedia project are more complicated sort of conflicts is visible, which has to do with interaction users which are trying to achieve different goals. The most obvious conflict is between a user who likes to enter new information into the Wiki and the admin, who likes to prevent this, because he classifies the edit as vandalism. The amount of conflicts in the WIkipedia isn't researched very well. In the early literature, the assumption was, that conflicts can be ignored. From a game theoretic perspective, it make sense to monitor the conflicts in detail, because they are the explaining what the rules in the system are.

It's important to know, that Wikipedia is working different then it was described in the help section. That means, the rules of the Wikipedia game are not described explicit but they are communicated in the conflicts which break out and which are solved in a certain fashion. Describing these conflicts allows to identify the shared goals of the users and under which cases a stress from the outside is available.

How exactly are conflicts solved in the Wikipedia? The answer is, that the users in the system are anticipating the reaction of the community and this allows them to adapt their individual behavior. That means, a conflict is located on the time scale and it produces reactions in the future. In most cases, the prediction of future behavior is based on looking backwards in the past. Longterm admin users have a large knowledge what the workflow was for certain article conflicts. This pattern is used to generate a certain behavior in the now. A behavior consists of entering text and pressing delete buttons.

Creating a Wikipedia article

... from scratch doesn't make much sense. Because the user has no idea, which topic is important nor how to format the paragraph so that Wikipedia is happy too. The more elaborated way in creating content for Wikipedia is to search for text already written on the own home directory. In the best case, it's draft for an upcoming wikipedia article, written 2 months ago, but never uploaded to the encyclopedia. Such a draft version can be extended with two literature references, and after proofreading it's ready for the sandbox. This tool allows to check if the paragraph is well formatted, and then it can be copied into the article space.

The newbie would assume, that after uploading new content to the Wikipedia, an edit war will start in which a powerful admin collective will go through every referenced source and will ask if the user is already familiar with the topic. Such a scenario is available for mainstream articles which have a high pageview statistics, but the edit in normal scientific article in the encyclopedia is mostly ignored. That means, the content is uploaded and nothing will happen. If the edit looks not as maximum spam, but seems to look halfway informed, the edit will be accepted as valid. The reason is, that most articles in the Wikipedia doesn't have any contributors at all. That means, the last substantial edit was made 2 years ago, and if someone likes to add a small paragraph Wikipedia won't reject it.

Sure, it's important to write accurate sentences and provide quality ressources in the footnote section, but in general the quality standard is only on the average level.

Why is Wikipedia critized by Academia?

According to the online-discussion it is a fact, the most universities and libraries distrust Wikipedia. They recommend their student not to cite the encyclopedia and they are also prohibit, that students or professors edit in the Wikipedia. But what is the reason behind this distance?

At first, it is has nothing to do with the content or the quality. The academic quality of Wikipedia is very high, and the encyclopedia draws a clear distinction between science and pseudo-science. That means, if somebody is written in the Wikipedia it is true from a scientific standpoint. It seems, that the mistrust to Wikipedia has nothing to do with the content itself, but is more a social situation. Usually, Wikipedia isn't working on a personal basis, but on a quality base, that means, if an anonymous author is editing an article and the edit makes sense, it will become part of Wikipedia. And this is the opposite to classical academia. Another difference is, that publication in classical science works with grants and huge amount of money, while Wikipedia is financially independent. That means, there is not plan behind the website, instead it is chaotic.

Like I mentioned in the beginning it is a fact, that most universities are not familiar with Wikipedia and they are not interested in become a friend. About the fact itself, we can't debate, but we can question if this makes sense. If the aim is to increase the amount of knowledge, and if the aim is to increase the quality, then the wikipedia model makes sense. It is the most successful example for open science, there is not better alternative available. Instead we must ask, if the other side who is criticizing the website is perhaps wrong? I mean, if a professor is telling his student to not cite Wikipedia in their homework and not contribute to Wikipedia then the professor is perhaps wrong. He lives in a world, in which Academia is equal to paywalled access and to restrict the flow of information. Even this behavior may be common in certain areas of society it is not right choice for future development.

Let us imagine possible alternatives to citing Wikipedia, contributing to open source knowledge and bringing Open Science forward. The alternative is given by the past. It is the way, science was organized the last 2000 years and it doesn't worked. That means, restricting the number of person who are able to read a book is the standard model which was used the last hundred years. It is a role model which makes no sense.

Wikipedia was not invented because it is the next logical step for the universities and the libraries, Wikipedia was invented as the opposite to the former science workflow. Wikipedia is criticized by the same reason, like the Gutenberg printing press was criticized by the church, because the danger is high, that it will change the world. Sometimes there are some conspiracy theories out there which postulate that Wikipedia is some kind of top down project which is lead by wise universities professors who want to monopolize scientific knowledge. The opposite is true. Most contributors to Wikipedia have a non-academic background, they come from commercial book publishers, gaming industry, amateur scientists and other crackpots. I would guess that the number of Wikipedia authors who are in their main employment a professor at a university are very small (smaller then 1%). That means, the social environment of Wikipedia and classical universities is different. It is attractive for a different type of people. Wikipedia is some kind of disruptive project, which has the aim to destroy something, while classical universities and libraries want to protect the past and criticizing any kind of technology.

The main reason, why the reputation of Wikipedia in Academia is low has to do with the fear of the people. Universities have seen what Wikipedia has done with classical encyclopedia like Brockhaus and the Britannica and they are scared that the same development will take place with their nice libraries, printed journals and seminars. If the student are able to inform themself from an independent source, the professor is in the difficult situation to explain himself. If a student googled during the lecture the topic in Wikipedia and has asked a question to the professor it is very likely that he will fail to answer it. That is the reason why Wikipedia isn't tolerated in the university.

Like I mentioned above, this makes absolutely no sense, because Wikipedia is one of the richest and accurate source of information available. It is easier to understand and cheaper to access then any other academic resource. Otherwise it is not uncommon that a reaction to new technology makes not sense. Because the idea is not, to talk about Wikipedia and explain the pros and cons, the idea of the neoluddism movement is to resist against technology. And that is always irrational.