Activity of modern scholarship creates online footprints galore. Along with traditional metrics of  
research quality, such as citation counts, online images of researchers and institutions increasingly  
matter in evaluating academic impact, decisions about grant allocation, and promotion. Along with citation counts, public engagement is another factor essential for scientists' future funding, promotions, and academic visibility. Increasingly often, this engagement is happening online through different social media, and can be measured with the number of likes, clicks, comments, downloads, retweets, etc., which have been labeled altmetrics (alternative metrics).

 

Previous research suggests that editing Wikipedia can be an influential way of improving researchers' visibility or getting the message across, even in academic community. Although there has not been sufficient research on exactly what it means if a scholar has a Wikipedia page, it is considered prestigious to have one.

 

 

Research Questions

We investigate how the academia itself is represented on Wikipedia and whether Wikipedia activity on pages about academics reflects the real academic merit and productivity of researchers. Our questions are: Are researchers represented on WP notable? Are WP article metrics correlated with researchers’ notability? Are notable researchers likely to be covered by the encyclopedia? In other words, if your professor is on Wikipedia, what does it really mean?

 

 

Results

We examined 400 biographical Wikipedia articles on academics from four scientific fields (Computer Science, Biology, Psychology & Psychiatry, and Physics). We find:

• no statistically significant correlation between Wikipedia articles metrics  (length, number of edits, editors, number of incoming/outcoming links from/to other articles, number of language editions) and academic notability of the researchers (measured through the h-index); 

• no evidence that the scientists with better Wikipedia representation are necessarily more prominent in their fields; 

• academics with very low h-indexes and high Wikipedia visibility (measured in gained views) are all noted figures, book authors, and popularisers of science; 

• Wikipedia fails in covering notable scholars properly (sampled from Thomson Reuters list of ''highly cited researchers").

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, academic prominence of researchers is not among the factors facilitating the decisions on articles inclusion. Instead, the interest of Wikipedians might be driven by other factors like scientists' social impact, public outreach, attention from media, popularity of their research topic, etc. Overall, Wikipedia might be producing an inaccurate image of academics on the front  end of science.

 

 

Implications

Online images of researchers and institutions increasingly matter in evaluating academic impact, decisions about grant allocation, and promotion. Although Wikipedia and Web 2.0 give young and promising academics more chance to be seen and found, online images do not always corrspond to the real academic merit of individuals.

 

Why is Wikipedia difficult to ignore?

• Biggest repository of human knowledge in history

• First port of call for information search

• Highly visible and virtually unavoidable

• Takes a direct part in shaping public opinion on a variety of issues, not excluding science.

As the articles are being actively edited and viewed, individual scientists, their fields, and entire academic institutions, can be easily affected by the way they are represented in this important online medium.

 

 

Wikipedia community reaction

Shortly after our publication, Wikipedia activists came up with the following initiative:

According to the article "The Distorted Mirror of Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis of Wikipedia Coverage of Academics", Wikipedia is missing coverage of a large number of notable scientists from the Thomson Reuters list of highly cited researchers. There are over 6,000 names on the Thomson-Reuters list, but only a selection of these missing names are provided here at a time, to avoid copyright concerns. As names are removed from this list, more will be added.   

The initiative also aims to cover women scientists. It has been active since 13 october 2013. You can become a part of this drive too!  [website]