Physics on Wikipedia
If you have knowledge you can share, Wikipedia needs you. Get your students involved too—improving articles is a great educational opportunity, argue Martin Poulter and Mike Peel
Martin Poulter is new media manager at the University of Bristol, UK, and Mike Peel is an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, UK. Both are members of the board of Wikimedia UK, a national organization allied to the Wikimedia Foundation. E-mail martin.poulter@wikimedia.org.uk
In a 1992 article for Physics World, Tim Berners-Lee wrote about the difficulties of managing the explosion of information available through his new invention, the World Wide Web. He saw that while easy, global online publishing would bring many benefits, users would be overwhelmed by huge numbers of documents. Electronic publication was also blurring the traditional lines between academic work and personal opinions. Users would need overviews of each area of knowledge, with reviews to help them assess the reliability of what they read. This would have to happen on a network with no central control. In short, what people really needed was a Web of knowledge, not just of information.
Berners-Lee saw that the Web needed an encyclopedia. This would be “An attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state of the art in their field. [It] will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time.” Nearly 20 years on, it is time to revisit the idea of organizing the world’s knowledge. Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has become the fifth most visited site on the Web, with nearly half a billion visitors per month. It fits Berners-Lee’s description, but is still (and always will be) a work in progress.
This article looks at two developments. Having established itself as the largest reference work ever created, Wikipedia is looking to be ever more reliable and detailed in what it covers. This involves collaborating with scholarly communities, including the Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics World), and individual educators or researchers. If you want to inform and excite the public about the techniques and discoveries of your favourite area of physics, Wikipedia is a way to reach the greatest audience.
Additionally, although a great many articles are incomplete, this is increasingly being seen as an educational opportunity. Some university courses have started to assign students the task of improving Wikipedia articles. This process encourages some very good habits, such as proper sourcing of statements and respectful collaboration with others. The same opportunity is open to anybody with the right skills. If you can look up facts; summarize, structure or illustrate them; and make them understandable to other people, then Wikipedia needs you.
Free for all
Wikipedia is the best known of nine online projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a US-based charity. Each of them serves a different educational or reference need. For example, people can look up Richard Feynman’s witticisms on Wikiquote or define “astrophysics” on Wiktionary. Each project is multilingual: Wikipedia itself is currently being written in 270 different languages. As the names suggest, all of these projects are based on a type of software called a “wiki”. This gives each page an edit button so that a site’s readers can rapidly make changes.
It is an unusual publishing enterprise, not least because it depends on volunteer labour. The roughly 100 000 regular contributors all work for no pay, because they believe in the shared goal of creating “a world in which every single human being on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. As well as the writing, all of the editing and reviewing is done collaboratively by volunteers.
The projects also differ from traditional publishing in that they provide free content. This is “free” not just in the sense of “for no money” but also in the sense of free speech. All the content is available under “copyleft” licences that guarantee the users’ right to copy, modify and redistribute, given certain conditions. So while most sites on the Web would not be happy with you taking their images or video for your own site or publication, anyone can reuse content from the Wikimedia projects, so long as they obey the licence conditions. These vary, but usually involve fully crediting the original source. The entire text of Wikipedia, and the software it runs on, can be taken and copied onto other media, again so long as the original source is credited.
Wikipedia does not accept original research; that has to be published and critically examined in the usual way in peer-reviewed journals. The function of Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia) is to give overviews of subjects in language that a layperson can understand. Different readers want different amounts of information, and Wikipedia’s structure reflects this. Someone who wants a quick overview of what is known about stars can read the summary paragraphs at the top of the “Star” article. If they want more detail, they can read the full article and follow links to sub-articles such as “Stellar evolution”, “Neutron star” and then even to specific noteworthy neutron stars. All of these articles cite published sources, so that readers can check the facts for themselves. In this way, the encyclopedia serves a “preresearch” function, satisfying the curiosity of laypeople while driving experts to the most relevant sources for a specific topic.
Subject matter
Wikipedia’s 3.7 million articles in English are backed by other pages such as policies, guidelines, user profiles and noticeboards. Though not part of the encyclopedia, these are also open for the public to view and edit.
