Wikipedians Reach Out to Academics at London Meeting

From Nature:

At a meeting in London last week, the non-profit website’s [Wikipedia] volunteer editors reached out to scientists to enlist their help and to bridge the gap between the online encyclopaedia and the research community.
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“A lot of academics have the impression that because anyone can edit, that means it’s a Wild West,” says Martin Poulter at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, UK, and an organizer of the meeting. “But Wikipedia is a community of ultra-pedants who care about facts being right.”
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But by and large, scientists are not getting involved. The number of people editing Wikipedia is, in fact, falling, says Alex Bateman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK. He hopes to make more scientists comfortable with the idea of editing Wikipedia pages in their field of expertise. “Most articles grow really organically, sentence by sentence”, which is a very different experience from writing a scholarly paper, he says.

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In other recent Wikipedia news…“Wikipedia Blocks 381 User Accounts For Dishonest Editing” (September 1, 2015)

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