WikiProject

A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease.[1] Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by Smithsonian for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000".[2]

On Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue.

Wikipedia has thousands of WikiProjects, primarily divided between specific topical areas and performing specific maintenance tasks.[3][4] One task commonly performed by topical WikiProjects on Wikipedia is the assessment of the quality of articles that fall within that topic area.[5] In Wikipedia and sibling projects, WikiProject pages are located in project space,[3] and the meta information regarding the association between the article and the WikiProject is usually included on the talk page of the article.[5]

WikiProjects provide an additional avenue for engagement between editors with similar interests, and have thereby been found to increase the productivity of such editors.[6] In order to spur participation and concentrate effectiveness, WikiProjects on Wikipedia may engage in activities like having a "collaboration of the week",[7] or designating one article to be improved to the point of achieving "featured" status.[8] The WikiProject Council is a group of editors that assists with the development of active WikiProjects, and acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration.

A 2008 academic study of Wikipedia concluded that participation in WikiProjects substantially improved the chances of an editor becoming an administrator, finding that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits,[9] and concluding:

Merely performing a lot of production work is insufficient for "promotion" in Wikipedia. Candidates’ article edits were weak predictors of success. They also have to demonstrate more managerial behavior. Diverse experience and contributions to the development of policies and WikiProjects were stronger predictors of RfA success. This is consistent with the findings that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy[10] and that coordination work has increased substantially.[11][12] [...] Participation in Wikipedia policy and WikiProjects was not predictive of adminship prior to 2006, suggesting the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination.

WikiProjects and assessments of article importance and quality

In 2007, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles.[13] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, about 7,000 (0.16%) are a featured article or a featured list. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia.[14][15] According to research in 2021, WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has the most quality content in terms of good articles and featured articles. This is unusual, due to the project's narrow scope and member count of only around 100.[16]

The articles can also be rated for importance by WikiProjects. Currently, there are 5 importance categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/unsure level. For a particular article, different WikiProjects may assign different importance levels.

The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table and bar-chart.

Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors.[17] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.[18]

All rated articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low ??? Total
FA 1,530 2,405 2,352 1,834 179 8,300
FL 167 627 707 664 111 2,276
A 344 674 779 562 83 2,442
GA 3,070 6,987 14,166 18,316 1,696 44,235
B 16,112 31,241 51,155 61,173 18,142 177,823
C 16,111 51,353 127,778 278,254 78,413 551,909
Start 18,589 90,881 405,094 1,515,734 383,487 2,413,785
Stub 4,260 31,693 278,100 2,735,904 760,843 3,810,800
List 4,637 16,361 51,114 179,388 63,438 314,938
Assessed 64,820 232,222 931,245 4,791,829 1,306,392 7,326,508
Unassessed 117 468 1,212 19,232 427,420 448,449
Total 64,937 232,690 932,457 4,811,061 1,733,812 7,774,957
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
Top
High
Medium
Low
???
  •   Featured articles
  •   Featured lists
  •   A-class articles
  •   Good articles
  •   B-class articles
  •   C-class articles
  •   Start-class articles
  •   Stub articles
  •   Lists
  •   Unassessed articles and lists

WikiProject Medicine

WikiProject Medicine was formed in 2004 to improve coverage of medicine-related topics.[19][20][21]

A 2011 review of the project's efforts praised it for assessing most medical articles on Wikipedia (at that time about 25,000), at the same time remarking that only around 70 have been assessed as high quality.[19] The first use of Wikipedia medical content in formal medical education was in 2011.[22] A 2014 study found that the frequency of Wikipedia medical topics referenced in medical publications has increased over time since 2010, in spite of recommendations discouraging doctors from using Wikipedia, with the majority provided as definitions or descriptions.[23]

A 2016 review written by Wikipedians[lower-alpha 1] stated that the number of high quality articles had improved to about 80.[24] The review praised the efforts of the volunteers, but said that participation levels are too low to promise any significant improvements in the thousands of lower-quality articles, calling for more medical practitioners to volunteer.[24][lower-alpha 2] The review also said that readability (complexity) of Wikipedia articles may be too high for its intended audience, and encouraged the Wikipedia volunteers to review this aspect.[21]

CBS News described the role of WikiProject Medicine in content about the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that while "hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages".[25] James Heilman told CBS News, "I do not recommend people trust Wikipedia blindly. I think doing so would be silly. Yet, you know, people shouldn't trust other sources of information blindly, either."[25]

According to a review written by a Wikipedia contributor and advocate,[lower-alpha 3][lower-alpha 4] as of 2020, Wikipedia is among the world's most accessed resources for health information by the public, patients, students, and practitioners.[22]

Notes
  1. "Competing interests: All authors have contributed to Wikipedia articles. TS, DD, MH and JH are current participants in WP:MED. JH is a former and current member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. All authors are on the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine. TS is on the editorial board of PLOS Genetics."[24]
  2. The article processing fee was covered by a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation had no involvement in the study design, the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, writing the report, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.[24]
  3. The author is a Wikipedia contributor and advocates for Wikipedia authorship to health workers, students, and faculty at McMaster University."[22]
  4. "The Author declared in the cover letter being awarded a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation whose funding would cover this publication if accepted. Financial Disclosure section and Competing Interests section should be updated accordingly (in competing interests, I believe Author could specify having obtained the grant -after- completing and submitting this work)".[22]

References
  1. Laudato, Anthony (May 24, 2020). "The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information". CBS News.
  2. Daley, Jason (March 15, 2016). "How a College Student Led the WikiProject Women Scientists". Smithsonian Magazine.
  3. Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it (2008), p. 213.
  4. Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. pp. 165–175.
  5. Huijing Deng, Bernadetta Tarigan, Mihai Grigore, Juliana Sutanto, "Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis", HCI in Business: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9191 (July 21, 2015), p. 64-75.
  6. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 207, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  7. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 38, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  8. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 85, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  9. Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (2008). "Taking up the mop". Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 3441. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. ISBN 978-1-60558-012-8. S2CID 5868576.
  10. Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy". Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 1101. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. ISBN 9781605580111. S2CID 15211227.
  11. Kittur, Aniket; Suh, Bongwon; Pendleton, Bryan A.; and Chi, Ed H. (2007). "He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 453–462. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240698. ISBN 978-1-59593-593-9. S2CID 17493296.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  12. Viegas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin; Kriss, Jesse; van Ham, Frank (2007). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia". 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07). pp. 575–582. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.210.1057. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.511. ISBN 978-0-7695-2755-0. S2CID 5293547.
  13. Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment
  14. Poderi, Giacomo (8 April 2009). "Comparing featured article groups and revision patterns correlations in Wikipedia". First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v14i5.2365. Retrieved July 13, 2010.
  15. Fernanda B. Viégas; Martin Wattenberg & Matthew M. McKeon (July 22, 2007). "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved October 30, 2007. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  16. Jemielniak, Dariusz; Rychwalska, Agnieszka; Talaga, Szymon; Ziembowicz, Karolina (September 2021). "Wikiproject Tropical Cyclones: The most successful crowd-sourced knowledge project with near real-time coverage of extreme weather phenomena". Weather and Climate Extremes. 33: 100354. Bibcode:2021WCE....3300354J. doi:10.1016/j.wace.2021.100354.
  17. Poderi, Giacomo, Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles, Master thesis, University of Maastricht, October 2008.
  18. Lindsey, David (April 5, 2010). "Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's featured articles". First Monday. 15 (4). Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
  19. Trevena, L. (2011-06-08). "WikiProject Medicine". BMJ. 342 (jun08 3): d3387. doi:10.1136/bmj.d3387. ISSN 0959-8138. PMID 21653617. S2CID 206893220.
  20. James, Richard (October 2016). "WikiProject Medicine: Creating Credibility in Consumer Health". Journal of Hospital Librarianship. 16 (4): 344–351. doi:10.1080/15323269.2016.1221284. ISSN 1532-3269. S2CID 79020792.
  21. Murray, Terry (2015-03-03). "WikiProject Medicine making progress". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 187 (4): 245. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-4982. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 4347770. PMID 25646285.
  22. Smith DA (2020). "Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review". PLOS ONE. 15 (2): e0228786. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1528786S. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0228786. PMC 7028268. PMID 32069322.
  23. Bould MD, Hladkowicz ES, Pigford AA, Ufholz LA, Postonogova T, Shin E, Boet S (March 2014). "References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature". BMJ. 348: g1585. doi:10.1136/bmj.g1585. PMC 3944683. PMID 24603564.
  24. Shafee, Thomas; Masukume, Gwinyai; Kipersztok, Lisa; Das, Diptanshu; Häggström, Mikael; Heilman, James (2017-11-01). "Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future". J Epidemiol Community Health. 71 (11): 1122–1129. doi:10.1136/jech-2016-208601. ISSN 0143-005X. PMC 5847101. PMID 28847845.
  25. Laudato, Anthony (May 24, 2020). "The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information". CBS News. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
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