User:Astinson (WMF)/Journal Experts

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Best practices for Journal Editors and Contributing Scholars.

The case for collaboration[edit]

Wikipedia's importance[edit]

  • 5th most visited website on the entire internet
  • 500 million monthly visitors
  • 8000 views per second
  • Top ten web referrer to scholarly articles

Wikipedia is a ubiquitous starting point for research. Students, librarians, even doctors check Wikipedia to begin their research, get an overview of a field, find relevant sources, and engage with the popular conception and summary of a subject.

In the modern information age, disseminating your scholarship to a broader audience means meeting researchers where they start: on Wikipedia. In particular, academic journals, which act as curators and referees of the knowledge being created by scholars, have an interest in accurately representing the best research in their discipline, including their own journals, and ensuring that anyone researching topics in a particular field has an opportunity to discover the best scholarship. Increasingly, Wikipedia has become an important tool for furthering the impact of disciplinary research, with tools like Altmetrics measuring inclusion of scholarship in Wikipedia, and CrossRef describing Wikipedia as one of the top referrers to DOIs.

This page describes the most successful strategies for editors and contributors to journals or scholarly projects to improve coverage, while being mindful of the standards and expectations the Wikimedia community has for experts.



Principles for adding citations to scholarship[edit]

Wikipedia is a research community of practice, with its own standards for inclusion, style guide and strategies for ensuring neutrally represented content. When editing Wikipedia it is important to follow these guidelines as best you can.

File:Verifiability and Neutral point of view (Common Craft)-en.ogv
A video explaining the two main policies used in writing Wikipedia: verifiability and neutral point of view. For scholars, its important to understand how neutral point of view, differs form other forms of neutral academic writing

Here are some basic principles to take into account when adding citations to scholarly journals:

  • If you have a promotional or monetary interest in the particular journal or scholarship, your conflict of interest is likely too great for adding citations to that scholarship. Journal editors and publishers should follow the guidelines laid out in Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide or engage experts in the field with less of a conflict of interest to improve Wikipedia (such as contributors to that journal, or academic associations). The Wikipedia community gets a lot of spam linking and citations, and doesn't appreciate promotional editing.
  • The community greatly prefers not to include citations indiscriminately and in large quantities without contribution to the Wikipedia articles; instead, we try to prioritize citations to the most relevant, specific, and useful materials on the web as well as the best offline sources. The principal goal of Wikipedia is to facilitate access to the "sum of all human knowledge" (see Wikipedia:Prime objective).
  • When adding a citation on Wikipedia make sure you are pointing towards the most authoritative opinions about a topic and that the opinions are neutrally summarized. Unlike academic journal, Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View Policy favors the equal representation of all authoritative claims within a field of expertise, even if subsequent scholarship challenges those claims. When adding scholarship that creates new claims about a topic, expert editors should not create undue weight within the article text that favours either position. To maintain this neutral point of view Wikipedia favours attributed claims, rather than statements of truth; include statements which summarize the scholarly positions, such as "Even though the [X] experts have favoured [X] interpretation, scholar [NAME] argues that....".
  • The more you do, the more it helps Wikipedia's readers and community: contributing citations to an individual paper or monograph is useful; contributing additional citations to other papers from you or the journal is helpful; reorganizing a further reading section while adding citations for all of the major scholarship on the topic is superlative. The community appreciates editors who work with the best interests of readers and the community in mind. Collecting and organizing information about relevant scholarship is a powerful tool for future researchers; even if you don't expand the article, expanding the collection of citations allows you to better meet our community's goals and make a positive impression on the community.
For more information on expert contribution to Wikipedia, see the following guides:

Before you start: Conflict of interest?[edit]

Wikipedia gets a lot of spam, and scholars sometimes get caught in the anti-spam net. To be clear, experts are not prohibited to add references to their own works, but it takes care to get it right and have a positive experience interacting with other editors.

The basic advice for you is to:

  • REGISTER: Create an account, for you individually – not your organization; e.g. User:Jmaloney or User:JmaloneyNYU, but not User:NYUPress (see the account naming policy for more information)
  • DISCLOSE: Mention and explain your affiliation with a particular line of research on your userpage and explain how you are here to improve coverage of that field
  • HIGHLIGHT: Link to your scholarship that is most relevant to articles.
  • INCLUDE: Add relevant scholarship from other journals or experts
  • ENGAGE: Respond thoughtfully to any community concerns raised in discussion
  • COMMUNICATE: Speak in a friendly, clear, and specific manner while you are seeking consensus

This plain and simple conflict of interest guide can walk you through the best practices. Do not fear: as a scholar you have an alignment of interest with the community because you are interested in disseminating that knowledge to the public!

Making claims about your own research

Be particularly careful when making or citing claims about your own research—such as to the importance of a claim.

Citing your own work

Wikipedia's conflict of interest policy does allow an editor to include information from his or her own publications in Wikipedia articles and to cite them. However, the community polices stipulate that this may only be done when the expert editor is sure that the Wikipedia article maintains a neutral point of view and their material has been published in a reliable source by a third party. If the neutrality or reliability are questioned, it is Wikipedia consensus, rather than the expert editor, that decides what is to be done. When you doubt whether or not you can represent your own work neutrally, it is good practice for a person who may have a conflict of interest to disclose it on the relevant article's talk page and to suggest changes there rather than in the article. Transparency is essential to the workings of Wikipedia.

As "Further reading" or "Other sources"[edit]

One of the simplest ways to add sources to an article is to expand the further reading section. "Further reading" sections highlight where to find further information, and are a great place to add citations to scholarship that substantially covers the articles topic. These section typically become the first stop for both volunteer editors who plan to expand an article and for researchers looking for information beyond that summarized in the Wikipedia article.

When adding citations to these sections, make sure to do due diligence as a member of your fields research community, and add additional citations to the best scholarship about the topic. Typically "Further Reading" sections will point to targeted resources using a full citation; for example, a chapter in a book or a particular journal article would be appropriate for Further reading sections. Sometimes, it might be appropriate to reorganize "Further reading" section into subsections, which break the works into thematic groups, "Biographies" or "Literary criticism" or groupings by type of source, such as "Primary sources" or "Multimedia".

Examples of further reading links[edit]

Further reading section on History of London

Visual editor editing[edit]

=Wikitext editing[edit]

By clicking the "Edit source", you edit Wikipedia in its raw WP:WikiText

Displays as:

Further reading

  • Donnelly, Judy (1992). The archive of Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited. Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University Library.

Formatted with:

==Further reading==
*{{cite book |last=Donnelly |first=Judy |title=The archive of Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited |year=1992 |publisher=[[McMaster University]] Library |location=Hamilton, Ontario |url=https://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/findaids/fonds/c/clarkir.htm}}

As "Bibliographies" or "Works" sections[edit]

Frequently articles about authors will have Works "sections", and longer articles will have a "Bibliography of" or "List of works about" section, or secondary articles that includes a comprehensive list of resources, works or other materials related to the topic. Like "Further reading" sections, these are very rich places for placing links to your collection: this is where, typically, including a link within the list to distinctive or rare examples of a works in library holdings will be useful. Make sure to annotate the link, so that both readers and other Wikipedians understand how that link or item is important to the research being discussed.

Examples in bibliographies[edit]

Listing of primary source archives on the Cold War bibliography

Displays as:

Document Collections

Formatted with:

==Document Collections==
*{{cite web |publisher=[[United States Army Center of Military History]] |title=Cold War Archival Material |url=http://www.history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/resmat/tcwy.html#tab_2 |accessdate=June 10, 2010}}
*{{cite web |publisher=[[Cold War International History Project]] |title=Digital Archive |url=http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/ |accessdate=April 29, 2013}}

As References[edit]

References support the verification of the information contained within an article or record. Citations from external sources give readers the opportunity to click through and check where the information came from and if it is a valid source for the claim. On Wikipedia, we generally do not use primary sources to verify claims; instead, we prefer secondary or tertiary sources. In general, the community most prefers links to external resources added as references to verify article content.

Adding references

Adding a reference using the "Cite" reference toolbar"

To add a reference do the following steps:

  • Click "Edit" or "Edit source".
  • Summarize the source material that you plan to reference.
  • Place your cursor at the end of the sentence which your reference will verify.
  • Click the "Cite" menu at the top of the editing Window, choose the "Cite web" option and fill out the form with the citation information (metadata) describing your site.
  • Click Save
  • Your citation should appear in the text within <ref>{{Cite web| ...}}</ref>: modifying the reference can be done within the citation template, "cite web" in this case.

For more information about adding references to Wikipedia pages, see Help:Referencing for beginners

Example of references[edit]

References on Artwork by John Steuart Curry

Displays as:

Curry, however, argued that the idea to be expressed was a correct assumption of how life was in rural America.[. 1]

References

  1. ^ Lewenthal, Reeves. "Box 1, Folder 41, Object 3 of John Steuart Curry and Curry family papers from Archives of American Art at Smithsonian Institution" (letter from Lewenthal to Curry). Personal Letter. Archives of American Art at Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 10 April 2014.

Formatted with:

Curry, however, argued that the idea to be expressed was a correct assumption of how life was in rural America.<ref>{{cite web |last=Lewenthal |first=Reeves |title=Box 1, Folder 41, Object 3 of John Steuart Curry and Curry family papers from Archives of American Art at Smithsonian Institution |url=http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/-192788 |work=Personal Letter |accessdate=10 April 2014 |location=Archives of American Art at Smithsonian Institution |format=letter from Lewenthal to Curry}}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

As "External Links"[edit]

External links sections at the ends of articles typically should be reserved for only the most useful or definitive digital resources on the web. Adding a link to your website or research in the external links section of an article should only happen if you have exhausted the other options. Generally, External links sections get the most scrutiny from editors, because they should only be pointing to the several most relevant external places for finding additional information about a topic.

If you find that multiple digital collections or similar academic sources are listed, it might be useful to break the external links into subsections at the beginning of a list of like external links, in this case links to archives ( i.e add "'''Academic research'''" to the beginning of a list).

Example of external links[edit]

External link on William Blake

Displays as:

External links

Formatted as:

==External links==
*[http://www.blakearchive.org/ The William Blake Archive] – A Comprehensive Academic Archive of Blake's works with scans from multiple collections

Other examples include:

Resources[edit]

Introductory[edit]

  • Educator training: 1-hour instructional tutorial overview of how to integrate educational models into standard university curriculum
  • The Wikipedia Adventure: 1-hour interactive game about learning to edit

Case studies[edit]

Academic studies[edit]

Notes[edit]

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