Wikipedia, the highly-popular online encyclopedia anyone
can edit, provides a platform to study how to engage citizen
scientists in knowledge dissemination. With over four
million content pages in the English version, Wikipedia is a
very important source of information about science for the
general public. It is among the five most popular websites
on the Internet and is a major resource for the general public
trying to learn about science. An early evaluation in the domain
of biology showed that the articles in Wikipedia were
almost as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica’s [6]. Moreover,
Wikipedia is far more popular than perhaps more vetted
sources of scientific knowledge for the general public, such
as the Encyclopedia of Life4.
Despite these qualities, Wikipedia has major limitations as a
source of trusted scientific information. As the Wikimedia
Foundation’s strategic plan notes, “Wikipedia’s coverage is
skewed toward the interests, expertise, and language skills
of the people who created it. For example, our coverage
of biographical and pop culture topics is very strong.” Although
Wikipedia has many good articles on technology, engineering
and the hard sciences, its coverage and quality of
articles in the social sciences are substantially weaker. For
many topics, the coverage is so poor that even very important
articles visited by thousands of people do not have enough
content to be useful. For example, Wikipedians themselves
have assessed over 65% of psychology-related articles in the