PLOS ONE Topic Pages: Peer-Reviewed Articles That Are Also Wikipedia Entries: What's Not To Like?

from the good-for-the-academic-career,-too dept

Thu, Jan 10th 2019 6:59pm — Glyn Moody

It is hard to imagine life without Wikipedia. That's especially the case if you have school-age children, who now turn to it by default for information when working on homework. Less well-known is the importance of Wikipedia for scientists, who often use its pages for reliable explanations of basic concepts:

Physicists -- researchers, professors, and students -- use Wikipedia daily. When I need the transition temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate (prefactor and all), or when I want to learn about the details of an unfamiliar quantum algorithm, Wikipedia is my first stop. When a graduate student sends me research notes that rely on unfamiliar algebraic structures, they reference Wikipedia.

That's from a blog post on the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) Web site. It's an announcement of an interesting new initiative to bolster the number of physicists contributing to Wikipedia by writing not just new articles for the online encyclopedia, but peer-reviewed ones. The additional element aims to ensure that the information provided is of the highest quality -- not always the case for Wikipedia articles, whatever their other merits. As the PLOS post explains, the new pages have two aspects:

A peer-reviewed 'article' in [the flagship online publication] PLOS ONE, which is fixed, peer-reviewed openly via the PLOS Wiki and citable, giving information about that particular topic.

That finalized article is then submitted to Wikipedia, which becomes a living version of the document that the community can refine, build on, and keep up to date.

The two-pronged approach of these "Topic Pages" has a number of benefits. It means that Wikipedia gains high-quality, peer-reviewed articles, written by experts; scientists just starting out gain an important new resource with accessible explanations of often highly-technical topics; and the scientists writing Topic Pages can add them to their list of citable publications -- an important consideration for their careers, and an added incentive to produce them.

Other PLOS titles such as PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics have produced a few Topic Pages previously, but the latest move represents a major extension of the idea. As the blog post notes, PLOS ONE is initially welcoming articles on topics in quantum physics, but over time it plans to expand to all of physics. Let's hope it's an idea that catches on and spreads across all academic disciplines, since everyone gains from the approach -- not least students researching their homework.

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Filed Under: peer review, science, wikipedia
Companies: plos

13 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2019 @ 7:51pm

I remember growing a bit disillusioned with Wikipedia during the gaamergate peak. For all its successes, the platform was unable to enforce NPOV on the article due to one editor who was extremely dedicated to pushing an exclusively negative view on the whole thing, and when that editor was finally banned from owning the article 24/7 the arbitration simply decided "now that we removed the guy who kept shoving his bias all over the article, we can lock the article and nevemind fixing the contents of the article".

Truly, the page in Wikipedia with one of the most disheartening examples of how one of the best systems for knowledge curating can still he exploited by one extremely dedicated troll. On the bright side, it left behind a pretty enlightening discussion page.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2019 @ 8:06pm

Re:
Yeah, I mean, what is so negative about a harassment campaign?
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Gary (profile), 10 Jan 2019 @ 8:53pm

Gaming the system
Just like when eBay and Amazon had customer reviews, it was such a crazy idea - let our peers tell us if we should trust this product or seller.
Until sellers learned to game the system and flood it with so much noise you couldn't tell what was real of fake.
Just like how one lying idiot can pollute a discussion by posting *hundreds* of off topic attacks from his mom's basement....
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Anon E Mouse, 11 Jan 2019 @ 1:09am

Re: Re:
"Harassment campaign" makes it sound like an organized thing, when it was more like a bunch of blind monkeys flinging poo everywhere and not caring who it hits. It was sad and a shitshow, but it was no campaign.

For a slightly less divisive example, see the talk page for crucifixion. Great example on how a single dedicated editor can promote his own view for years. Long story short, according to him when you think of people hanging on a cross, the first example is not Jesus Christ but Sailor Moon.
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Ninja (profile), 11 Jan 2019 @ 3:06am

No can do, how are creators going to survive without copyrights? How are we going to maintain our yachts, airplanes and luxurious lifestyles? - Elsevier
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2019 @ 5:19am

PLOS One is garbage.
PLOS One is very well known for publishing junk articles... the kind of articles which are rejected by 'respected journals' as they're often pseudo-science, or the results from the study are biased & polluted;

So Ultimately what PLOS is trying to do is give the (junk) articles published on its system more "legitimacy", by having them also mentioned in Wikipedia entries.

In essence, its all a race to the bottom, to peddle junk (so-called) research, and try to make people even dumber.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2019 @ 6:12am

Re: PLOS One is garbage.
And just how much did Elsevier pay you to post that?
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2019 @ 8:00am

Re: Re: PLOS One is garbage.
Just because a research paper is publicly available doesn't mean that it's been peer reviewed, let alone by qualified reviewers.
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Gary (profile), 11 Jan 2019 @ 9:06am

Re: Re: Re: Is PLOS One garbage?
Sounds like we need citation on this - is PLOS garbage, is it reputable, or something in between?
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Anonmylous, 11 Jan 2019 @ 9:59am

Nope
Look, I like Wikipedia and use it daily. That said, it shows me the problems with using it for something like this. Its just a bad idea, it violates the point of publishing in the first place, which is to allow others to see your work and reference it in their own. If they reference your work and that work changes, it undermines their work. Quoted excerpts can change, tables and formulae could change, anything could change and make your work worthless. This makes referencing a work twice as difficult because you'll also need to look through the edits and verify its not in the middle of an edit-war, see if the part you are trying to reference from it has been edited in the past, if there might a malicious editor involved, etc. I love making these papers publicly available to everyone, that is a phenomenal step forward! I just do not believe Wikipedia is the right place to do so.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2019 @ 10:39am

Re: Nope
The "View History" page is an essential part of most any Wikipedia article. Earlier revisions are often better in various ways than the current version, and seeing the edit-warring can be a learning experience in itself.
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Coward Anonymous (profile), 11 Jan 2019 @ 10:43am

Re: Nope
You could also reference the original finalized article that is not going to change.

I love their idea!
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jan 2019 @ 10:47am

Re: Nope
The point of this isn't to replace "traditional" publishing of research articles (although that's definitely in need of some overhauling). These pages aren't so much "here's our groundbreaking research suggesting that core string theory tenets are incorrect" - they're going to be more along the lines of "here's what the core tenets of string theory are, explained by someone who deals with them day-in day-out, who got a Ph.D. in this, and didn't just read 'An Elegant Universe'." I would side-eye the hell out of any research article that cites a Wiki page, regardless of whether it's peer-reviewed or not.

The point of this initiative is to have accurate Wikipedia pages not just for scientists wanting to quickly familiarize themselves with a concept, but also to have high-quality and insightful articles on niche topics that members of the general public wouldn't necessarily be able to write (or necessarily even know about at all.)

The benefits to the Wiki author include having a peer-reviewed publication to add to their CV, and the clever researcher/writer can also cast it as a form of community engagement/public service.

There's a big push in the scientific community right now to make scientific research more accessible and understandable to the people funding the research, and this is another step in that direction.

Source: I'm writing a topic page for PLOS Comp Biol.
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