Wow, first there was solid evidence that tourism is causally influenced by Wikipedia, and now science. The English Wikipedia's Economics article still says "Tax cuts [boost] aggregate demand." Isn't it time that potentially harmful biases in economics articles are tempered as carefully as those in medical articles?
On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:53 AM, Sarah R <srodl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, September > 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC. > > YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk > > As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And, > you can watch our past research showcases here > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#September_2017>. > >... > > Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial > By Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley > > As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it > is not surprising that Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific > knowledge. However, Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in > the world, including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the > potential to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating > ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the > scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways: > correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally > through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content to > Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational relationship is > causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping effect on science. Our > findings speak not only to the influence of Wikipedia, but more broadly to > the influence of repositories of scientific knowledge. The results suggest > that increased provision of information in accessible repositories is a > very cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains > are equity-improving, disproportionately benefitting those without _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
