Page:Physics on Wikipedia - Martin Poulter and Mike Peel - Physics World, 24(09).pdf/3

Feature: These pages include WikiProject Physics, a shared space for contributors—some expert, some amateur—who improve articles on the subject. On the WikiProject Physics discussion pages, they review articles, share tasks and ask for advice.

The wikiproject reviews and monitors about 14 000 articles with some relevance to physics. The 80 most popular of these are each getting more than a million hits per year. All you can assume about the readers of English Wikipedia is that they know English—not necessarily at a high level—so a lot of effort is put into making the encyclopedia not just technically correct but also accessible to people with no background in physics. Sometimes this takes the form of dedicated overview articles such as “Introduction to special relativity”. The extreme end of this drive for accessible explanations is the Simple English Wikipedia, written in a restricted vocabulary for learners of English around the world. Roughly 150 of its articles are on physics, including heroic attempts to explain terms such as “frame-dragging” and “negentropy”.

At their best, Wikipedia articles ignite curiosity as well as satisfying it. While being neutral and accurate, they also draw the reader in and show them why the topic is worth knowing about. That involves using not only engaging text, but also images, video clips, tables, equations and formulae, and of course references. The “free content” requirement means that Wikipedia cannot just take any image or video from the Internet—they need to be freely licensed or out of copyright. Photographs, diagrams, animations and video are all collected on, and curated by, its sister project Wikimedia Commons (see images on p33). Many of these files are uploaded by researchers, scientific bodies or educational projects. These files also include lecture videos—for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shared clips of Walter Lewin’s physics lectures.

Articles on a common theme can be organized into what is called a Wikipedia Book, which can be downloaded as a print-quality file. The books relating to physics include one on Isaac Newton and another about the Large Hadron Collider. As the overall quality of Wikipedia articles improves, this raises the prospect of highly specific textbooks customized to individual educational courses.

Drive for quality

WikiProject Physics, and the Wikipedia community generally, are working to drive articles to ever higher levels of quality. The site’s status as the largest ever encyclopedia is only a step towards the eventual goal of assembling a complete overview of human knowledge. Improvement takes the form of a repeating cycle of editing and reviewing. Whether a change remains or is undone by another editor often comes down to the quality of the sources. For example, if you add a fact that is cited to a peer-reviewed journal, that will probably remain, though anyone is welcome to improve the phrasing or structure. Statements based on a self-published source, such as a personal blog, are much more likely to be replaced or deleted.

Evaluating the quality of articles is one of the crucial activities going on behind the scenes of Wikipedia, and one of the ways it depends on respectful collaboration. There are multiple stages of review, at each of which the article is checked against specified criteria. Some criteria are straightforward, such as the correct capitalization of headings. Other contributors require a good knowledge of the published works on a given subject so that they can assess whether an article is complete and well written. Although Wikipedia does not give any special status to qualified users, experts have a real practical advantage because of their knowledge of the scientific literature.

As articles are developed, they can be given various ratings. Most begin as a stub (figure 1a), which includes a definition and some basic facts but no references. A few ratings above this is the C-class article, an example of which is “Hydrogen spectral series”. This has a lot of sourced material and tables but is a list of facts rather than an accessible overview of the topic. An article that has been confirmed as well written, factually accurate, broad, neutral, stable and illustrated can be labelled a good article, an example of which is “Weak interaction”. Only about 0.5% of Wikipedia’s content is at or above this level. The criteria for a featured article are even more demanding (figure 1b). This label is awarded to articles that are “professional, outstanding and thorough”, meeting a long list of style requirements. The 44 current featured articles in physics include “Supernova”, “Atom”, “General relativity”, “Uranium” 34