Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-07-25/Wikimedian in Residence interview

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A comment concerning the coverage of open access journals on Wikipedia. WikiProject Science deals with capital-S Science. As such it would be much more interested in articles on say Occam's Razor, Falsifiability, or articles about "Science as endeavour", making its scope a bit closer to what you would expect from a project named "WikiProject Natural Philosophy" instead. Anything that is closer to "actually doing science" will be taken care of by a more focused WikiProject such as WikiProject Physics, WikiProject Chemistry, WikiProject Biology, WikiProject Neurology, and so on.

In the case of scientific publications, the most relevant project (and it is quite an active one) is WikiProject Academic Journals. We do not particulary focus on open-access journals, mostly because open-access journals tend to be newer and most of them did not have time to become impactful, or became drowned in the sea of open-access online journals that flourished because of the greater ease and cheaper cost of online publishing compared to traditional print journals. What we do is focus on the impactful journals, especially those heavily-cited by Wikipedia, as we consider them to be those of greater relevance to Wikipedians readers.

There are similar efforts to improve the coverage of publishers, but journals have enjoyed the spotlight given by our compilation of journals cited by Wikipedia of WikiProject Journals for a few years now, while publishers have neither a compilation, nor a WikiProject dedicated to them. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:03, 25 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for these hints - I certainly see overlap with WP:JCW and similar efforts for publishers and books. I especially like your bot, since I have compiled a small publisher-centric list by hand to get a similar overview. ---- Daniel Mietchen 03:04, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. BTW I checked your list... not really sure what its purpose is exactly, but some of those numbers are way off. For instance, many many citations to the arXiv are done through templates such as {{arxiv}} (531 times) and {{cite arxiv}} (841 times). And then there are the citations done through the |arxiv= parameter of citation templates, such as {{cite journal|arxiv=1234.5678}}, which would probably be in the few thousands. Likewise, by looking for journals from SAGE Publications by DOI, you will also miss citations to SAGE journals where the DOIs was not specified (or to books published by SAGE, if they publish books). The PNAS count should probably be closer to 20,000 if you compile all its possible spellings and abbreviations. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:30, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The list was an initial attempt at quantifying the extent to which OA sources are being referenced and reused, to compare that to other sources, and to allow for these numbers to be recorded over time. I am aware that not all pages brought about via the link in the "Citing pages" column actually have citations proper, but most of them probably are. Likewise, a link from Commons does not automatically entail reuse; it might just be a figure drawn on the basis of data presented in a paper that is referenced there. DOI availability and spelling or abbreviation variants add to the noise, as illustrated by the case of Scholarpedia. As for ArXiv, I do not get your point - my search phrase was "arxiv.org/abs/", which is part of the URL that {{arxiv}} and {{cite arxiv}} use (though now both do it indirectly via Interwiki map). I haven't gone through the PNAS results in detail but found the high number of Commons pages linking there somewhat surprising. ---- Daniel Mietchen 14:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just had a closer look at the PNAS results for Commons and noticed that 25,255 out of 25,298 are referencing one and the same paper on gene expression (doi:10.1073/pnas.0400782101; related to Gene Wiki).---- Daniel Mietchen 15:01, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What I mean is that while {{cite arxiv}} uses the "arxiv.org/abs/..." urls, searching for the string "arxiv.org/abs/" will not reveal those citations to the arxiv, because the string "arxiv.org/abs/" does not appear in the raw text of the article.

By my count, "arxiv.org/abs" appears at least once in 1903 articles and "arxiv.org/pdf" appears at least once in 257 articles. {{arxiv}} appears at least once in 531 articles, {{cite arxiv}} at least once in 841 articles. There is also the arxiv:... type of links that are used, and arxiv:... appear once in at least 23 articles. The use of {{cite journal|arxiv=...}} is a bit harder to gauge, but it's used at least once in around 2460 articles. So usage is closed to 6,000 give or take a few hundred cases. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:50, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have now changed the search string from "arxiv.org/abs/" to "arxiv". This will bring in a few false positives but basically should solve the problems you outlined. -- Daniel Mietchen - WiR/OS (talk) 21:33, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]