Credit: Reategui12 via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike  3.0 Unported license.  
    Wikipedia has been through many changes since its inception in    2001. Now that it dwarfs all previous encyclopedias in scope    and depth, collaborations with expert contributors are aiding    the increased focus on content quality.  
    In a recent letter to Science, a group of researchers    make the case that there has never been a better time for    experts to help shape the world's most-read information source.    This is illustrated with examples of Academia-Wikipedia    collaborations that have benefited both parties. Academics gain    a public impact that is matched by few other outreach platforms    (even obscure Wikipedia pages often get hundreds of reads per    day). In return, the encyclopedia benefits from the accurate and    expert-reviewed information.  
    The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that hosts    Wikipedia, is currently formulating its strategy through to    2030 and has identified collaboration with the wider knowledge    ecosystem as one of its key themes.  
    "It's a resource that we've all benefited from at one time or    another. Scholars have the privilege of being able to devote    their careers to knowledge, so I think it's only fair to give a    little back," says Thomas Shafee  
    The academic community has a range of ways to get involved. The    first is for individual scholars to directly edit the    encyclopedia. Recent updates to its editing interface have made    it as easy to write as a Word document. Multiple academic    journals also offer the opportunity to dual-publish articles so    that a cite-able version if published in the journal, and used    to create or overhaul the topic's Wikipedia page (e.g.    PLOS, Gene, Wiki.J.Med). The Wikipedia editor community    is organised into groups with similar interests called    "WikiProjects," which cover all pretty much all possible    topics.  
    On a larger scale, there are also several successful models for    organisations to form partnerships. One option is to organize    groups of experts to review and update important pages (for    example Cancer research UK's updates of several cancer pages).    They can also train their members to ensure the best sources    are integrated into articles (or example by the Cochrane    Library). Indeed, several medical schools now teach Wikipedia    editing as a student course. Another possibility is directly    providing their own content for use by the encyclopedia (for    example Osmosis.org medical video content). Even more extensive    integration of their information is also possible with    Wikipedia's structured knowledge database, Wikidata (for    example the pages for genes and RNA families).  
    Greater involvement by subject experts will improve Wikipedias    quality, which will in turn attract more contributors. Although    the letter to Science focused on the biomedical field, these    are examples of a much wider phenomenon. For instance, there    have been several ongoing collaborations between Galleries,    Libraries and Museums around the world to add their curated and    well-sourced knowledge to Wikipedia (GLAM-Wiki).  
    In all this, the real winners are the general public. Barely a    few decades ago an encyclopedia was a luxury item that few    could afford. Now everyone has free access to an encyclopedia    larger than could ever fit in most homes if printed. It seems    reasonable to keep pushing for such a resource is as good as it    can be.  
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Wikipedia-academia collaborations benefit both parties - Tech Xplore