Structured Abstract:Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate university faculty perceptions and practices of using Wikipedia as a teaching resource.Design/methodology/approach -This study is based on a large survey to all faculty members in two large public universities. A total of 913 valid responses were collected through an online questionnaire with 9 control variables and 41 Likert-scaled questions.Findings -Our results do not support an overwhelming sceptical attitude among faculty towards Wikipedia. The overall quality of Wikipedia articles is highly valued and most faculty are regular users, just as students are. Though most faculty show a positive view on the teaching usefulness of Wikipedia, few of them actually use it for teaching purposes. We have detected a certain conflict between standard academic procedures of knowledge building and the open collaborative model on which Wikipedia rests. In the end, two important factors play a role in shaping faculty views: (a) their colleagues' perceived opinions and practices and (b) academic disciplines.Research limitations/implications -The survey has only been conducted in two universities. More institutions are needed in order to broaden the scope.Originality/value -We have gathered a greater number of answers than those collected in previous studies. The questionnaire is also very extensive. The survey has been addressed to all faculty members at one online university and at one standard brick-and-mortar university.

A key impact the Internet is having on university teaching involves the new choices being provided because of open educational content. Wikipedia is a clear example of these new options. It is a gigantic open repository of knowledge, and it can also be considered a platform that facilitates collaboration in knowledge creation and dissemination. Our research objective is to understand what the main factors are that influence the teaching uses of Wikipedia among university faculty. Based on a technology acceptance model, and using data from a survey sent to all faculty members of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, we analyze the relationships within the internal and external constructs of the model. We found that both the perception of colleagues' opinions about Wikipedia and the perceived quality of the information in Wikipedia play a central role. These two constructs have a significant direct impact on the perceived usefulness of Wikipedia. This perceived usefulness affects, mediated by the behavioral intention of using Wikipedia, the effective use behavior of the encyclopedia. The degree to which an individual considers it is important to participate in open collaborative environments and the Web 2.0 profile of the faculty members also play an important role in our model.

In this opinion piece, we would like to present a short literature review of perceptions and reservations towards Wikipedia in academia, address the common questions about overall reliability of Wikipedia entries, review the actual practices of Wikipedia usage in academia, and conclude with possible scenarios for a peaceful coexistence. Because Wikipedia is a regular topic of JASIST publications (Lim, 2009; Meseguer‐Artola, Aibar, Lladós, Minguillón, & Lerga, ; Mesgari, Okoli, Mehdi, Nielsen, & Lanamäki, ; Okoli, Mehdi, Mesgari, Nielsen, & Lanamäki, ), we hope to start a useful discussion with the right audience.

Wiki4R will create an innovative virtual research environment (VRE) for Open Science at scale, engaging both professional researchers and citizen data scientists in new and potentially transformative forms of collaboration. It is based on the realizations that (1) the structured parts of the Web itself can be regarded as a VRE, (2) such environments depend on communities, (3) closed environments are limited in their capacity to nurture thriving communities. Wiki4R will therefore integrate Wikidata, the multilingual semantic backbone behind Wikipedia, into existing research processes to enable transdisciplinary research and reduce fragmentation of research in and outside Europe. By establishing a central shared information node, research data can be linked and annotated into knowledge. Despite occasional uses of Wikipedia or Wikidata in research, significant barriers to broader adoption in the sciences or digital humanities exist, including lack of integration into existing research processes and inadequate handling of provenances. The proposed actions include providing best practices and tools for semantic mapping, adoption of citation and author identifiers, interoperability layers for integration with existing ‡

Wikipedia’s significant gender bias is widely acknowledged. In this paper we analyze the Spanish Wikipedia with the aim of estimating the percentage of women editors and measuring their engagement and editing practices with respect to their men counterparts. To identify the gender of Wikipedia registered users, we analyzed both the information contained in their user profile and the information provided by users about themselves on their personal user pages. Using our own coding procedure, it is possible to identify a greater number of women than by relying only on the gender reported in their user profile. Combining both methods, our results show that the percentage of women is small, a meagre 11.6% of all analyzed editors, though there is still a significant percentage of users whose gender cannot be determined by either method. Men outnumber women in all Wikipedia namespaces in a ratio that is always equal to or greater than 3:1. This fact can be partially explained by the lesser persistence of women editors, who tend to leave Wikipedia much more quickly. There is, however, a small group of veteran women editors who, in some cases, surpass men editors in terms of their editing practices and participation in different Wikipedia namespaces.