Endless palimpsest: Wikipedia and the future’s historian

Wyatt, Liam

doi:10.1080/03075079.2020.1749793

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Wyatt suggested in a theoretical paper that Wikipedia could be used as a primary source in historical research [ 48 ]. From the edit history of articles, to metadata for traffic and even talk pages, he envisaged treating the open-source encyclopedia as an “endless palimpsest”.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob,

Guley,

Sevin

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob,

Guley,

Sevin

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Wyatt suggested in a theoretical paper that Wikipedia could be used as a primary source in historical research (Wyatt 2020). From the edit history of articles, to metadata for traffic and even talk pages, he envisaged treating the open-source encyclopedia as an “endless palimpsest”.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Benjakob

Guley

Sevin

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source regarding contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed its text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented CRISPR's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research generically and demonstrated its applicability on two other scientific fields we have previously studied - COVID-19 and Circadian clocks. This method makes use of Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, documenting the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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“…The IPCC had a big impact on Wikipedia and its history, we found, and what made this possible was the work of a small number of dedicated editors. In recent years, Wikipedia has been increasingly established as a historiographical source (3,8,15,37). Previous work regarding the Wiki-article for "Global warming" between 2002-2014 concluded that the IPCC report was prominently used (17).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, Wikipedia has been increasingly established as a historiographical source (3,8,15,37). Previous work regarding the Wiki-article for “Global warming” between 2002-2014 concluded that the IPCC report was prominently used (17).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

Benjakob,

Jouveshomme,

Collet

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a trusted source of knowledge online, feeding Google search results and serving as training data for ChatGPT. Understanding the accuracy of its information, the sources behind its articles and their role in the transference of knowledge to the public are becoming increasingly important questions. Meanwhile, climate change has moved to the forefront of scientific and public discourse after years of warnings from the scientific community. Therefore, to understand how it was represented on English Wikipedia, we deployed a mixed-method approach on the article for “Effects of climate change” (ECC), its edit history and references, as well as hundreds of associated articles dealing with climate change in different ways. Using automated tools to scrape data from Wikipedia, we saw new articles were created as climatology-related knowledge grew and permeated into other fields, reflecting a growing body of climate research and growing public interest. Our qualitative textual analysis shows how specific descriptions of climatic phenomena became less hypothetical, reflecting the real-world public debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had a big impact on content and structure, we found using a bibliometric analysis, and what made this possible, we also discovered through a historical analysis, was the impactful work of just a few editors. This research suggests Wikipedia’s articles documented the real-world events around climate change and its wider acceptance - initially a hypothesis that soon became a regretful reality. Overall, our findings highlight the unique role IPCC reports play in making scientific knowledge about climate change actionable to the public, and underscore Wikipedia’s ability to facilitate access to research. This work demonstrates Wikipedia can be researched using both computational and qualitative methods to better understand transference of scientific information to the public and the history of contemporary science.

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Endless palimpsest: Wikipedia and the future’s historian

Cited by 7 publications

References 6 publications

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

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