Wikipedia is built by summarizing and citing what reliable sources already say. Academic journals are reliable sources, but often prohibitively expensive for Wikipedia contributors to access. There is a social movement called “open access” which demands public access and reuse rights from academic journal publishers. I feel strongly about this movement. I stepped up the Wikipedia community outreach I had been doing after the 2011 arrest of Aaron Swartz, which happened because of his open access advocacy. About a year after he was arrested I set up a Wikipedia article on The Cost of Knowledge protest against Elsevier and set up WikiProject Open Access on Wikipedia, which was my attempt to help people organize to promote the idea of open access. “Open access”, for various reasons, is a difficult concept to express. I care for the idea, and I care about the state of the advocacy movement.
Jake Orlowitz established The Wikipedia Library in a Wikimedia Foundation grant-funded project in 2013. The Wikipedia Library is a program to connect Wikipedia contributors to source materials to which they can refer with citations when adding content to Wikipedia. In theory, it would connect contributors to any kind of source. However, before The Wikipedia Library existed Wikipedians had their own systems for sharing access to some kinds of reference materials, and were already adept at sharing access to content which was free to read online. Considering its mission, and considering the gap in ability between an independent volunteer and a collective project which could speak for the community, The Wikipedia Library skewed its work focus to provide a service that Wikipedians could never crowdsource. That service was to solicit publishers for free online subscription accounts to commercial publications and then provide those accounts to Wikipedia contributors who seemed likely to use them to develop Wikipedia articles. Here is the process:
- The Wikipedia Library asks a publisher for free accounts to their publication
- The publisher providers those accounts to The Wikipedia Library
- The Wikipedia Library advertises the availability of free accounts
- Wikipedia contributors request those accounts in a public forum
- The community comes to consensus about who gets the accounts – in practice there have been enough accounts for all or most eligible requestees to get them.
- Account recipients use them to develop Wikipedia articles sharing a subject field with the content of the publication
- After some time, The Wikipedia Library seeks to report outcomes following issuance of the account. In practice this has been difficult, but everyone presumes that Wikipedians engage with the subscriptions like they do with other sources, and cite them in Wikipedia articles. Those Wikipedia articles are read by Wikipedia’s usual huge and engaged audience.
- Then end result is that better content gets into Wikipedia with better sources. Subscription recipients are gratified to have better research support. The Wikipedia Library is happy to be a vehicle for delivering donations to people who need them. Publishers presume commercial benefit from having their publications cited in Wikipedia projects.
So this process has been ongoing, and hundreds of Wikipedia contributors have used subscriptions from this service. Still, I would call it a small project in its infancy. These days it has 2-3 staff supporting it, but most of its foundation is Wikipedia’s usual volunteer labor pool and crowdsourcing process. While Jake was establishing the project, I met him for coffee and we talked about open access. He was not a passionate adherent to the open access social movement even though he respected it. Overall, Jake has always been understanding of my pressing need to communicate through conspiracy theories about open access and other things, and has a patient, moderate, sensible soul. I talked to Jake again last summer – he is as gracious as ever, and The Wikipedia Library is still awesome, and he is still a major open access supporter without having a fight or flight response every time the topic comes up in conversation. Maybe some of his practicality could guide my own actions.
In September Michael Eisen, co-founder of PLOS and giant in the open access social movement, tweeted criticism of The Wikipedia Library. As a result of that that, Glyn Moody came to know about The Wikipedia Library and criticized it in an article. Jake followed with a response on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. In response to that post, Michael posted more criticism on his blog. As a result of all this, my colleague Pete Forsyth arranged for a public discussion to be convened in which Jake, Michael, and a UCSF open access guy (Rich Schneider, with whom I am not acquainted) will have a discussion about open access and Wikipedia and The Wikipedia Library. This happens next week in the context of Open Access Week, which has always been a flexibly scheduled commemoration.
So that is the context. I wish to give my own responses to the ideas in the critical blog posts and provide my own criticism of Wikipedia. I am sharing this with the panelists before their talk next week. At the end I give suggestions for how Wikipedians and the open access community could work together more effectively.
“Wikipedia” does nothing or very little. Better to say, “Some guy on Wikipedia did this…”
The critical open access posts talk about “Wikipedia” as it is a unified entity. Lots of news media does. This is mistaken and misguided. Whenever anyone says, “Wikipedia did this and that…” replace the word “Wikipedia” with “some guy”, as in “Elsevier and some guy had struck a deal”. The Wikipedia Library is sort of an official effort of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is also an institution backed by a little Wikipedia community consensus, and probably better to call a “community project” than a Wikimedia Foundation project. The Wikipedia Library is not founded on any great thought, manifesto, new order, or ideology, and is more of an individual’s project than part of any unified brand identity of the Wikipedia project. It is an improvised solution born of poverty to reach a goal of providing content access in desperate circumstances. It is Jake’s organization derived from the community demand. From one perspective, it makes sense for Jake to speak on behalf of The Wikipedia Library, and The Wikipedia Library would not exist were it nor for him, but from another perspective, he is meeting a crowd demand and speaking on behalf of needs at the level of individuals. Jake’s position as staff of the Wikimedia Foundation does not imply – as it would with a traditional corporate entity – that there should be a philosophical ground for The Wikipedia Library’s place in a concerted organized social movement. Jake put a lot of work into establishing The Wikipedia Library, and maybe it will grow into something bigger, but at this point in its development criticism of The Wikipedia Library has to be recognized as the criticism of individual users wanting access to subscription publications. Follow the blame through the people requesting access, and not through The Wikipedia Library for providing it, because whatever is driving people to seek access to closed access sources is the problem.
Remember – Not even the Wikimedia Foundation speaks on behalf of the Wikimedia community or “Wikipedia”.
The Wikipedia Library’s direct impact is not a big deal
Building from the idea that The Wikipedia Library should not be considered as part of the Wikipedia brand, except in the sense that the brand is something that anyone can edit, critics of Wikipedia’s projects too often assume that Wikipedia projects or events are comparable to ex cathedra actions of a corporate power and backed with a lot of influence. Definitely The Wikipedia Library is a project with impact, but to say that it is popular would be an overstatement. First, Wikipedia is not popular. It hardly has any content contributors as compared to its peers in high-profile new media. It has a huge number of readers, but the number of people targeted by The Wikipedia Library is tiny. The Wikipedians eligible to get subscriptions from the library is about the same as the number eligible to vote in Wikipedia’s steward elections, so about 12,000 for English language. Among those 12,000, about 3,500 people make 100 Wikipedia edits a month, which is really the base audience which The Wikipedia Library serves. I am going to venture a guess that there are fewer than 100 people who use The Wikipedia Library subscriptions to make 5 edits a month for a six-month consecutive period- if I am wrong I still think my guess is close. Whatever actions The Wikipedia Library is encouraging are probably not the most significant part of the library project. Rather, the significance of The Wikipedia Library is to ideologically convey the idea that Wikipedians seek to use good academic sources in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians as layman have ideological interest in getting access to pay-to-read publications and citing them in Wikipedia. With the major criticism of Wikipedia being that it is low quality content, an ideological alignment with projects to increase access to scholarly content is a boost that Wikipedia needs far more than contributors actually getting direct benefit from using The Wikipedia Library’s subscriptions.
For the most part, Wikipedia contributors use scholarly sources in two ways: either they already have access to them, or they are resourceful #IcanhazPDF copyright circumventers who can get copies of whatever academic papers they want without subscriptions through The Wikipedia Library or otherwise. Personally, I do not believe that the number of people using The Wikipedia Library’s content is making a significant direct impact on the quality of content Wikipedia, but indirectly, I do feel that The Wikipedia Library is raising awareness that Wikipedia seeks to include the best available sources. I also feel that recipients of subscriptions from The Wikipedia Library feel very lucky for the privilege and grow a new appreciation for the privilege divide between those who have access to subscription content and those who cannot afford to make subscription purchases. The existence of The Wikipedia Library also communicates that people with access to the best information are welcome to contribute to Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia contributors deserve access to academic papers more than any university or library
There is a “Wikipedia is the lesser evil” argument. If any organization deserves subscriptions, then Wikipedia’s need is foremost, because Wikipedia is the single most popular general information source in the world and the only popular nonprofit media outlet. No one has offered Jake or the Wikipedia community any alternative to making the The Wikipedia Library a beggar project that grovels for donations from publishing houses. It is difficult for me to take criticism of The Wikipedia Library seriously from anyone who thinks there is any other library on earth that has more right to exist than The Wikipedia Library. When people want to criticize Wikipedia they often treat it as a world institution and when they are asked to support it they treat it as insignificant.
A few years ago Encyclopedia Britannica still had annual revenue of not less than USD 50,000,000 and is in decline from a 1990 legacy when its revenue was 650,000,000 yearly. In contrast, The Wikipedia Library might be operating on a staff of three at most with no budget for library content. There is a conspiracy against Wikipedia in the sense that every university in the United States pays for access to Britannica (part of a bundle, but they do), but has no support for Wikipedia. Britannica is the mega-power. Britannica’s staff gets access to journals. The University of California pays for Britannica access – I just checked their library website, and see Britannica listed as a resource they purchase but of course I cannot read it because they restrict access to their students. Just a guess, but perhaps they are paying 10k a year for this while giving nothing to Wikipedia, and of course Wikipedia is more valuable as a resource than Britannica.
One might ask – what triggered critics to point to Wikipedia, when they would never be so confrontational in their own university or even to Britannica? There is a societal tendency to criticize nonprofit projects for being in poverty, then disparage the desperation of those projects to grasp slightly out of the reach of poverty. The targets of criticism should be the rich inefficient projects and not the scrappy almost unfunded projects. Wikipedia is more worthy of access to subscriptions than any library or university in the world. There is no such thing as a university which is making better use of its library subscriptions than it would by cutting all local access and turning over control of the entirety of their resources to The Wikipedia Library. There is no such thing as a university or library that matters as much as Wikipedia. If any library or university imagines being more, then it is matter of vanity. Good content is easy and cheap to find, but only Wikipedia has good distribution which is the expensive and scarce resource. If the goal of any library is to distribute information to the largest audience in the deepest way, then having a process to channel information into Wikipedia is low cost, high impact, and contributes to the persistent commons of free accessible information. I am a big fan of libraries but I also think that the world would be a better place if any given library dissolved and transferred its resources somehow to get content into the hands of Wikipedia contributors.
Wikipedia is a sneaky snake of a project which counters corporate control over information access
There is a tradition in the Wikimedia community of smiling Wikipedians approaching institutions and saying, “Share your content with us. Wikipedia will distribute it, and this will drive traffic to your media channels.” This is a nice idea, and I say it too sometimes, but it is not the whole truth. The research backing this idea is inconclusive. At its core, this Wikipedia outreach strategy develops because it seems to speak to the aspirations of content providers who wish to increase their audience. It is less established that sharing content on Wikipedia is a good short or long term strategy for driving traffic to other publishers. It definitely is not the case that the Wikipedia community cares at all about the traffic metrics to any other publication, despite what any outreach pitch might promise. Wikipedia is great for sharing ideas and information. It makes no promises to pump life into decaying business models which anyone wishes to support beyond their usefulness, even though sometimes “some guy” might promise that Wikipedia does this.
The Wikipedia community imagines itself as the last stop for most people’s needs. Yes, people who wish to go more deeply into a topic should follow the sources which a Wikipedia article is citing, and yes, they might read the original paper for more information. In general, though, Wikipedia strives to be the information source which gives people the reference context that meets whatever need they have. Wikipedia contributors frequently drive their actions toward free media, minimizing commercial bias, and nonprofit publishing. Along with feelings of support for those things, Wikipedians instinctively grow habits to use Wikipedia as a tool to consume and assimilate all media. Wikipedians especially like using Wikipedia to adapt and republish ideas from good media which is less free, more commercial, and more for-profit.
Traditional academic publishers might have the idea that if their work is featured in Wikipedia, then readers will click through their links, hit the paywall, then make a purchase decision to read the paper. That is one theory, and in outreach sometimes even the Wikipedia community suggests that this is plausible. Personally, I do not buy this. Information wants to be free. Bolstering paywalls is probably not a viable business model, and I doubt the business wisdom of increasing the number of people who hit them or strategies to make people crash into the paywalls in a more surprising way. A publisher which has their closed access publication cited in Wikipedia is building supporting evidence that they are a dinosaur in a changing world, and as time passes, public opinion will not become kinder to them for being more cited over more time in Wikipedia. Saying that a given closed access publisher is highly cited in Wikipedia is not a marketing strategy – it is a target to be attacked by people who would sink their enterprise. It is supporting evidence that a lay public demands the content, which is an idea that neither the open access movement nor traditional academic publishing is prepared to address. Lay public access is so great, so disrupting, and so completely outside the professional experience of scientists or the commercial experience of scholarly publishers that they would not even know how to respond to a public demand for this content.
Getting one’s content featured on Wikipedia is no favor to traditional publishing. Wikipedia seeks nothing less than openness beyond even the comfort of the open access movement. It would be a hasty focus on short-term benefit to presume the long-term predictability of matching the minor business decision of sharing a few subscriptions to the wild and limitless radical open ideology of the Wikimedia community. There is no end to Wikipedia’s appetite and demand for content, nor is there any end to its demand that content be processed to become more free. There are already experiments for Wikipedia to devour all PubMed Central open access publications, deconstruct the text and non-text media they contain, auto-upload the media files to Wikimedia Commons and post the text to Wikisource. From this point all the content goes in every direction on Wikipedia’s never-ending assembly lines, where it is processed typically by integration into Wikipedia articles in all languages. Wikipedia does not want that just for open access publication – it wants the closed sources too somehow. The natural instinct of Wikipedians is to look at the sum of all academic publications ever published, say “Really? Only terabytes?” then think about eating it all.
The future of Wikipedia’s relationship with publishing is probably that base concepts with minimal subjective interpretation are presented in Wikipedia. Traditional publication loses its monopoly on dry presentation of information as more outlines and overviews become free to remix online. At the same time, there is still space for commercial sales of expert interpretations, context presented with humanity, cleverness in publishing for targeted demographics, and the upcoming knowledge explosion that will follow universal access to basic information. This might not benefit established corporate interests but Wikipedia and the free content movement are the biggest supporters of the arts, publishing, and the creation of new copyrighted creative works overall.
Open access is only a means to an end
Open access was always a lie. No one ever cared about open access. It was only imagined as a route by means of which we get to open science. As shocking as open access has been, it is much less confrontational to the controllers of power than open science. Open access is the palatable first-step strategy by means of which open science is sought. Even if Wikipedia is a little in conflict with open access, it does more to advance open science than the open access movement, and for that reason little conflicts should be tolerated because both projects have the same endpoint.
Academic publishing is a tiny commercial field of merely many billions of dollars. Activists behind the open access movement developed open access as a way of deceitfully positioning large groups of scientists in such a way that they would come to believe that opening data, notebooks, and all science would be the next step. The resistance to open science is so great that the concept is hard to even imagine in contemporary society. So many corporate interests and drives to commercialization stand against the spirit of scientific thought that scientists in the same field but working for competing commercial organizations are unlikely to closely collaborate. Eventually, the day will come when some technological communication development will happen that will enable scientists to communicate efficiently with each other, and when that happens, it might be the case that corporations will have to contend with the fact that humans doing the same thing like to build on each others’ work. I want to manifest open science. The open access movement is one strategy for expediting the advent of open science. Other strategies include public dissemination of layman interpretations of the science, and The Wikipedia Library as a big boost to dissemination and at most a small pushback to open access for the greater good. For a lot of reasons I do not worry too much about open access. I would prefer it to come sooner than later, but I take it as an inevitability, and I am not convinced that the incoming generation of scientists have the capacity to tolerate the anti-science nonsense in which the leading thinkers of the current and last generations seem to be comfortable. Open access advocates, because they are a subset of academics, generally have few opinions about sharing scientific information with the public, so I do not fully trust that demographic to speak impartially about community strategies to advance open science. It would be nice to collaborate in mutual efforts to destroy barriers to open science, because both OA advocates and community groups are underdogs in their challenge to commercial barriers to free science. Still – the open access movement should not be so inwardly focused to think that the movement matters of itself. There is a greater goal of open science to which The Wikipedia Library and Wikipedia are advancing with the open access movement.
As closing thoughts, here are the things that I think each perspective should ask of each other-
Open access activists should ask for this from the Wikimedia movement-
- Leaders of The Wikipedia Library should be able to recite the talking points of the open access movement
- The Wikipedia Library should conform to the jargon set by the open access movement. “Open access” as a term should be used to refer to only academic literature, and only for the ability to both read and remix that literature.
- The Wikipedia articles on open access and related should be maintained and distributed.
- The Wikipedia Library funds certain benefits to their closed access partners, including metrics reports. These reports come as a consequence of the business transaction – since closed access partners are making a “donation”, they expect an impact report in return to demonstrate an exchange of value. If any open access partner were to request and value an impact report from Wikipedia, then ask The Wikipedia Library to provide this kind of report. Ask for the following – how many times is a given journal cited in Wikimedia projects, in which Wikipedia articles do those citations appear, and how many Wikipedia readers read the Wikipedia articles which are presenting information from the cited sources. Any publisher who does this proves dissemination of their content through Wikipedia and gets a closer relationship to the Wikimedia community.
- Open access enthusiasts should keep their reserved places in The Wikipedia Library, even if no one can be identified to sit in the empty available roles in that project. Considering the present climate, there is almost certainly a path to Wikimedia Foundation funding. I even contributed to a draft proposal for a PLOS enthusiast to enter Wikipedia.
- Seek coaching on using the resources of Wikipedia, including the ability to use the name and brand image. Michael criticized the negotiation that The Wikipedia Library did with Elsevier. Fine – I am sure that Jake would be happy to deputize Michael or anyone Michael chooses to be the official ambassador to Elsevier. More titles, ranks, and accreditations can be provided on request if they are useful, or anyone can just make up their own title and say “I am from Wikipedia…” and negotiate whatever they like with whomever they like. The authority of The Wikipedia Library is crowdsourced consent, not diktat from the Wikimedia Foundation or any other hierarchy. Lots of individual Wikipedia community members can predict the response of the Wikipedia hivemind to any given proposal, so if anyone has an idea that helps Wikipedia, float it by the community and if it seems cool then go out with it into the world. If some open access movement activist wishes to negotiate outlandish deals for The Wikipedia Library and Wikipedia with intent to benefit Wikipedia while having a side effect of compromising academic publishers, then there is place for that person in the Wikipedia community.
Wikimedia community members interested in open access should ask for this from the open access movement-
- Scientists, especially people with opinions about academic publishing, need to have good familiarity with how Wikipedia works. The world is cold and lonely and Wikipedia is this generation’s only popular friendly player in nonprofit media. Wikipedia training is available internationally. Considering the good track record Wikipedia ideology has in changing individuals’ world outlook, it is worth a little time to understand how it works.
- It is probably time for some leaders of the open access movement to fork movement ideology to call for business sense in marketing. The open access movement’s commitment to jargon is intolerable. “Open access” is an incomprehensible term without having its counter-intuitive meaning explained. The related terms “green” and “gold” are not usable and should never have been coined or marketed. The blur as commercial publishers put “open access” labels on content which is barely free to read is harming the movement. The open access movement is only 10 years old and only has a few million supporters at best. Scrap all the jargon usage which has been taught to these people over this time. Start over with plain English. Make the Wikipedia article on open access comprehensible, then let’s have Wikipedia present the core idea – “scholarly publications and backing data free to read and remix” – to the world beyond direct users of academic publishing. Wikipedia is the world’s most consulted source of information on “open access” as a concept so it is an ideal platform for the open access movement to present its ideology.
- Someone with business sense in the OA movement would be doing the Wikimedia community favors by requesting a little funding from the Wikimedia Foundation while also using the Wikipedia brand name to solicit a lot more funding for development of Wikipedia as a vehicle for disseminating research. Please exploit Wikipedia as a vehicle for meeting your research grant’s communication and dissemination requirements.
- Wikipedia needs more content of better quality. Please provide.
- Wikipedia needs more access to more sources to cite.
- Open access enthusiasts should check out the many delightful open access projects which the Wikipedia community has developed, and consider participating.
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