Wikipedia to academics: Why the cold shoulder?

Wikipedia may be the fifth most visited website in the world. But it still fails to muster much enthusiasm from academics willing to participate in this global collaborative editing cause.

So it is that Wikipedia is now trying to find out why. The organization has begun to survey academics in a bid to understand their reluctance to contribute to it.

"The aim of this survey is to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to an open collaborative project such as Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities," according to Wikipedia. "We hope this may help us identify ways around barriers to expert participation." (The survey runs until the middle of April.)

But while academics by and large don't contribute to the articles published in the open source online encyclopedia, that doesn't mean they ignore it entirely. Dario Taraborelli, a research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation and one of the people on the research committee involved with the survey noted the paradox where academics use Wikipedia but - for whatever reasons - do not contribute to the editing process.

"While there might be pockets of academics running very advanced projects and lots of academics contributing outside their fields of expertise, not enough are contributing to scholarly articles within their fields," he told The Guardian..