Wikipedia is open to all, the research underpinning it should be too

blogs.lse.ac.uk

16 points·hhs··3 comments

>Wikipedia’s ethos of verifiability should extend to the accessibility of academic references. Our sample indicated that around half of all academic citations on the platform are paywalled. This is a major flaw in the Wikipedia model.

WPedia doesn't see it that way. It has recently (progressively) unveiled a new feature/resource I haven't seen mentioned on HN yet: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...]

One feature is that (sufficiently experienced) editors can sign up for access to paywalled articles. (Some personal data may be sent to the sources.) Look on related pages (listed at top) for the details.

That just encourages trouble. The most experienced editors are also the most likely editors to be surreptitiously on the payroll of some PR firm.

That's creating an environment where those editors can edit articles on the basis of papers not available to the general public and pinky swear that their translated-onto-wikipedia interpretation of the paper is correct.

Completely agree. (I was just reporting.) IMO, the confirming text of all sources should be instantly viewable by all users. But at first and by design, only the most-experienced editors learned-about and gained this capability. Sez something to me.

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