Wikipedia and Research – An Article, Some Ideas

I came across this infographic today – Wikipedia – Redefining Research

Some observations and ideas for projects:

  1. “In comparison to College Level Text Books – Wikipedia is 98% accurate”.  It will be interesting to see whether Wikipedia’s coverage is as extensive as a recommended book for a specific course? Wikibooks may be designed to meet these needs, but I wonder how many wikibooks take content from Wikipedia itself.
  2. Since Wikipedia text is available under Creative Commons License , it can be tailored to the needs of learners and researchers with special tools.
  3. It will be useful to create some guides on how to do research using Wikipedia, and compare it with other alternate methods.
  4. Projects like DbPedia use Wikipedia to extract information about entities like companies and provide a searchable database.  This concept can be extended further for other entities including subjects.
  5. Concept mapping tools can provide a visual interface to Wikipedia. Instead of the conventional method of drawing by hand, you can create automatic concept map generators (a subject for another blog post)

Related:

Wiki Mindmaps