On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 2:59 PM, David Golumbia <dgolum...@gmail.com> wrote: > i honestly don't see what the petition has to do with wiki-research-l
The purpose of this list is "to discuss scientific research into the content and the communities of the Wikimedia projects". An example of such research is the recent editor survey, which states (cf. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/10/59-percent-wikipedians-started-anonymous/#c ; emphasis added): "We asked editors to choose the top three problems with Wikimedia culture that have affected them personally, making it harder for them to edit. The most commonly picked responses were: Other editors who feel that they own specific articles and don’t want others to collaborate (46 percent), too many rules and policies (41 percent), editors who are not fun to work with (39 percent) and *lack of access to research materials like scholarly articles or books (39 percent).*" In another survey (cf. http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AExpert_Participation_Survey_-_Wikimania_2011.pdf&page=17 ), it turned out that Wikipedia contributors are much more likely to have all their academic papers available online than scholars not contributing to Wikipedia. Conversely, practitioners of Open Access are more likely to contribute to Wikipedia than their peers who are less engaged in Open Access. The problem of lack of access also applies to research of the kind normally discussed on this list, as highlighted by the icons in use to signal OA-ness in the reference section of the Research Newsletter (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-30/Recent_research#References ). In all these cases, there is a link between Wikimedia and Open Access. More such links exist, and some are explored in a special report in last week's Signpost (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-05-14/Special_report ). Last but not least, the Wikimedia Foundation as well as Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Poland are signatories of the Berlin declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge (cf. http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/signatoren/ ), one of the core documents of the Open Access movement. To sum up, the petition addresses an issue that is relevant to the list in several ways, so posting it here would just seem natural. Cheers, Daniel _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
