User:MartinPoulter/Psychology on Wikipedia 2011
My talk at the WikiConference 2011 in Bristol on 16 April 2011 was entitled Psychology on English Wikipedia: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
- Abstract
This talk is about the quality of psychology content on English Wikipedia and the lessons learned from some attempts to improve it. Psychology is about human beings; how they think, feel and interact. It's a subject whose teachers and researchers include a relatively large proportion of women. Unsurprisingly, it's not one of the subjects that Wikipedia does well. The vast scientific, experimental literature on psychology has counterparts in commercially lucrative pop-psychology and fringey para-psychology. It pains me to see some of the misconceptions spread about psychology through its 5000 enwiki articles. In this talk, I will make you feel that pain.
- Links
My slides do not have much text, so rather than share the slides, here are the links I talk about in sequence.
- Asperger syndrome and Autism: examples of Featured Article-rated, professional quality content, on topics where psychology overlaps with medicine.
- Memory navigation template: An impressive map of the entire topic of memory: processes, theories, people...
- Assessments of Psychology articles: at the time of the presentation, more than 6500 articles but fewer than 3000 with any kind of assessment, and a worryingly large proportion of High importance articles in a Stub- or Start-class state.
- Two columns by Mahzarin R. Banaji, President of the Association for Psychological Science, in which she reviews Wikipedia coverage of psychology and calls for experts to get fully involved: "There is something very important going on here and I want to be a part of it" (September 2010) and "Anyone can edit Wikipedia: have you?" (December 2010)
- Self and Identity task force: educational project in which students, working in groups of three, improved articles relating to the self.
- Psyc3330_w11 and Psy3330_W10: Two years of an educational project which overhauled articles related to memory, getting many from a very bare state to quite well-developed and encyclopedic.
- Wikipedia:INTEGRATE: an essay that deserves a lot of attention. It argues that we can make quality overview articles by merging together lots of short, stubby articles, thereby making a big change in the ratio of useful to poor articles.
- Perception: An article that was overhauled by merging in related stub articles such as distal stimulus, proximal stimulus, percept and copying small amounts of content from a range of sub-articles such as Speech perception
- Psychology wikiproject: Has been overhauled and given new aims in an attempt to re-energise the subject
- Psychology Barnstar: Barnstars - awards given from one user to another - are just one of the ways it's possible to be nice to people on Wikipedia. I created one for Psychology and User:Orionist helpfully gave us a graphic in which the barnstar is an optical illusion.
- How to write a Psychology article for Wikipedia: a guide I have written for students and academics