This VCU professor’s extracurricular gig? Wikipedia editor

By Sian Wilkerson

Wikipedia, the Internet's free encyclopedia, has long been a favored resource for curious web searchers across the world. Since launching in 2001, there are now more than 300 wikis, with nearly 70 million articles written in hundreds of languages.

But among Wikipedia's huge audience - more than a billion readers every month! - few spend much time wondering about the web of contributors who ensure that the encyclopedia continues to grow and thrive. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only about 270,000 accounts are considered regular contributors. They are the volunteers who write and edit articles, ensuring accuracy, stylistic consistency, proper categorization and much, much more.

Among those dedicated few is Virginia Commonwealth University professor Peter Uetz, Ph.D., who was among notable contributors featured in the recent annual report from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.

Uetz is an associate professor of systems biology in the School of Life Sciences, part of the College of Humanities and Sciences. Since the creation of his Wikipedia account in 2007, he has made more than 6,000 edits - enough to put him in the top 0.1% of users. His work ranges from making small edits to developing entire pages, many of them related to his research interests: genes, proteins and reptiles, including the Reptile Database, which he founded as a graduate student in 1995 and which provides a catalog of more than 12,000 species of living reptiles.

"I think it's a great addition to our day-to-day scientific work," Uetz said of Wikipedia. "I cannot write academic papers about every possible subject in the world, but I'm interested in a lot of different things."

For Uetz, Wikipedia is both a tool to disseminate knowledge and a way to save what he learns for his own future use: "When you look at scientific journals, you see an interesting paper, and what I often do is think, 'That's interesting - I should write this down.' And instead of having a notebook, I just make notes on Wikipedia."

Wikipedia contributors can do everything from fixing a typo and adding a picture to writing a completely new page, and everything in between.

"There are people on Wikipedia who specialize on fixing the Oxford comma," Uetz said. "That's all they do - they fix commas all day long. It's a completely individual thing, depending on what you prefer to do."

As Uetz shared with the Wikimedia Foundation, he believes that scientists have the "responsibility to aggregate and evaluate" knowledge. Central to Wikipedia is its accessibility: It's open to everyone, either to read or to contribute their own knowledge.

The site has also been a valuable educational tool for Uetz's students, and not just as a resource. In his classes, Uetz often assigns projects rooted in the pillars of Wikipedia: verifying the reliability of a source, collaborating across different points of view and communicating information to a broad audience.

"Some of them are totally comfortable" working with Wikipedia, he said, "and others, they're cringing a little bit when they have to write something, especially [when] I tell them, 'Look, if you put a sentence in there, once you hit the publish button, 2 billion people can read that.'"

To Uetz, there's a formula to a successful Wikipedia page: It has to have enough information (and good sources), the illustrations must be sufficient, and it has to "hit the sweet spot between technical and easily understandable," he said.

After his nearly two decades on Wikipedia, the recognition from the foundation came as a bit of a shock. But for Uetz, it has been an opportunity to consider the impact and reach of his contributions, which include the page for ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease - among many others.

"I think it's important that we all have some sort of general education, and for people to understand the world better," Uetz said. "Wikipedia is one of the few places where people can find out information in a broader context, and I think that's important, too. We are living in a complex world, and it's important to understand how the world works, at least to some extent."

And Uetz hopes that everyone will consider themselves a potential Wikipedia editor, able to contribute to "the whole hyperlink universe that aims at really representing the world's knowledge."