Martin Poulter and Mike Peel

“ WikiProject Physics, and the Wikipedia community generally, are working to drive articles to ever higher levels of quality. The site’s status as the largest ever encyclopedia is only a step towards the eventual goal of assembling a complete overview of human knowledge. Improvement takes the form of a repeating cycle of editing and reviewing. ”

“ In summary, Wikipedia and its related projects have an ambitious goal that we believe is worth pursuing in its own right. Berners-Lee saw that the Web was incomplete without a global, comprehensive, up-to-date encyclopedia. This is what the Wikipedia community is working to provide. If you have access to books about physics, you can help, even in a small way. We can testify that it is rewarding work that develops your knowledge of the subject, while potentially reaching an audience of millions. Clicking the edit button is just the first step. ”

“ The wikiproject reviews and monitors about 14 000 articles with some relevance to physics. The 80 most popular of these are each getting more than a million hits per year. All you can assume about the readers of English Wikipedia is that they know English—not necessarily at a high level—so a lot of effort is put into making the encyclopedia not just technically correct but also accessible to people with no background in physics. Sometimes this takes the form of dedicated overview articles such as “Introduction to special relativity”. ”

“ Educational projects
We in the Wikipedia community have set ourselves a truly enormous task: to write high-quality, accessible articles on every area of knowledge. The estimated 100 million person-hours achieved in the first decade are only a start. Meanwhile, educators in schools and universities want to create experiences that encourage critical thinking, collaboration, proper use of sources and other good scholarly habits. ”

“ All the content is available under “copyleft” licences that guarantee the users’ right to copy, modify and redistribute, given certain conditions. So while most sites on the Web would not be happy with you taking their images or video for your own site or publication, anyone can reuse content from the Wikimedia projects, so long as they obey the licence conditions. These vary, but usually involve fully crediting the original source. The entire text of Wikipedia, and the software it runs on, can be taken and copied onto other media, again so long as the original source is credited. ”

“ Whether a change remains or is undone by another editor often comes down to the quality of the sources. For example, if you add a fact that is cited to a peer-reviewed journal, that will probably remain, though anyone is welcome to improve the phrasing or structure. Statements based on a self-published source, such as a personal blog, are much more likely to be replaced or deleted. ”

“ The above-mentioned quality scale can be used to guide assessment of students’ work, although a more finely grained scale has been created specifically to help instructors. The students see their work being published online for a global audience, perhaps becoming more widely read than their own tutors. ”

“ This has a lot of sourced material and tables but is a list of facts rather than an accessible overview of the topic. An article that has been confirmed as well written, factually accurate, broad, neutral, stable and illustrated can be labelled a good article, an example of which is “Weak interaction”. ”