Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Abstract

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source regarding contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed its text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented CRISPR's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research generically and demonstrated its applicability on two other scientific fields we have previously studied - COVID-19 and Circadian clocks. This method makes use of Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, documenting the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

“…Therefore, we hypothesized that tracking article creation can reflect the growing body of knowledge related to climate change that had accumulated between 2001 (Wikipedia's creation) and 2022. To follow these dynamics, we used the data supplied by the "corpus builder" (9,28) to create a timeline of corpus articles based on each of their Date Of Birth (DOB), (Fig 1D and Table S1). We found that as the corpus' size (i.e.…”

“…They were however indicative of wider changes taking place in the table of content. Sections and their growth have previously been used by us (9) and others to map the growth of knowledge (37) on other scientific articles on Wikipedia. Alongside textual changes reflected in the article's text and size, we also observed changes in its TOC, which expanded and contracted over time (Fig 2C and Table S4).…”

“…The first stage of our research was defining the body of Wikipedia articles that deal with our topic of interest: climate change and its effects. For this aim, a “corpus builder” (9,28) tool was deployed to scrape Wikipedia’s massive body of English-language articles only for those containing the term “Effects of climate change” in their title or in that of one of their sections. This filtration was aimed at restricting the corpus to articles with significant content relating to climate change effects, rather than those with merely anecdotal mentions, as would appear in the free search directly.…”

“…These include studies on diverse topics such as the Egyptian revolution (15) and even attempts to map the entire history of human knowledge since the dawn of history (16). Recently, tools have been put forward to consolidate research methods focused on using Wikipedia to study contemporary science; specifically the manner it documents the growth of knowledge and facilitates access to research (9). Climate change is among the most volatile subjects on Wikipedia (17), and has thus been studied from the perspective of controversy dynamics, in English and Portuguese Wikipedia (17)(18)(19).…”

“…Research on Wikipedia shows it generally relies on reliable sources and high-quality academic sources (1)(2)(3)(4) even on topics in the public arena like COVID19 (5,6). From computer sciences (7) to the history of science (8,9), Wikipedia, its articles and the bibliometric data they contain, are increasingly becoming a lucrative and popular research topic. A growing body of research has tried to use Wikipedia for historical purposes, bringing mixed-methods from digital humanities (10), bibliometrics (11,12), textual analysis (13) and others from the disciplines of history and sociology of science and knowledge (14) to the online encyclopedia.…”