[BOAI] Signalling the openness of references cited on Wikipedia

[Daniel Mietchen]

Dear all,

your feedback is invited on a system to signal the openness of
references cited on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness
.

Millions of references are being cited on Wikipedia, including on
scholarly topics. [1]
The citation typically contains a hyperlink to an online version of
the cited resource, yet many of these are paywalled and thus not
accessible to the vast majority of Wikipedia readers.

So the above-mentioned proposal has been made to signal the OA-ness of
a cited reference. One of the expected effects of the scheme is to
save readers the disappointing clicks on links leading them to
paywalls. Considering that all Wikipedias combined get over 20 billion
page views per month [2] and e.g. medical topics on the English
Wikipedia still over 200 million views per month [3], there is a lot
of potential to save clicks.

Another possible effect is that the signaling of the availability of
an OA version might entice some readers to actually click through to
the reference when they otherwise would not, especially after having
hit paywalls in previous attempts.

Furthermore, such a system might signal to Wikipedia editors if they
can use materials from a particular cited source, e.g. images or video
files. [4]

Your thoughts on any of these or related issues would be greatly
appreciated. The preferred channel for feedback would be the talk page
of that proposal [5].

Thanks and cheers,

Daniel
for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access


[1] http://opensym.org/wsos2013/proceedings/p0203-ford.pdf found
67,026,537 cited sources on the English Wikipedia as of May 2, 2012.
[2] http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MED500
[4] For an overview of the extent to which images and other media from
OA sources are being used across Wikimedia projects, see
http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama.php?group=Open+access+%28publishing%29&date=201307
.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness