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The Physics of a WikiProject: WikiProject Physics


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This image of astronaut Bruce McCandless II, is a Featured Picture of WikiProject Physics
Lightning is an atmospheric discharge of electricity, a Good Article of the project
Interesting articles under WikiProject Physics include Sir Isaac Newton, who is considered the father of classical mechanics with the publication of his Principia Mathematica, which contain the famous laws of motions and the first formulation of the law of universal gravitation

This week we contemplated relativity with WikiProject Physics. The project was started in June 2005 and has grown to include 43 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, and 42 Good Articles. WikiProject Physics maintains four portals covering Physics, Electromagnetism, Gravitation, and X-ray Astronomy. We interviewed Christopher Thomas and Headbomb.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Physics? What area of physics interests you most? Do you have any expertise in physics?

I am at best an "armchair physicist". While I enjoy the subject and have read a fair bit about many facets of it, my formal training is with electronics and computing. As a result, I consider myself an adjunct member rather than a full member of WP:Phys, and my main function (other than cleaning up obvious problems) is to highlight problem-articles so that those with discipline-specific expertise can address them.
Particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology are the subjects I usually follow. I have work-related expertise with optics, lasers, and semiconductor physics, but rarely end up editing those articles.
As for expertise, I'm currently a master's student in physics. I've got a fairly good grasp on the history of particle physics, and a pretty good background in solid-state physics and optics (both at the experimental and theoretical levels).

The project is home to 43 featured articles and 42 good articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Do you have any tips for editors attempting to bring a physics article up to FA or GA status?

If you want to bring an article to GA or FA status, be prepared to put in a very large amount of grunt work, and to have quite a lot of patience. The single most useful task, from my outside impression, is finding and adding references (as unsourced statements seem to be the biggest item picked on during review), but many other tasks are valuable as well. Having the persistence to shepherd an article through its long, slow, and often repeated passage through the review bureaucracy is also important.
Article improvement to GA or FA status is a noble goal, and those with the patience and persistence to accomplish it have my respect.

Do you contribute to other science-based projects? Have there been any inter-project collaborations?

This "inter-project" stuff led me to come up with the concept of Article Alerts. I was getting tired of missing proposed deletions and various other discussion concerning physics-related articles, and it was very tiresome to review every discussion process for articles that interested me. (See the original Signpost coverage of Article Alerts). Currently 700+ WikiProjects and Task Forces subscribe to the Article Alerts, so I think that's a pretty successful project.
Another example of an inter-project collaboration I've led has been Journals Cited by Wikipedia, which is basically a compilation of the various |journal= parameters of citation templates. This tremendously boosted the output of WP:Academic journals by allowing us to see which journal entry were missing, and which were important for Wikipedia (journals which we cite often should have decent articles, mostly because many readers will want to know about the journal's reliability, its history, etc...). I also compiled lists of missing journals for individual projects (Medicine, Biology, Plants...) to let them know how how their field is represented on Wikipedia. Prior to that compilation, we had some journal cited well-over 1000 times without any articles on them. Now all journals which have been cited more than 80 times on Wikipedia have an article. [Well, cited 80 times as as of last year, the compilation is pretty dated since the bot operator is inactive]. So I say that's another successful project.

Does the project have any difficulty recruiting new members? Does the technical nature of some physics-related articles limit contributions from editors without a physics background?

There's more than enough day to day cleanup work needed for the efforts of non-experts to be very useful. Alerting the project of problem articles or problem edits is also very helpful, and takes minimal expertise.
Our real problem is retaining members. My understanding is that this is endemic to most technical topics on Wikipedia, not just to WikiProject Physics. The problem is twofold. First, editors burn out. The cleanup task never ends, and contrary to the initial goals of Wikipedia, articles don't constantly improve but instead find a balance point where improvement and degradation happen at the same rate. Second, not all editors are able to function in a collaborative environment. Every year or two there's a situation that escalates to ArbCom where an editor (expert or non-expert) has a position against consensus and refuses to drop it. One of the most bitter lessons to learn around here is that there will be times when you feel the position of other editors is just plain wrong, about something important - but that you should back down anyways, for the greater good. When people don't back down, they tend to escalate their actions until they get themselves removed from Wikipedia, and may take a few others with them (due to involvement or just to burnout from dealing with the dispute). This leads to a high turnover rate among experts, in the physics project, at least.
That being said, we could be twice as many people involved and we'd still have work for everyone. In particular, some fields within physics are less well-represented on Wikipedia. I feel our optics and fluid dynamics articles are overall lacking compared to the our articles on other fields, so maybe we do need to do some targeted recruiting.

The project has its own portal. Do you contribute to the portal? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of portals?

What are the project's most pressing needs and concerns? How can a new member help today?

This type of maintenance work is 90% of what WikiProject Physics does. It's pretty draining, so help spreading the load is always appreciated.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Next week we'll break out the board games. Until then, plan your next move in the archive.


















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