Research Reviews

Wikipedia as an online web information source has been controversial in scholarly circles since it began in 2001. As an internet service, Wikipedia receives more than 79 million visitors a month and has published over 17 million articles of which over 3 million are written in English. It is accessible in 270 languages and has over 91,000 active contributors. The success of Wikipedia is controversial in itself without discussing credibility because it is quite a new phenomenon to have such a rich information source universally accessible online. In the past such information sources would have been in a print format with restricted access. The impact of Wikipedia on scholarly publications has recently been examined in an interesting and revealing research article by Dr Taemin Kim Park entitled The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications published in the open online journal First Monday.