Thompson, N., & Hanley, D. (2018). Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505. 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Large differences between new information added to Wikipedia written about in scientific works and articles that were not added to Wikipedia imply causation - adding new citations to Wikipedia articles increases the number of times those works are cited outside of Wikipedia

Science is shaped by wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial

- Wrote new scientific Wikipedia articles for chemistry and econometrics
- Stratified the 43 chemistry articles into 3 blocks – article author, branch of knowledge, and types of topics. Within each block, half the articles were randomly assigned as treatment and the other half as control 
- Treatment articles uploaded to Wikipedia in January 2015
- Control articles were not uploaded onto Wikipedia 
- If there is causation, then new articles added to Wikipedia should have a greater impact on the scientific community compared to new articles in the control group 

Science is shaped by wikipedia experimental design

- Studied causation of Wikipedia citations on the scientific community between 2013 and 2016
- Each of the newly written Wikipedia articles had 2 to 3 academic citations on average
- Same randomization as actual experiment for sorting articles into treatment and control groups 
- Used Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions to test whether references in Wikipedia articles affect the number of times those sources are cited in other academic publications

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