Hannah's web log

Imagine, if you will, a world where academics no longer spend months (or years) trapped in the purgatory of peer review, where nobody pays $39.99 to download a single PDF, and where knowledge actually reaches the people it's meant to serve. Revolutionary, I know.

Here's the proposal: we abandon the sinking ship of academic publishing and redirect our collective intellectual energies to... Wikipedia. Yes. That Wikipedia - the one your lecturers warned you never to cite.

Think about it. While you were waiting for reviewer #2 to finally read your manuscript (after sitting on it for six months), countless Wikipedia pages languished in mediocrity, desperately awaiting your expertise. Your meticulously researched paper on medieval brewing techniques, read by approximately seven people worldwide? As a Wikipedia section, it could have educated thousands.

In this brave new ecosystem:

1. Scholars conduct research as usual but skip the submission-rejection-revision cycle of doom.
2. They directly update relevant Wikipedia pages with their findings, complete with thorough citations.
3. There would still need to be something resembling traditional research papers for original data, methodologies, and full arguments. These would be self-archived on institutional or community-led repositories, and what we currently think of as "pre-print" servers (no more signing away copyright to publishers charging libraries exorbitant subscription fees).
4. Scholarly discussions and idea dissemination happen on platforms like Bluesky, where threads can function as informal, distributed peer review.
5. Altmetrics replace traditional impact measures such as citations and journal impact factors. Instead of counting citations to measure research impact, we track page views, edit persistence, social media engagement, practical applications, and public benefit of research contributions.

Is formal peer review dead in this system? Not exactly, it's just transformed. When you edit Wikipedia, your work is instantly reviewed by countless eyes. Make a dubious claim, and watch how quickly another editor flags it. It's peer review at the speed of the internet, without the power dynamics of anonymous reviewers hiding behind journal paywalls.

"But Wikipedia has problems too!" Indeed it does. Gender bias, coverage gaps, edit wars... but aren't these precisely the problems that an influx of dedicated scholars could help solve?

The academic publishing industry has morphed from a knowledge dissemination system into a profit-extraction mechanism that happens to disseminate some knowledge as a side effect. Meanwhile, Wikipedia, for all its flaws, remains steadfastly committed to its mission of making knowledge freely available to everyone.

So hear me out: Publishing out. Wikipedia in. Your research deserves better than sitting behind a paywall, read by no one. Your grant money deserves better going than going to the most profitable companies in the world for the privilege of publishing your research on the web. The world deserves better than a rigged system that has eroded trust in science and scholarship writ large.

And reviewer #2? Well, they can still leave their comments, they'll just have to create a Wikipedia account like everyone else.

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