Experts adding to psychology articles on Wikipedia

    Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anybody can edit–but have you?

    That’s the challenge the Association for Psychological Science is posing to its members. Wikipedia is home to more than 6000 articles related to psychology, but experts say many are written by lay people, and the quality is spotty.

    You just can’t be sure what you’ll get, said Robert Kraut, a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some really good articles, and others are just a paragraph or two long, they don’t have enough information in them to be useful for most anyone,” he said.

    Kraut said the Association for Psychological Science is recruiting experts to contribute to the free online encyclopedia. Experts have been asked to review articles to identify flaws as well as using Wikipedia assignments in the classroom. The association is also encouraging professors and their students to directly contribute by editing pages.

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    Kraut said some articles now available on Wikipedia include only a fraction of the research available on a specific topic, while others fail to mention available treatments for a disorder.

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