Michael Jeltsch: Wikimedia, Wikipedia and ResearchGate contributions

By contributing to Wikimedia  and Wikipedia  , I, as a researcher, can make reliable knowledge more accessible to society and strengthen the connection between science and the public. But why would I contribute to ResearchGate  , aka “Facebook for Researchers”? Since its inception, scientists have been speculating about the ulterior motives behind starting the ResearchGate project, especially since it is a venture-capital-backed, for-profit company that has raised tens of millions of dollars from investors such as Bill Gates, Goldman Sachs, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Benchmark. Investors do not invest that kind of money without expecting a future return. For sure, ResearchGate is a convenient place to share, find and request papers that are not Open Access. That’s how I mostly interact with it.

Here are two articles that have analyzed some aspects of the importance of Wikipedia:

• https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23687 
• https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05163-4 

Links to my contributions

• English Wikipedia  

• German Wikipedia  

• Finnish Wikipedia Finnish Wikipedia edits by Michael Jeltsch 

• Wikimedia Commons  

• ResearchGate