Scholarly Community Encyclopedia (encyclopedia.pub) and HandWiki

[Hemiauchenia]

If you are familiar with the world of academic publishing, you will have likely noted the great rise of MDPI (T-H-L) over the last decade.

MDPI is an open access (T-H-L) publisher, that publishes under the "Gold OA (T-H-L)" regime typical among open access publishers, where authors are required to pay substantial amounts of money (over $1,000 per paper typically) in order to make their publication freely accessible to everyone. This is in contrast to the older model where researchers gave away their research for free to the journal, and then the publisher asks for (often exorbitant) fees for libraries to have access to the research.

Over the last decade, co-inciding with the rise of the open access movement, MDPI has rised from being a minor player in academic publishing to the largest Open-Access publisher in the world, and one of the largest academic publishers in the world in general. Like some other up and coming open access academic publishers like Frontiers Media (T-H-L), MDPI has been accused of having lax peer review standards in order to make as much money as possible from publishing papers, and was once placed on librarian Jeffrey Beall (T-H-L)'s (who edits Wikipedia as Jeffrey Beall (T-C-L)) list of potential Predatory publishers (T-H-L), until MDPI threatened to sue him and so he removed them from the list.

MDPI's controversies are thoroughly documented in its Wikipedia article, to the point that MDPI felt the need to make a public announcement responding to the Wikipedia page about itself last year https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1558

One of MDPI's initiatives has been the creation of the "Scholarly Community Encyclopedia" https://encyclopedia.pub/ which describes itself as "From Scholars for Scholars". Looking at the entires, at least some of them appear to be adaptations of papers that are published in MDPI, with full credit to the original authors. However, a large number of them are taken directly from handwiki.org (which is credited in the byline, but no credit to any other authors). According to HandWiki itself, 80% of its content is copied from Wikipedia https://handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About#Statistics , though it does not provide credit on an article by article basis as far as I can tell, which might be a violation of Wikipedia's text license. HandWiki is pretty shameless about this, as their front page currently features their article about the electric vehicle startup Canoo https://handwiki.org/wiki/Company:Canoo , which is just a word-for word mirror of the Wikipedia equivalent (Canoo (T-H-L))

Anyways, I just thought it was funny that one of the world's largest academic publishers was laundering Wikipedia articles as works of a "scholarly encyclopedia".

[Zoll]

The dark side of OA is where shit like this can pass.

Global Journals, the publisher of the above article, is also classified as a predatory OA journal by Beall's List.

Yet, WP still treats anything written by a person with a doctorate as gold.

Besides, there is already an Encyclopedia.com.

[Hemiauchenia]

The dark side of OA is where shit like this can pass.

Global Journals, the publisher of the above article, is also classified as a predatory OA journal by Beall's List.

Yet, WP still treats anything written by a person with a doctorate as gold.

Besides, there is already an Encyclopedia.com.

MDPI, like Frontiers, sits in a sort of greyzone. While a lot of what does get published in MDPI is frankly junk, at least in my area of knowledge, a lot of publications by reputable authors get published in it, so it's not really a good idea to just ignore it entirely. Its frankly miles better than outright predatory publishers like Scientific Research Publishing (T-H-L) or
OMICS Publishing Group (T-H-L).

I disagree that Wikipedia "treats anything written by a person with a doctorate as gold". Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) (T-H-L) runs in pretty flat contradiction to that, as does WP:PRIMARY (T-H-L) and so on.

[Zoll]

Yet, WP still treats anything written by a person with a doctorate as gold.

I disagree that Wikipedia "treats anything written by a person with a doctorate as gold". Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) (T-H-L) runs in pretty flat contradiction to that, as does WP:PRIMARY (T-H-L) and so on.

That's true for Medical Related articles only, take a leap into controversial historical topics, and check their "scholarly" citations, and you'll see what I mean.

[iii]

However, a large number of them are taken directly from handwiki.org (which is credited in the byline, but no credit to any other authors). According to HandWiki itself, 80% of its content is copied from Wikipedia https://handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About#Statistics , though it does not provide credit on an article by article basis as far as I can tell, which might be a violation of Wikipedia's text license. HandWiki is pretty shameless about this, as their front page currently features their article about the electric vehicle startup Canoo https://handwiki.org/wiki/Company:Canoo , which is just a word-for word mirror of the Wikipedia equivalent (Canoo (T-H-L))

Anyways, I just thought it was funny that one of the world's largest academic publishers was laundering Wikipedia articles as works of a "scholarly encyclopedia".

This is more than just "funny". The founder of handwiki (discussed here in a few places) is one Sergei Chekanov who was one of the more, let's say, competent participants in Larry Sanger's Encyclosphere/Knowledge Standards Foundation project.

Chekanov's attempt to build a rival to Wikipedia started, as you may have guessed, with a fury over an article deletion:

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/DataMelt (T-H-L)

which, predictably, followed a CheckUser block for sockpuppetry:

Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_Schekanov (T-H-L)

Chekanov has been pretty adept at navigating his way into alt/anti-wikipedia projects and it looks like he was able to launder his way into the MDPI scholarly portal probably on the basis of his credentials which has been his main way to argue in favor of his legitimacy (and this gives him common cause with those gray-area GoldOA publishing startups). Anyway, as an expert with certain technical expertise, he is better positioned to do this kind of disruption than other gumflappers who tout their replacement projects as the next big thing.

I recall way-back-when a certain Bernard Haisch (T-H-L) was appointed the pre-Citizendium maven of Sanger's Digital Universe (T-H-L) project. Larry was convinced that Haisch's credentials would establish Nupedia once and for all, but it didn't go well because, well, Haisch is off his rocker. Chekanov isn't that sort of wacko (as far as I know), instead he is more of the self-important physicist who had a meltdown over datamelt.

Good times.