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There is a new WikiProject: Earch Science on Wikipedia. Thought people here might be interested.

Anyone have any good ideas on how ES.SE can interact with it? Might be interesting to be able to keep track of which parts of Earth Science are falling behind in one site vs. the other.

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I think this is a great idea. I do a lot of work in enterprise knowledge sharing, and have seen good results making closer ties between Q&A or forum sites and wiki-like sites.

I disagree that the sites have 'very different' intentions (see Jan Doggen's answer). The two sites seem well aligned in their broadest purpose — to help people learn about the world by finding answers to their questions.

SE can inform WP about the sort of questions people have about a topic. It's also conceivable that an interaction on SE could reveal a nice pedagogic analogy or illustration or reference that could improve a WP article. Most importantly thought, I think the SE community could help improve WP by augmenting articles to help answer a question, where this makes sense. The encyclopedia already informs a lot of answers (and questions) on SE — I bet it constitutes a third at least of the links. If a person has more to add to the WP answer, I like the idea that they could contribute that part to the WP article, and just point to it from SE. Assuming they can do this in line with WP's usual guidelines, naturally.

At least in geophysics, I find that a lot of WP articles are incomplete or missing completely, and this could be a nice way to augment the more technical content on WP.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think Jan's point would be better expressed as "the sites have very different modus operandi". $\endgroup$
    – naught101
    Commented Sep 4, 2015 at 0:28
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I doubt this is sustainable because the sites have two very different intentions:

Wikipedia is an inventory of current knowledge.
StackExchange is a Q&A site.

So Wikipedia has no intention to solve specific questions through interaction, neither do SE sites have any intention of covering a certain scope or maintaining an inventory. List questions are not encouraged.

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  • $\begingroup$ How do you mean "sustainable"? I wasn't thinking that they'd try to fulfil the same role, that would be pointless. I was thinking that they'd be complementary . e.g. ES.SE already as a policy to close questions that can be answered easily by reading the relevant wikipedia page, and ES.SE questions could help identify important missing components in Wikipedia's Earth Science coverage. $\endgroup$
    – naught101
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 4:21
  • $\begingroup$ @naught101 Maybe you want to update your question a little, then? The phrase are falling behind and your comment remarks would still require a sustained effort though: some people would have to do the actual work. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Doggen
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 7:21
  • $\begingroup$ I guess I was imagining that by reducing duplication, work would be reduced. But I don't have a solid plan, which is why I was asking for ideas here. $\endgroup$
    – naught101
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 14:33

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