Alternative metrics provider Altmetric has announced that any mentions of articles or other academic outputs in Wikipedia will now be reflected in a new 'Wikipedia' tab on the Altmetric details page.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia written collaboratively by the people who use it, is the largest electronic encyclopaedia in the world. The English version alone contains over 4.7 million articles, and as of February 2014 there were nearly 500 million unique users and over 73,000 active editors.
Within those millions of articles exist hundreds of thousands of links to academic research. Publishers, institutions and researchers are increasingly moving to leverage the exposure and traffic that a reference on Wikipedia can generate for their content. Although the value and relevance of that traffic is sometimes debated, for their part Wikipedia enforce strict editorial guidelines to try and ensure that quality and standards are consistent across articles, and that undue bias isn't shown towards over-zealous posters.
For now Altmetric will just be tracking the English language version of Wikipedia, but will be adding all of the other language versions over the next few months.
