Links From Wikipedia to Russell Group University Repositories

"A session at the recent Wikimania conference provided an opportunity for discussion on the topics: 'The fount of all knowledge – wikipedia as the front matter to all research'. The abstract describes how: 'This discussion focuses on how Wikipedia could become the entry or discovery point to all significant research for the general public, and for scholars who are working just outside of the topic of interest. For most people, even researchers from closely related areas, summaries and explanations of a piece of research can be a crucial means both to discover and to begin to get into a new piece of research' ... Reading this I wondered about the extent to which Wikipedia articles currently link to papers hosted in institutional repositories.  In order to explore this question I made use of Wikipedia’s External links searchtool to monitor the number of links to from Wikipedia pages from to institutional repositories provided by the Russell Group universities.  The survey was carried out on 28 August 2014 using the service. Note that the current finding can be obtained by following the link in the final column.  Table 1: Numbers of Links to Wikipedia from Repositories Hosted at Russell Group Universities ..."