I have made a little survey on how many pages on the Wikipedia are dedicated to Optical Illusions and the scenario invites some reflection.
In a first place let’s deal with the voice: “Optical Illusions” . The topic is the best represented one across the Wikipedia network and appears in 20 languages, which is rather good. Universal voices such as “Internet” appear in just about 100 languages however more science-related topics such as “Brain” and “MRI” easily score about 20 or 30 languages. As often, not all the pages in the several languages are exhaustive, however at least 10 languages superseed the one page limit.
It is not here the place where to asses the content of the pages, this is better done in the Wikipedia discussion page, however still a few remarks can be made. Generally speaking the articles are aimed for the general public and they succed in this. However, even keeping things simple, I believe it is still possibile to mention other more in depth arguments such as how optical illusions can help us understanding brain function.
The bad side of the story, it comes when looking for the Visual Illusions entries. The database is not complete at all and various languages offer a different set fo visual illusions. The best way to asses the overall presenece of visual illusions on the site is going to the Wikipedia category “Optical Illusions”. This category contains links to all the visual illusions treated in each language of Wikipedia so, ideally it is the starting page for someone looking for a certain visual illusion. The category “Optical Illusions” appears in 10 languages. Not all the languages have the same number of illusions. English Wikipedia contains 74 pages, French Wikipedia scores 29, German and Spanish Wikipedia contain 20 entries each and Italian Wikipedia only 12. Given that repositories of visual illusions contain up to 100 illusions these figures are relatively small.
I don’t know what you may think of all of this and what you think of the Wikipedia Project. I use the Wikipedia quite a lot and I find it as a good place where to start a web search (either academic driven or curiosity driven) and so many people do. For this reason I think that if we can improve the presence of Visual Illusions on the Wikipedia and increase the quality of the pages it can only be a good thing for our research field.
Comments, as always, are very welcome
