Mike Peel began editing Wikipedia – the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit – after a physics entry made him mad. It was 2005 and the then undergraduate was reading around a course when he became "irritated by a grammatical mistake". He hasn't looked back since. For Peel, now a 26-year-old post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank centre for astrophysics, is not only the secretary of Wikimedia UK – the local volunteer chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project – but also one of the more prolific contributors among UK academics.

Though it is impossible to say who holds the top spot – academic wikipedians are not ranked per se – Peel estimates he has made more than 16,000 edits, contributed to approximately 1,500 pages and started over 50, mostly within his area of expertise. If you Google "Big Bang", the Wikipedia page that is the first result to pop up owes its thoroughness, at least in part, to the work of Peel. His main reason for contributing is one of public good. "Everyone goes to Wikipedia, and, because most people are using it and learning from it, we need to make sure they get the right information," he says.

Yet Peel is also a rare breed among academics, who seem less inclined to make contributions to pages than gaze on them. Scholars have mostly now joined students in accepting that Wikipedia – the fifth most visited website in the world – can be a valuable starting point for inquiry, but it appears that when it comes to actually contributing to the articles within their area of expertise, there is a hole. "Academics are trapped in this paradox of using Wikipedia but not contributing," says Dario Taraborelli, a research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation. "While there might be pockets of academics running very advanced projects and lots of academics contributing outside their fields of expertise, not enough are contributing to scholarly articles within their fields."

The issue is certainly concerning the Wikimedia Foundation. Taraborelli is currently one of three members of its research committee running a survey of experts to try to understand both why they do – and don't – contribute to Wikipedia and what could be done to help. Academics, scientists, research students and working professionals are all invited to participate. Part of the purpose is simply to try to turn the many anecdotes about expert participation into data, says Daniel Mietchen, who is also running the survey and is the managing editor of Citizendium, a Wikipedia-like project with a special role for experts. "It is the first real attempt to investigate the motivations for experts contributing or not, and we are honestly interested in answers to both."

The foundation wants to raise the level of expert participation – be it fully fledged editing or helping editors identify inaccuracies – to improve the quality of pages, cover more scholarly and encyclopaedic knowledge, and increase the diversity of participants, says Taraborelli. But, issues of lack of time and unfamiliar technology aside, the biggest barrier to more participation may be the academic ego.

Academics get ahead primarily by writing papers and winning grant proposals. "Unfortunately, there is no reward system set up in academia for us to contribute our knowledge in Wikipedia," says Mark Graham, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute currently studying geographical aspects of Wikipedia.

Likewise, on Wikipedia, no one knows they are experts, causing fears that contributions will be edited out. Suzie Sheehy is a researcher at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, who does plenty of public outreach but has never contributed to Wikipedia. "I worry about genuine, well-researched contributions being changed or overwritten by others," she says.

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking at how it might capture expert conversation about Wikipedia content happening on other websites and feed it back to the community as a way of providing pointers for improvement, says Taraborelli. And it takes on the Wikipedia model that better-value academic contributions do exist. Citizendium – launched in 2006 by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger after an acrimonious split with fellow co-founder Jimmy Wales – requires contributors to use their real names and contains expert-approved articles, though it doesn't have the breadth or ubiquity of Wikipedia.

So what is in it for academics who do get over these barriers and engage? One of the most rewarding aspects can be in helping shape the public image of their field, say contributors. For many subjects – including scholarly topics – it is very often Wikipedia pages that are the top hits on Google, and for scholars who want their field represented accurately or interestingly, contributing to Wikipedia can help. The Association for Psychological Science in the US is currently running an initiative to match up psychology pages that need fixing with the academic experts who have the necessary knowhow. Clearly there is a role for learned societies.

Paul Goldberg, a professor of computer science at the University of Liverpool, dabbles in editing Wikipedia pages. He has added entries on specialist mathematical concepts and admits to creating the entry on the research excellence framework. "It does give a sense of importance to these rather abstruse topics you happen to be working on," he says.

When history researchers on Project Volterra at University College London discovered fragments of a lost Roman law code, they were so keen to ensure journalists got the story right that they penned pages on the code before they released details of the discovery to the press. "We suspected that any journalist would be likely to look at the Wikipedia pages as an initial resource," says research fellow Simon Corcoran. The idea that the group would spend a lot of time just generally editing pages is "not realistic", he says, but with a specific need it made sense.

Yet editing Wikipedia isn't the only way academics can contribute. From Wikipedia evangelists such as Peel, to the Wikimedia Foundation, to the first UK Wikipedia student society – the newly formed Wikipedians at Imperial College – the dream is to see Wikipedia embraced as a learning and teaching resource in the classroom, with lecturers setting new types of assignment where students edit pages as coursework.

However, according to the Wikipedia page that lists them, there is currently only one such project in the UK. Toni Sant, director of research at the University of Hull's Scarborough school of arts and new media, gets his third-year applied and interactive theatre students to write or update pages about practitioners and broad concepts in the field, grading them partly on how their pages are received by other Wikipedians. It teaches students concepts such as collaboration and how to distinguish between the reliability of sources, says Sant. "Some of my colleagues think it is mad. The general feeling from teachers at all levels of education is Wikipedia is the devil. But it is so popular with students, they are going to use it one way or another so we may as well find ways to embrace it and integrate it into the curriculum."

• The survey, Expert Barriers to Wikipedia, is open until 15 April. Dr Panagiota Alevizou, a post-doctoral researcher at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology, is also running it.

• This article was amended on 29 March. The original omitted the inclusion of Dr Panagiota Alevizou's contribution.