From Daniel (and an excellent timing for our survey on barriers to expert participation).
Dario
Time to underpin Wikipedia wisdom
Alex Bateman & Darren W. Logan
Nature 468, 765 (09 December 2010) DOI:10.1038/468765cPublished online 08 December 2010
Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopaedia, is regarded with suspicion by some in the scientific community — perhaps because the wiki model is inconsistent with traditional academic scholarship (Nature 468, 359–360; 2010). But the time has come for scientists to engage more actively with Wikipedia.
Type any scientific term into any search engine and it is likely that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit. Ten years ago, it would have been inconceivable that a free collaborative website, written and maintained by volunteers, would dominate the global provision of knowledge. But Wikipedia is now the first port of call for people seeking information on subjects that include scientific topics. Like it or not, other scientists and the public are using it to get an overview of your specialist area.
Wikipedia's user-friendly global reach offers an unprecedented opportunity for public engagement with science. Scientists who receive public or charitable funding should therefore seize the opportunity to make sure that Wikipedia articles are understandable, scientifically accurate, well sourced and up-to-date.
Many in the scientific community will admit to using Wikipedia occasionally, yet few have contributed content. For society's sake, scientists must overcome their reluctance to embrace this resource.
FYI, if you missed this, Howie's post on the recent meeting with UCSD/Stanford researchers I mentioned during the RCom Meeting.
Is any of you still not on wiki-research-l?
Dario
> Hi everyone,
>
> Last week, some researchers from Cal-IT (UCSD) [1] and the Persuasive Technology Lab (Stanford) [2] visited the Wikimedia Foundation. A brief summary of their visit is posted on the Strategy Wiki Village Pump:
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Village_pump/en#Researchers_from_UCSD_an…
>
> As I mention in the post, the goal of their visit was to see if there are any areas of mutual interest between the researchers and WMF/WMF projects. The Cal-IT and Persuasive Tech folks will be developing a list of potential projects, so please contribute to the thread if you're interested.
>
> Howie
>
> [1] http://www.calit2.net/
> [2] http://captology.stanford.edu/
>
Dear all,
the 2nd RCom Meeting will take place on Saturday 18 at 5:00pm GMT, as the date/time seems to suit everybody who turned up on doodle so far.
Luca, Erik, Mayo, WereSpielChequers - I haven't heard from you but hopefully you can join us (please drop me a line if you want me to add you to the list of attendees). We will try to hold the meeting on Skype (voice) with a Skype chat backup and Etherpad for note taking/agenda (separate email will follow).
I'd also like to ask 15' of your time to take part in a pilot survey to understand reasons why academics/scientists do (not) contribute to Wikipedia. The survey has been inspired by a recent discussion on FriendFeed, it has been designed by Daniel and myself, with input from other people: http://bit.ly/AcaWP
If you get a chance to go through it, I'd love to have your feedback on how to improve it before it goes live.
I look forward to talking to you this Saturday.
Best,
Dario
Dear all,
first of all a short reminder, if you are planning to attend the 2nd RCom Meeting this week but you haven't given your date/time preferences yet, please respond to this poll as soon as possible: http://doodle.com/rp4dryfrdph5a96g
Proposed dates for the meeting are: Wed 15, Thu 16, Fri 17 and Sat 18.
Further details will follow.
An informal pre-meeting discussion took place on Friday with Daniel and Giota (thanks so much for your help guys). The goal was to think of how to best organise work within the Research Committee by reconciling different individual interests with the need to produce some tangible output in a relatively short timeframe. To get the ball rolling we would like to propose the following plan:
Prioritising RCom's areas of interest
The current list of areas of interest on Meta [1] is unprioritised. The lack of prioritisation makes it hard to tell which of these areas may have an impact in the short-term as opposed to areas that may involve an ongoing discussion and more long-term goals. We need to focus on simple and realistic short-term goals to showcase the function and value of the committee both to the Wikimedia community and the research community. The following 2 areas already saw some preliminary activity and it looks like they could produce valuable output in a short timeframe.
Research Committee/Areas of interest/Open-access policy
Research Committee/Areas of interest/Subject recruitment processes
Daniel, Giota and myself also started putting together some ideas for a new area of interest (triggered by Erik's post on Wikimedia's collaboration with EOL) which may also lead to some preliminary output in the short run:
Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_involvement
There are other suggestions for short-term/high-impact activities in other areas (e.g. organising a panel at a major research conference to discuss "high-value research contributions to Wikipedia" or organising a data contest to highlight research priorities ) but there hasn't been much discussion in the corresponding pages so far.
To help prioritise work within different areas of interest we suggest to identify coordinators for active areas and start brainstorming ideas for possible short-term tasks:
Step forward as a coordinator
If you marked a specific area as close to your research interests (e.g. if you ranked it (1) or (2) in your personal priority list) and you think the area may have some short-term/high impact potential, then we would like to ask you to act as a coordinator for this area. Coordinators will help animate the activity within each area and define its objectives and expected output. An area of interest can obviously have one or more coordinators and in some cases there will be no need of a coordinator at all if the activity within the group is sufficiently sustained.
Defining short-term tasks for each area of interest
Coordinators should help each group formulate 1or 2 tasks that they believe would be achievable within a 3-6 months timeframe. Examples of such tasks are:
- drafting the first public version of Wikimedia's Open Access Policy
- running a survey about obstacles to expert participation in Wikipedia and publishing the results (see [2-3]);
Some areas may not have any foreseeable short-term goal, in which case they will not be considered for top priority action.
Hopefully this plan makes sense to you all, please let me know if you have any comments or ideas you wish to discuss before the meeting.
Dario
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/
[2] http://friendfeed.com/scholarly-wikis/65583af6/top-ten-reasons-why-academic…
[3] http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Top_ten_reasons_why_academics_do_not_contrib…
Dear all,
at Erik's request, I am writing to check your availability for a second meeting of the Wikimedia Research Committee to be held before the winter break. December tends to be a ridiculously busy month but I hope we'll be able to get together a second time and move things forward with some of the goals we discussed during the last meeting.
An possible (hopefully not unrealistic) agenda for the 2nd meeting could focus on the following:
• select from the initial areas of interests we discussed a subset (say, max. 3) of high-priority areas
• nominate a coordinator and a team for each of these high-priority areas
• define a tentative workplan and set of expected actions for each team
I will set up a page on Meta to discuss ideas and suggestions for the meeting agenda, but before then please let me know whether any of the following date/time slots suits you:
http://doodle.com/rp4dryfrdph5a96g
I look forward to speaking to all of you,
All the best,
Dario