One of her focuses in on a project called Women in Red , a reference to the fact that a link to a person with no biography appears in red on the site. That group aspires to turn those links blue by filling out biographies for notable women who deserve pages on the site. Poore suggests that groups of experts concerned with the quality of a particular topic organize monthly brown bags to get together and improve articles in their area of study. Trends change, but Wikipedia is not a set of KPIs [key performance indicators].
Wikipedia is not in trouble. Write to Chris Wilson at chris. Peter Macdiarmid—Getty Images. By Chris Wilson. Biographical articles about academics, especially if they are in a peer-reviewed journal, are one of the most important and useful sources a editor can draw on to write a Wikipedia article. Even if these articles exist, they might not be accessible to most editors.
Wikipedia editors do their best to find, create, and contribute as many photos as they can. For example, Wikimedia District of Columbia volunteers go to events like the National Book Festival to take photos of people for their Wikipedia articles. Academics can contribute in the same way. Document your conferences and colleagues and put the photos on Flickr or Wikimedia Commons. Remember that we can only use freely licensed photos that can be redistributed, and non-commercial licenses prevent their use on Wikipedia.
For example, the American Library Association does a fantastic job of providing photos of their conferences and leading contributors to our field. Unfortunately, they post them on Flickr with a non-commercial license, so many Wikipedia articles about important librarians, including about half of the most recent presidents of the ALA, lack photographs.
Professor Robert Fernandez is an academic librarian and a member of the board of directors of Wikimedia DC , an independent Wikimedia outreach organization. As commercial websites have risen to prominence, online life has moved away from open, self-governed crowdsourcing communities like the one that runs Wikipedia, says Clay Shirky, a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Shirky was one of the biggest boosters of an idea, popular during the previous decade, that the Web encouraged strangers to come together and achieve things impossible for a conventional organization.
Wikipedia is proof there was some truth to that notion. Outside specific settings like massive multiplayer games, relatively few people mingle in shared virtual space. Shirky, who is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation, says people steeped in that model will struggle to understand how and why they should contribute to Wikipedia or any project like it. Because the encyclopedia has little competition, Web developers will continue to build services that treat its content as fact, and ordinary people will rely on Wikipedia for information.
Yet it may be unable to get much closer to its lofty goal of compiling all human knowledge. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job.
Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. After boosting unproven covid drugs and campaigning against vaccines, Steve Kirsch was abandoned by his team of scientific advisers—and left out of a job.
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By Clive Thompson archive page. By Cat Ferguson archive page. By Tanya Basu archive page. Deepfake researchers have long feared the day this would arrive. Such reticence is understandable but unfounded. The worst that can happen is your first edits are deemed not to be an improvement and they get reverted.
If this does occur, treat it as a positive learning experience and ask the reverting editor for advice. Wikipedia is not primarily aimed at experts; therefore, the level of technical detail in its articles must be balanced against the ability of non-experts to understand those details.
When contributing scientific content, imagine you have been tasked with writing a comprehensive scientific review for a high school audience. It can be surprisingly challenging explaining complex ideas in an accessible, jargon-free manner. But it is worth the perseverance. You will reap the benefits when it comes to writing your next manuscript or teaching an undergraduate class. With certain conditions, almost all of Wikipedia's content is free for anyone to reuse, adapt, and distribute.
Consequently, it does not accept non-free material under copyright restriction. Some journals, including those from the Public Library of Science, publish material under an open-access license that is compatible with use in Wikipedia if properly attributed. Most do not. Therefore, although it may be tempting, avoid copying text or figures from your latest review article or anyone else's into Wikipedia. It will quickly be identified as a copyright violation and flagged for immediate deletion.
You can give Wikipedia permission to use material you own, but this process is non-reversible and can be time consuming. It is often better to rewrite the text in simpler language or redraw the figure to make it more accessible. This will also ensure it is more suitable for Wikipedia's non-expert readership see Rule 4. To maintain the highest standards possible, Wikipedia has a strict inclusion policy that demands verifiability [11]. This is best established by attributing each statement in Wikipedia to a reliable, published source but see Rules 7 and 8 on excessive self-citing.
Most scientists are in the fortunate position of having access to a wide body of literature, and experience in using inline citations to support their writing. Since unverified content may be removed from Wikipedia at any time, provide supporting citations for every statement that might be challenged by another editor at some point in the future. Whenever possible, give preference to secondary sources such as reviews or book chapters that survey the relevant primary research over research articles themselves.
Wikipedia's accessibility makes each of its scientific articles an excellent entry point for laypeople seeking specialist information. By also providing direct hyperlinks to reliable, freely accessible online resources with your citations biological databases or open-access journals, for example , other editors can quickly verify your content and readers have immediate access to authoritative sources that address the subject in greater detail.
Many people are tempted to write or edit Wikipedia articles about themselves. Resist that urge. If you are sufficiently notable to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia, eventually someone else will write an article about you. Remember that unlike a personal Web page, your Wikipedia biography is not yours to control. A lovingly crafted hagiography extolling your many virtues can rapidly accumulate information you would rather not be publicized.
You may already have a Wikipedia biography, but it contains factual inaccuracies that you wish to correct. How do you do this without breaking the rules?
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