O'Really?

July 31, 2015

Wikipedia Science Conference @WellcomeTrust in London, September 2nd & 3rd 2015 #wikisci

Filed under: conferences,education,engineering,mathematics,open access,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 4:18 pm
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There is growing interest in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other Wikimedia projects as platforms for opening up the scientific process [1]. The first Wikipedia Science Conference will discuss activities in this area at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London on the 2nd & 3rd September 2015. There will be keynote talks from Wendy Hall (@DameWendyDBE) and Peter Murray-Rust (@petermurrayrust) and many other presentations including:

  • Daniel Mietchen (@EvoMRI), National Institutes of Health: wikipedia and scholarly communication
  • Alex Bateman (@AlexBateman1), European Bioinformatics Institute: Using wikipedia to annotate scientific databases
  • Geoffrey Bilder (@GBilder), CrossRef, Using DOIs in wikipedia
  • Richard Pinch (@IMAMaths), Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Wikimedia versus academia: a clash of cultures
  • Andy Mabbett (@PigsOnTheWing), Royal Society of Chemistry / ORCID. Wikipedia, Wikidata and more – How Can Scientists Help?
  • Darren Logan (@DarrenLogan), Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Using scientific databases to annotate wikipedia
  • Dario Taraborelli (@ReaderMeter), Wikimedia & Altmetrics, Citing as a public service
  • … and many more

I’ll be doing a talk on “Improving the troubled relationship between Scientists and Wikipedia” (see slides below) with help from John Byrne who has been a Wikipedian in Residence at the Royal Society and Cancer Research UK.

How much does finding out more about all this wiki-goodness cost? An absolute bargain at just £29 for two days – what’s not to like? Tickets are available on eventbrite, register now, while tickets are still available. 

References

  1. Misha Teplitskiy, Grace Lu, & Eamon Duede (2015). Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of
    Science Wikipedia Workshop at 9th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Oxford, UK arXiv: 1506.07608v1

June 1, 2012

An Open Letter to the Royal Society: Please employ a wikipedian in residence

Filed under: awards,communication,Science — Duncan Hull @ 12:01 pm
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Dear Professor Nurse

Fellows of the Wiki Society?

To improve public engagement with Science and Scientists, the Royal Society should employ a wikipedian in residence. Here’s why:

The Royal Society is a National Academy of Science which represents some of the world’s leading scientists. The stated aim of the society is to:

“recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.”

Despite the elitist nature of many scientific societies, a significant part of what the Royal Society does is engage with members of the general public of all ages through a wide range of events. The annual Summer Science exhibition, Royal Society Blogs, Policy Centre and Royal Society television channel are just a few examples from amongst many more.

Many Fellows are of interest to the general public and already have extensive biographies in wikipedia which are up to date, well-written, well-referenced and conform to the wikipedia guidelines for the biographies of living persons. Wikipedia biographies often appear top of the list of google search result for a scientists name, for example see:

However, many other scientists do not have pages about them on wikipedia. Unfortunately, alternative sources of information such as academic homepages are often out of date and not particularly engaging. Most scientists are too busy doing Science to spend time updating their home pages, as neatly illustrated by cartoonist Jorge Cham. At the time of writing, less than half of the notable and distinguished Fellows elected in 2012 have biographies on wikipedia, see below of details.

Putting scientific information into wikipedia isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Alex Bateman at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute [1], PLoS Computational Biology [2] and many others [3] have already made considerable progress in improving the scientific content of wikipedia. This information is immediately accessible to a huge global audience.

Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest ever opportunities for public engagement in Science. By employing a wikipedian in residence, the Royal Society could improve and influence the scientific content of wikipedia, while engaging even more with the general public around the world, who are often just as interested in the scientists as the science itself. As the current president of the society I hope you will consider this proposal.

Yours Sincerely

Dr. Duncan Hull
University of Manchester, UK

(this letter has also been sent by email, see followup post for results)

References

  1. Daub, J., Gardner, P., Tate, J., Ramskold, D., Manske, M., Scott, W., Weinberg, Z., Griffiths-Jones, S., & Bateman, A. (2008). The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families RNA, 14 (12), 2462-2464 DOI: 10.1261/rna.1200508
  2. Wodak, S., Mietchen, D., Collings, A., Russell, R., & Bourne, P. (2012). Topic Pages: PLoS Computational Biology Meets Wikipedia PLoS Computational Biology, 8 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002446
  3. Xiao, L., & Askin, N. (2012). Wikipedia for Academic Publishing: Advantages and Challenges. Online Information Review, 36(3), 2. Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Appendix: Fellows of the Wiki Society

As of June 2012, only 21 out of the 52 of the Royal Society Fellows elected in 2012 have a biographical page on wikipedia. Where biographies currently exist, they are linked to below

Of course, 2012 is just the tip of the iceberg, there are also the Fellows elected in 2011, 2010 and so on back 350 years to 1660.

June 17, 2009

Nettab 2009 Day Two: Wikis ‘n’ Workflows

Filed under: conferences,informatics — Duncan Hull @ 11:29 pm
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Alex Bateman on the RNA WikiprojectThis is a  brief report and some links from the second day of Network Applications and Tools in Biology (NETTAB 2009) in Catania, Sicily. There were two keynotes on the RNA WikiProject [1] by Alex Bateman and myExperiment [2] (by me) as as well as presentations by (I think but I wasn’t concentrating enough) Dietlind Gerloff, Guiliano Armano, Frédéric Cadier and Leandro Ciuffo.

Alex Bateman (wikipedia user:Alexbateman) did an entertaining talk on the RNA wikiproject: Community annotation of RNA families where they have taken data from the Rfam database [3], and put it all into regular wikipedia. This project got quite a lot of media attention back in February. In this case, the primary advantages of “letting go of data” by giving it to wikipedia are that it is read by everyone who uses Google (where pages are frequently the top search result) and wikipedia gets lots more traffic than biological databases like rfam.sanger.ac.uk do. Thanks to wikirank which tells you what is popular on wikipedia, it is also possible to quickly compare the popularity of pages, see RNA vs. Ribosomal RNA vs Micro RNA vs SnoRNA for an example. The Rfam project have some interesting stats on who makes the most edits to the Rfam pages, it isn’t always the scientists who make important contributions, but anonymous users and machines (e.g. like Rfambot, Smackbot and Citation bot) who are often doing most of the hard work. There is a very long tail of contributors who make small contributions – which supports the 90% of users in on-line communities are lurkers who never contribute rule and is reminiscent of Citizen Science and Muggles. I wanted to put the slides from this talk on slideshare, but they contain some unpublished data. You can, however, subscribe to the feed of the Rfam and Pfam blog at xfam.wordpress.com, if you’d like to keep up to date on developments in this area.

After the keynote there were presentations by Dietlind Gerloff on Open Knowledge (a new agent-based infrastructure for bioinformatics experimentation – nice pictorial intro using lego here) and Guiliano Armano? on ProDaMa-C – a collaborative web application to generate specialised protein structure datasets.

The next keynote was on myexperiment.org, “Where Experimental Work Flows” – my slides on Who are you, Managing collaborative digital identities in bioinformatics with myexperiment are embedded below.

I followed this presentation with a live 30 minute demonstration and discussion of myexperiment. The most interesting question people asked was Why use OpenID instead of full blown Public Key Infrastructure? (answer: OpenID is currently a lot easier and provides good-enough security). The rest of the day is a bit of a blur, I’m with Tim Bray in enjoying the monster adrenaline high of public speaking, but with all that ChEBI:28918 coursing through my veins it can be difficult to think straight (immediately before, during or after a talk)… so you’ll have to take a look at the proceedings for the full details of what happened in the afternoon – but they included Make Histri (great name!), SBMM: Systems Biology Metabolic Modeling Assistant [4] by Ismael Navas-Delgado and Biomedical Applications of the EELA-2 project.

By the evening time, there was some Opera dei Pupi (traditional sicilian puppet theatre), a trip to Acireale and a delicious italian feast in a ristorante (the name of which I can’t remember) to round off an enjoyable day.

References

  1. Daub, J., Gardner, P., Tate, J., Ramskold, D., Manske, M., Scott, W., Weinberg, Z., Griffiths-Jones, S., & Bateman, A. (2008). The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families RNA, 14 (12), 2462-2464 DOI: 10.1261/rna.1200508
  2. De Roure, D., & Goble, C. (2009). Software Design for Empowering Scientists IEEE Software, 26 (1), 88-95 DOI: 10.1109/MS.2009.22
  3. Gardner, P., Daub, J., Tate, J., Nawrocki, E., Kolbe, D., Lindgreen, S., Wilkinson, A., Finn, R., Griffiths-Jones, S., Eddy, S., & Bateman, A. (2009). Rfam: updates to the RNA families database Nucleic Acids Research, 37 (Database) DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkn766
  4. Reyes-Palomares, A., Montanez, R., Real-Chicharro, A., Chniber, O., Kerzazi, A., Navas-Delgado, I., Medina, M., Aldana-Montes, J., & Sanchez-Jimenez, F. (2009). Systems biology metabolic modeling assistant: an ontology-based tool for the integration of metabolic data in kinetic modeling Bioinformatics, 25 (6), 834-835 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp061

September 12, 2008

Blogging Professors: Big Boffins with Blogs

Filed under: web of science — Duncan Hull @ 2:22 pm
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Jeffrey Bates by Julian CashI’ve been hunting all over the interweb looking for Professors that have blogs. While it would be a good thing if there were more, (see the science blogging challenge 2008), there are surprising amount of big boffins that already blog. I should say that by big, I mean (full) professor. By boffin I mean a person practicing science including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering and hell, even computer “science” and the “dismal science” of economics too. By blog I mean, a web-log or a lab-log which is personal, frequently updated (with web feed) and allows comments. Here is my collection of big boffins with blogs, with a little help from friendfeed.com [1]. It is ordered alphabetically by surname and I hope it gives a flavour of some of the bloggers out there on the Web. If you know any more, please let me know. (more…)

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