ESEAP Conference 2018/Program/Wikipedia in Science

Speaker(s)

Athikhun Suwannakhan (Wikimedians in Thailand User Group ), Mike Dickison (NZ), Ivonne Kristiani (Wikimedia Indonesia)

Length (min)

60

Audience / Target group

Session Format

3 x 20 minutes presentation

Description

1. Wiki Journal of Medicine: a Wikipedia integrated medical journal. Wikipedia's level of accuracy is comparable to that of Encyclopedia Britannica and is already the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. However, improvements by academic contributors are still highly beneficial. Started in 2014, WikiJournal of Medicine is a free-to-publish, open access, peer reviewed scientific journal in medicine and biomedicine published by the Wikimedia Foundation. Publishing in WikiJournal of Medicine allows scholars to contribute their findings to the Wikimedia movement in the academic publishing format that directly rewards scholars with citable publication. Content may also be incorporated into Wikipedia, 7th most visited websites on the internet, to achieve higher visibility than they otherwise would. Integration to the Wikimedia movement is achieved by (1) publishing under a Wikipedia-compatible license, e.g. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, (2) typesetting by Wiki markup language and/or templates native to Wikimedia Foundation projects and (3) employing open and objective peer review which is one of the core values of the Wikimedia movement and (4) adding links from Wikimedia projects so that readers from laypersons to scientists can find articles in the journal. WikiJournal of Medicine currently publishes with DOI codes and its articles are indexed by Google Scholar and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). WikiJournal of Medicine is currently aiming for inclusion in PubMed to be more attractive to authors and be more discoverable by technical readers. Recently, the WikiJournal publishing model has also been extended to other fields including general sciences (WikiJournal of Science) and humanities (WikiJournal of Humanities).
2. Critter of the Week: To draw attention to native endangered species, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) began a series of interviews with a representative of the Department of Conservation (DOC) in a programme called Critter of the Week. The species discussed were often small, ugly, and overlooked – so overlooked they had no Wikipedia page. Since 2015, each week I and other volunteers improve or create a page for the week's Critter, using photos and information supplied by DOC ahead of time. This volunteer Wikipedia effort is regularly mentioned on the air, and the resulting articles linked and shared by DOC and RNZ. We all now appreciate the difficulty of sourcing CC-BY-SA photos like those produced by Landcare Research and Auckland Museum. The total number of Critters recently passed 100, RNZ has made the project its own T-shirt, and DOC has now offered to host a Wikipedian in Residence. For more information and links, see the blog posts Sympathy for the Wētā and Wikipedia as an Entomology Outreach Tool, and the talk slides.
3. Ganesha Project: A fun and challenging writing competition in Wikipedia Indonesia to improve the quality of social science articles. Participants were given some missions during the competition with different level of difficulties. Find out more about how to make an online Wikipedia competition for science-related articles!

Desired Outcome

Inspiration and ideas to utilise Wiki-related platform in the academic world and science in general

Documentation

Slides from Mike Dickison's (User: Giantflightlessbirds) ESEAP Wikimedia talk in Bali, 5 May 2018