Public outreach/Academy/RfC/Bill's talk

preliminary notes for an introductory talk

Brief tour

Remember the adjective: "heterogeneous"
Articles have different scope (start from most specific and work up, e.g., up to leukemia, thence to cancer, thence to dab)
- Possibly develop roadmap script, e.g., main article of category, main article of parent category, etc.
Articles are organized in several ways, e.g., category system, lists, hierarchical tree of articles, search
Script to give slide-show tour of random links on a page, or in a category

show students' work on coverage, both of general topics and of scientific topics

highlight remarkable coverage of some areas: enzymes, RNA families, human genes, etc.

In a mini-review, you don't need to write well, because your peers will understand you even if you don't

In a Wikipedia article, you need to write intelligibly for the (educated) lay-person (writing is harder, but content is easier)

Introduce assessment system and summarize my students' work
Who makes these assessments? Wikiprojects (foreshadowing Tim's talk)
How many FA's exist in biomedical fields? Typical properties of FA's
Typical properties of articles ranked lower
Show them that they can assess the health of their field's coverage using script
Introduce Institute lists, tables

Show page views for typical biomedical FA such as Virus, DNA and Immune system (>1M/yr)
No correlation with quality? (check this hypothesis; note danger of misinformation)
Talk about TFA page views and mention in-the-news events (whet appetite for Tim's talk)
Variety of languages and getting articles translated

Show movie of development of "Immune system" (give them script to do this for any article)

"Wisdom of the crowds"? not really; show typical FA contributor lists (another chance to prep the audience for Tim!)

"Anything can be added"? not really; basic principles WP:V, NPOV, NOR, NPOV, COPY, etc. but IAR

TMI for this introductory talk? Parhaps incorporate basic elements into Brief tour section?

Public outreach
- Unique reach of Wikipedia
- Convey results of publicly-funded research to the public
- Price of scientific illiteracy, misinformation
- Inspire taxpayers to support your research; funding!
Inspire the next generation of students in your field
- Share the excitement/coolness of your work
- Recruiting (under)graduate students to your lab/field
- Inspire high-school and elementary-school students
Teacher/professor training
- If they understand it, they can pass it on to their students
Other motivations
- Colleagues developing teaching materials
- Direct feedback on teaching materials
- Fun of collaboration
- Story of a patient coming in with the doctor's own article
- Explain to friends and family what you do

See Public_outreach/Academy/RfC/Ways of contributing.

Give this part of the talk on Wednesday night to save time?

giant encyclopedia written by volunteers
part of the Open Education Resources movement, as well as Free Culture
content licensed under the Creative Commons license
hardware and software infrastructure maintained by the WMF, a nonprofit charity relying on donations
fundamentally a database in which even the smallest changes are time-stamped and recorded indefinitely (maybe TMI?)