Grants talk:IdeaLab/drive contributions from the academic world through better ORCID integration

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Implementation plan[edit]

A minimal implementation of this might be:

  • port en:Template:Authority control to meta
  • establish an OAuth2 relationship with ORCID
  • a page of the toolserver with the following logic:
    • Display some info and help text
    • If the user is not logged into wikimedia account, invite them to
    • If the user is not logged into ORCID account (OAuth2), invite them to
    • If the user does not have a meta user page or the meta user page does not have en:Template:Authority control with the orcid= parameter, invite them to create one. (Maybe using a template)
    • Get global user stats (ideally reusing an existing tool such as https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/?user=Stuartyeates)
    • Build a couple of widgets based on the user stats that the user might like to have on their ORCID profile
      • "User <user> has been a wikimedian for <y> years"
      • "User <user> has been a wikimedian for <y> years and contributed more than <e> edits with <x> projects in <l> languages"
      • "User <user> has been an editor of the <l> language wikipedia for <y> years"
      • "User <user> has been a contributor of the <l> language <project> for <y> years "
    • Allow the user to select one of the widgets to push to their ORCID profile, replacing the current wikimedia one.

Obviously it could get quite elaborate if desired and need translation.

When looking at en:Template:Authority control be aware that it's one of the few templates which is used on both content and user pages. Adding it to a user page MUST be done by the user (see en:WP:OUTING). Stuartyeates (talk) 20:45, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If you encourage people to add VIAF identifiers for themselves, we then have professionally-assigned age and gender info on these people too. This data is not perfect, however, as per http://opensourceexile.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/adrian-pohl-wrote-some-excellent.html Stuartyeates (talk) 08:27, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Prior art[edit]

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T136943

Please see ORCID. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:59, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comments[edit]

Thanks for this idea Stuartyeates! This is my first time hearing about ORCID, but a cursory review of the system tells me it would be pretty neat if there was a way to incorporate contributions to Wikimedia projects toward an ORCID account. (Back when I was in grad school, there were definitely some articles in my capacity as a volunteer I worked on that would have been useful to capture under this kind system.) I did want to ask why Wikimedia Foundation staff would be needed to implement this idea. My knowledge of what technical components volunteers can work on and what is restricted to staff is somewhat limited-- does it have something to do with the OAuth2 authorization? Maybe there are some aspects of this that volunteers could develop? It's possible that the WMF grant could fund this kind of work if it is appropriately planned out. We have funded technical development work in the past.

Also pinging Astinson (WMF) (to comment on this proposal with respect to GLAM initiatives) and Halfak (WMF) (to comment on the viability of the WMF joining the ORCID consortia and who might be best suited to complete appropriate OAuth2 work. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 06:39, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hey all. I'm not quite sure I understand what would be involved in joining the ORCID consortia. It seems like we'd need to work with ORCID to allow a researcher to associate their ORCID identifier with their Wikimedia central auth ID. Is that all that's proposed or have I missed something? --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's all that's proposed. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:32, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a really interesting idea! I know that @Pigsonthewing: is interested in working more with ORCID ID, and might know more about the background on this work. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes; I'm Wikimedian in Residence at ORCID. Please see ORCID for my thoughts. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:10, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
For the record I should say that Andy is probably more qualified in pretty much every way to lead this work than I am. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:26, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]


It's worth noting that there's considerable overlap between this project at Wikimedia_MOOC_platform in terms of linking an wikimedia account to an external account and explicitly gaining user consent to to transfer personal information across that interface. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:17, 2 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]