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

Coverage

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

• most scientific topics are covered

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

• pathologies of emphasis

Target audience and depth

• Similar to a mini-review written for peers in another field, BUT...

• 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)

• Methods for giving background information

How good are these articles?

• 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

Page views and languages

• 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

Development of articles

• 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

Article structure and formatting tools

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

• Lead most important part

• Organization of body

• Target length, daughter articles, dab's

• Closing sections

• xlinking

• Images, animations, galleries, slideshows (implement this), imagemaps, etc.

• Other cool formatting, navboxes, infoboxes, templates

Common critiques

• Poor coverage
• Poor quality
• Not authoritative
• Unreliable accuracy

Why you might want to contribute

General

• 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

How you can contribute

See Public_outreach/Academy/RfC/Ways of contributing.

Sister projects

• WP:NOT a textbook

• Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikisource

Obsolete sections

General introduction

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?)