Sunday, July 28, 2019

Daniel Pomarède or a method to include an interesting paper in @Wikidata

I read about an interesting astronomical phenomena, this is where you find the abstract. Daniel Pomarède, one of the authors is open in ORCiD about his work. I found that he has a presence on Wikidata by searching for his ORCiD id: "0000-0003-2038-0488".

Marking Mr Pomarède for an update is what it takes to give the article I think is interesting more of an audience. In the process there will be more to read about this part of astronomy.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Hey @GlobalYAcademy this blogpost is for you II

As I have added all global young academics in Wikidata, an update. What I like best about this academy is its global reach and the spread among the sciences. I am happily pleased that you may be found in ORCiD, Google Scholar and VIAF.

The most vital of them all for Wikidata is ORCiD; when your data "can be seen by everyone", we can retrieve your data, import it in Wikidata and make a "Scholia" for you. This is the Scholia of one of my favourite young academics. The import process (SourceMD) is broken at this time and this is my backlog of jobs to run.

Running a process for you will import co-authors and papers we do not know about. Given your global spread, it follows that your co-authors will have a similar global spread and this is an anti-dote to the Anglo-American bias we have in Wikidata and the Wikipedias. Particularly when I run a second job, a job will run for your co-authors with pubic ORCiD information as well, improving the subset of the data you are part of.

There are things you can do that have an impact on what we do:
  • You can check your data, add what is missing, improve what is wrong or missing on your Wikidata item
    • You can create/improve your ORCiD data and make it visible to everyone
    • You can trust organisations like CrossRef to update your data in ORCiD on your behalf
    • Please add your "name in native language" and indicate using the ISO 639 code the language it is in.
    • Check if the authorities that are linked to you are indeed correct and do not link to a false friend
    • Add your occupation
    • Please add other authorities that know you.. ISNI for instance
  • We love to have a (freely licensed) picture, it helps with disambiguation. You can upload it to Commons.. 
    • Having a picture on the GYA website and on Google Scholar is why there are so many links to Google Scholar
So what is in it for us?
  • We want people to know about science and learn about the scientific record
  • We want people to write Wikipedia articles and your papers may be used as references.
  • There are many gaps in our coverage of science. We know and it is improved one paper, one scientist at a time.. There is even the option to work on a specific subject.. like this one
As a member or the GYA, you are part of an outreach program. We happily invite you to work with us and together do the best job possible for science.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Friday, July 26, 2019

Authorities relieve us from the tedium of completeness and enable functionality

At Wikidata we do not rely on any one authority and we refer to many. As a consequence we bring many links to authorities to our users and only when they know how to value them, it is of value.

The link for William Shakespeare to the Open Library gains you access to his work.. It links those works to the Library of Congress to indicate that it is indeed that work of the bard.

When authors we know are linked to the Open Library, it does not really matter if we know their books. People find them regardless. When we want people to read, all we need to do is promote these links to Open Library and to local libraries.. Such promotion could be done in the Wikipedias. Like we do for WorldCat and WorldCat could be so much better if it is about local attention for the user and consequently have more of a purpose.

One project on Wikidata has been to include scholarly works that are free to read. Free to read enables for those works and their authors an additional audience and increased relevance. However among all the works we represent, we do not know what works were added. That makes it a fail. There is an authority for that. It is Unpaywall. However even when we have a link to Unpaywall it only makes a difference when people use it and read articles. This effect is something we can measure when people go to the free version of an article.

We can get the database of Unpaywall and add just another authority. Next is the issue of maintenance. We could partner with Unpaywall and have a hybrid system where we import the database and regularly check those articles we do not know to be open.

In this way we still do not see the effect of more reads of open science. To achieve that we should mark free articles with an Unpaywall icon in Scholia and Reasonator. Measuring the amount of reads is now possible and we positively acknowledge authors with free to read articles.

Next could be an Unpaywall icon in Wikipedia for all free to read references..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Sunday, July 21, 2019

@Wikimedia, when we do "science outreach" what audience do we reach out to and why?

A recent tweet said "If you are an outstanding woman then you have a 1 IN 6 chance of having a @Wikipedia article. If you are an #African woman then you have a 1 in 300 chance." This bias exists for all Africans and all of Africa.

In Wikicite, with all respect for what has been achieved, we find a professional approach by scientists. Their profession, their data and this is all well and good. However, as the University of California no longer has access to the Elsevier papers, business is no longer "as usual" and consequently the relevance of access to readable papers has gained priority.

We need to know if papers known to Wikidata are available and we may have all the papers known at UnpayWall but as long as we do not indicate availability, it is irrelevant.

We need to make it easy for scientists to gain a presence for their science. At this time there are too many hoops to jump through. We can make it easy by putting scientists in the driving seat.
  1. Make an Orcid identifier for yourself and open up the data
  2. Enable common sense organisations like "your" university, CrossRef to update your profile
  3. Have a button that runs a SourceMD process importing the data into Wikidata.
  4. Enjoy and improve on your Scholia
By enabling people to update their data and the data of others, you create value. When we run the API of Unpaywall as part of the SourceMD process, we help USC and we help the rest of the world that is facing the insurmountably obstacle that exists because of the likes of Elsevier. Science becomes easier, scientists gain relevance for their science and Wikidata establishes another purpose.

NB Wikipedia gains as a fringe benefit an objective criteria for the establishment of notability (it is in the science, the Scholia)
Thanks,
      GerardM

Thursday, July 18, 2019

@librarycongress and @gndnet link to @OCLC's #Viaf and beyond

In 2015 it was news that in VIAF, Wikipedia was replaced by Wikidata. In quick succession it was recently announced that both the American Library of Congress and the German Deutsche National Bibliothek announced that they are linking to Wikidata.

That is awesome enough. Awesome because as a result, Wikidata is easier to link to VIAF as every entry of the LoC and DNB results in a VIAF registration. The only thing needed to make this a reality in Wikidata is a dedicated bot for us to know all the good work done in the US and Germany.

Another relevant improvement that is of particular relevance to scientists like linguists is that it is now possible to authorise the GND to automatically update the ORCiD record. It will be truly awesome when this is the example other authorities follow.

It is a small step for Viaf to include ORCiD as it links to other scientific publications. For librarians and library systems this is most relevant. For Wikidata it will help with disambiguation and it allows us to populate our information with even more papers and co-authors.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Wednesday, July 03, 2019

Hey @GlobalYAcademy this blogpost is for you

I am adding members of the Global Young Academy to Wikidata. This was requested on Twitter and I was asked to describe the process how they are added. With 100 members added, it is high time to take the time for this.
In this blog many of the pointers are for Matthew Levy, all edits are done in Wikidata itself.. This is the item for Mr Levy.
Thanks,
      GerardM