the virality of co-authors in urology

Happy birthday Wikidata and, many happy returns.

When you start enriching the data for a Dutch urologist, an academic who published quite a number of scientific papers, obviously there must be many co-authors. Many of them are yet to be identified, at this moment for Jakko A. Nieuwenhuijzen there are some 339 still to be added.

The main consideration is what has the biggest impact. As a colleague of Mr Nieuwenhuijzen is known at Google scholar, adding papers for him brought new publications to Mr Nieuwenhuijzen and many of his co-authors. Enriching data for these co-authors makes the graph more complex.

At some point more precision in the data for a single author is no longer worth the effort. When you then find an other urologist with many papers not yet attributed and many co-authors where Wikidata does not know the gender yet, focus shifts and many more edits make their way into Wikidata.

Many of these co-authors are of the same institute but people from elsewhere find their place in these graphs as well. Many are Dutch but as urology knows many international collaborations this is reflected in the expanding number of co-authors. 

As a topic is developed in this way, it easily results in thousands of edits. As many subject are  researched in this way, the enriched data is there for the world to use. This data is only of value when there is a public. Sharing in the sum of all knowledge has always been what we stand for. Sharing freely and widely generates us a a both public and a future.

Thanks,

      GerardM