The case for #Wikimedia Foundation as an #ORCID member organisation

The Wikimedia Foundation is a research organisation. No two ways about it; it has its own researchers that not only perform research on the Wikimedia projects and communities, they coordinate research on Wikimedia projects and communities and it produces its own publications. As such it qualifies to become an ORCID Member organisation.

The benefits are:

• Authenticating ORCID iDs of individuals using the ORCID API to ensure that researchers are correctly identified in your systems
• Displaying iDs to signal to researchers that your systems support the use of ORCID
• Connecting information about affiliations and contributions to ORCID records, creating trusted assertions and enabling researchers to easily provide validated information to systems and profiles they use
• Collecting information from ORCID records to fill in forms, save researchers time, and support research reporting
• Synchronizing between research information systems to improve reporting speed and accuracy and reduce data entry burden for researchers and administrators alike

At this time the quality of information about Wikimedia research is hardly satisfactory. As is the standard; announcements are made about a new paper and as can be expected the paper is not in Wikidata. The three authors are not in ORCID, as is usual for people who work in the field of computing so there is no easy way to learn about their publications.

What will this achieve; it will be the Wikimedia Foundation itself that will push information about its research to ORCID and consequently at Wikidata we can easily update the latest and greatest. It is also an important step for documentation about becoming discoverable. It is one thing to publish Open Content, when it is then hard to find, it is still not FAIR and the research does not have the hoped for impact. It also removes an issue that some researchers say they face; they cannot publish about themselves on Wikimedia projects. 

Another important plus; by indicating the importance of having scholarly papers known in ORCID we help reluctant scientists understand that yes, they have a career in open source, open systems but finding their work is very much needed to be truly open.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Professor @steve_hanke and reading what is #FAIR

Professor Hanke is on Twitter. He has his five Wikipedia articles and his info on Wikidata is well developed. With a scholar of his eminence, you would expect a lot of known publications as well. However, never mind the 153 English Wikipedia references, never mind the links to 13 external authorities, finding his work is not easy nor obvious.

The problem with Wikipedia references, it is a hodgepodge of links about him and links to his works. His VIAF registration may bring you some of his works but it will not tell you where his books are cited. Mr Hanke does not have an ORCID identifier and consequently it is not easy to include his data on Wikidata.

This is not about Mr Hanke; in certain fields of science people do not have an ORCID identifier or are not open about their publications. When you are interested in a specific subject or a specific scientist, it helps when the information is FAIR.

So what is missing; there is this database with all Wikipedia references, it needs to be included in Wikidata as soon as possible. It may require a fair deal of social manoeuvring to include all Wikipedia references to Wikidata. But the benefits; the benefits will be huge. Given that Wikipedia references are backed up by the Internet Archive, this will extend for these links in Wikidata as well. It makes them FINDABLE and ACCESSIBLE. At Wikidata, this data becomes INTEROPERABLE and REUSABLE (FAIR).

So my 2019 wish for the Wikimedia Foundation is to become FAIR in what it says and what it does.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Science; I can read

The basis for what Wikipedia articles offers are its sources. Those sources can be anything and when we want to know the veracity of what we read, the sources have to be available. Not only that, we rely on those sources to be consistent and we rely on those sources to be readable.

When sources are on the web, the Internet Archive will have iterations of a source available in its Wayback machine. It ensures that sources remain available and thereby much of the integrity of Wikipedia is maintained.

For scientific sources we are unlucky. Reading a scientific paper can set you back $45,- and it only allows you to read that paper for a day.. In effect all such papers cannot be read; we "have to" trust them and there are plenty of papers that are extremely problematic and also expensive to read.

Many papers are increasingly FAIR. They are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The best first line partners we have are again the Internet Archive and ORCiD. Organisations like the Biodiversity Heritage Library store scientific papers at the IA thereby making them available for as long as the IA exists. ORCiD is where living scientists identify themselves and if they so choose, the publications they (co-)authored. It makes them and/or their papers findable. The papers typically include a DOI making them accessible. After that it is anyone's guess if you can actually read them.

Scientists that are open about their work may find that they and their work found its way into Wikidata. For Karsten Suhre this was done; his scientific work is represented in his Scholia and many of his co-authors have been automatically added from ORCiD and have been processed as well. His co-authors that are not as open are largely missing but that is only Fair; I do not volunteer to promote them.

What Wikidata has is not representative of all of science but it increasingly represents the science that is open access, the science that I can read, that you can read that is for all of us there to read. The science that deserves to be used as sources in Wikipedia. We can read.
Thanks,
      GerardM