When crossing the street in the days of Corona, look left, right and left again

Many of us are at home, waiting to go out. We are all obsessed with the latest statistics and read what pundits have to say.  It is likely that you are cognizant of the statistics for your country, state or county.

I learned that Jonathan P. Tennant died in a traffic accident. When you care for statistics, you will wonder what are my chances of dying in a traffic accident at this time. Deduct it from your chances of dying of Corona and things look up.

Not so much for Protohedgehog, he met with an accident. It is sad, he was young, full of promise; just became a member of the Global Young Academy. If anything, it serves as a reminder for us to look left, right and left again to not become a bus factor.
Thanks,
     GerardM

@wikidata - I don't scale, help me scale

At Wikidata there is always more to do and as a volunteer you make the biggest impact when you concentrate on specific subjects. I do not scale enough to do everything I would like to do.

There are a few area's where I aim to make a difference; of particular concern is where we do not represent a body of knowledge/information in Wikidata. At this time the favour scientists particularly women, young scientists and scientists from Africa.

To make my work scale, I twitter and blog. I latch on to the great work done by Dr Jess Wade. She writes articles on well deserving scientists and I aim to add value for those scientists on Wikidata. Typically I add professions, alma maters, employers and awards. In addition I add "authorities" like ORCiD, Google Scholar and VIAF. This is important because it enables the linking of scholarly papers already in Wikidata or known at ORCiD. I can more or less keep up with Jess and, I happily add information for any and all scientists I come across on Twitter.

While doing this I learned of the Global Young Academy and as a side project started adding scientists who are member of the GYA or one of affiliated organisations to Wikidata. I am so pleased  I got into contact with Robert Lepenies. Robert is happy with the opportunity that a Scholia provides for an organisation like the GYA, for him and for all the young scientists involved. We collaborated on completing the lists on many wikipedias, Robert added many scientists to Wikidata and is now battling to keep the pictures of these young scientists on Commons...

What is crucially important for me is that Robert advocates an open ORCiD profile to scientists worldwide so that they may have their Scholia. Both Robert and I do not scale and what would help us most is an easy and obvious way that enables any scientists to start a process that will include all his papers from ORCiD, will update the known co-authors and instruct in what they can do to enrich their Wikidata / ORCiD / Scholia profile even more.

I am now working on African scientists and yes, I would appreciate some help.
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS my wife would like this scale to be enough for me

#Statistics for National Young Academies

The Global Young Academy is linked to many national young academies. It and they represent many relevant scientists. They represent all of science and, they are interested in representing science to the public. The question: how can we make them visible.

First you add the orgs to Wikidata and then the scientists to the orgs. When you then add the same Listeria lists to Wikipedias, we will see a picture when we have one and we may notice who has a local Wikipedia article.

There are many interesting statistics possible:

• the gender ratio
• the different professions in the mix
• awards received 
• the known number of publications per person
• the organisations they are employed at

However, first things first. It is my intention to include all the current members and the alumni of the Young Academy of Sweden before Wikimania.. Second, these scholars are bright :) once they put their mind to it, they will help themselves to nice statistics based on the info we accumulate in Wikidata. They can be linked to on the Wikipedia pages.

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