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

@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