You are a #scientist and, you want your papers to be read

People have to know that there is something new out there and Amy D. Willes gets it, she tweeted the news and illustrated it with gorgeous cover art. On Twitter I follow Jens Svenning, he retweeted the news from Amy and it is why there is now a Scholia for the paper.

When you want your paper to be read, you receive optimal results when your paper is used as a reference in Wikipedia. Current Wikipedia references have their references and when people want to review an article, it is only the later papers that provide new insights.

So what can you do for yourself and your papers:

• Check if your papers or you as a scientist are known
• a paper has a DOI
• you have an ORCiD, a Google Scholar et al identifier.. your Twitter id is appreciated
• You can check your profile using Scholia and you can add papers using Scholia
• It will identify co-authors with an ORCiD identifier when they are known on the publication at Crossref

Adding yourself or any other scientist is a start; when there is a Wikipedia article, it is great to add a {{Scholia}} as a reference particularly as it will get updated from new papers, cited papers, new papers or because of co-authors that become known.

Obviously a well developed Scholia is a stellar argument to support the notability when a new Wikipedia article for a scientists is considered.

Thanks,

       GerardM

PS you can also add a "main subject" to a paper for instance "woolly mammoth".. 

@Wikipedia: #notability versus #relevance

I had a good discussion with imho a deletionist Wikipedia admin. For me the biggest take away was how notability is in the way of relevance.

With statements made like: "There are only two options, one is that the same standards apply, and the other is the perpetuation of prejudice" and "I view our decisions of notability as primarily subjective--decisions based on individual values and understandings of what WP should be like" no/little room is given for contrary points of view.

Notability has as its problem that it enables such a personal POV while relevance is about what others want to read. For a professor Bart O. Roep there is no article. Given two relevant diabetes related awards he should be notable and as he started a human study for a vaccine for diabetes type 1, he should be extremely relevant.

A personal POV ignoring the science that is in the news has its dangers. It is easy enough for Wikimedians to learn about scientific credentials, the papers are there to read but what we write is not for us but for our public. Withholding articles opens our public up to fake facts and fake science. An article about Mr Roep is therefore relevant and timely particularly because people die as they cannot afford their insulin. Articles about the best of what science has to bring about diabetes now is of extreme relevance.

At Wikidata, there is no notability issue. Given the relevance of diabetes all that is needed is to concentrate effort for a few days on a subject. New authors and papers are connected to what we already have, genders are added to authors (to document the gender ratio) and as a result more objective facts available for the subjective Wikipedia admins to consider, particularly when they accept tooling like Scholia to open up the available data.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Scholia: on the "requirement" of completeness

Scholia, the presentation of scholarly information on authors, papers, universities, awards et al is at this time not included in the "Authority control" part of a Wikipedia article. The reason I understand is because Wikipedians "that matter" insist that its information is to be complete.

That is imho utter balderdash.

The first argument is the Wiki principle itself. Things do not need to be complete, in the Wiki world it is all about the work that is underway. The second is in the information that it provides: its information is arguably superior to what a Wikipedia article provides on the corpus of papers written by an author. The third is that with the prospect of all references of all Wikipedias ending up in Wikidata, value is added when a paper can be seen in relation to its authors and citations. It matters when it is known what citations a paper is said to support. It matters that we know the papers that are retracted. The fourth argument is in the  maths of it all; typically scientific papers have multiple authors. It takes only one author with an ORCiD identifier to get its papers included. The other authors have not been open about their work, it is their own doing why they are not known in the most read corpus on the planet. They still exist but as "author strings". When a kind soul wants to remove them from obscurity they can.

As to the "Katie Bouman"s among them? There are many fine people that are equally deserving, that have not been recognised yet for their relevance. Fine people that have a public ORCiD record. For them it is feasible to have their Scholia ready when they are recognised. For the others, well it is not a Pokemon game, it is a Wiki.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Vikram Patel and missing awards

Mr Patel received many awards; for one of them you see illustrated what the award looks like. This award was missing in the Wikipedia article. Another award, the Chalmers Medal by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was mentioned but there is no information about other award winners.

Other awards for this society had their own item but no enrichment had taken place. They are now at least linked and award winners with a Wikipedia article are now also linked.

Linking people through awards, through their employers, their education provides an entry point to a subject like "Tropical Medicine and Hygiene". When this is a subject that matters to you, Mr Patel is the first one listed to have received the Chalmers award; this award started in 1923 so you can add all of them to Wikidata or write Wikipedia articles to these notable people.

When you consider notability, would it not be an argument to use against the Wikipedia deletionists when there is plenty of information at Wikidata?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Franziska Michor and #notability

Because of Facebook I read something about Franziska Michor. What triggered me was that she received an award. Her occupation, biomathematician, does not even exist (yet) on Wikidata.

To understand what a biomathematician does, it is great to watch the TedMED presentation by Mrs Michor. It gets me to the question of notability; I was amazed that Mrs Michor did not have a presence on Wikidata. I do not know if TEDMed is part of the TED project we had and I have no clue how to add this presentation.

The problem with an ever increasing scope of Wikidata, the challenge becomes less one of introducing data but more of maintaining data. This is particularly true when you look at Wikidata from a mathematical point of view. With Mrs Michor there are several datasets that gained notability and can do with some tender loving care: biomathematicians, TEDMed talks and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Sources: the Charles S. Johnson Award

Awards honour both the recipients, the organisation that confers it and often the person the award is named for. The Charles S. Johnson Award is named after Charles S. Johnson. He is notable; has his own Wikipedia articles. The organisation that confers it is notable; the Southern Sociological Society has its own Wikipedia article.

The awardees, well that is a problem because there is only a partial list of people who received the award. There are many gaps in the list and sources are available to indicate why they think someone received the award.

The Wikimedia blog has a post that mentions Lillian Smith. It mentions that she gave an acceptance speech at Fisk University in 1966. But there is no source for it. This does not mean that she did not receive the award, it just means that there is no source in the article.

When sources are provided to the Sociological Society, Mrs Smith will be connected to a list of other remarkable people. All notable in their own way. It is just a matter of connecting the dots.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The #Labor hall of Honour

When you add awards for one person, you will find other awards that are of interest. The Department of Labor's Hall of Honor is one such. It is a monument to honor Americans who have made a positive contribution to how people in the United States work and live.

Regularly new people are included. For some awards there are many red links. This time there was only one. Mark Ayers was added in 2012. When you google Mr Ayers, you find several dates of death.

To do the list justice, it is easy to add sources to the more relevant statements for Mr Ayers; him being part of the hall of honour and his death. It is left for other people to complement the data. As it is, the item fulfils its function; it completes a list.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - Professor Hermann Buhl "Leichtathlet"

Mr Buhl died in Tirol wandering through the Alps.  He used to be an athlete of repute and became a professor at the Julius Maximilians-Universiteit.

It is obvious that Mr Buhl was a professor because of his presence in a category. It is not obvious in the same way where he studied and what he taught. When you read the text, it expects a lot of knowledge about the DDR for the text to make such things obvious.

Every Wikipedia has its notability criteria and, the German Wikipedia is not different. Mr Buhl is certainly notable as an athlete but his career did not end. He is probable notable as well for the "latter" part of his career. Some would argue that he started to contribute in a meaningful way when he taught in university.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - 2014 deaths

In the many #Wikipedias, articles for people who are notable or noted indicate their demise. The deaths of 2014 are registered in Wikidata. Adding the deaths from the Ukraine Wikipedia is rather depressing. Then again, if the death of the people who died in the Ukraine is not noted, they may have died in vain.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Adrianne.. "we can edit"

Adrianne is one of the few Wikipedians who has her own articles and, deservedly so. It is sad that she had to die to get them and it is sad to see that some do not recognise her notability and want her article deleted. They cite policy. It used to be policy to "ignore all rules"..

Never mind, but I do. Given that someone who played just once a professional game of soccer is "notable" enough for an article is proof enough for me that Wikipedia has some dumb notions of notability.

To honour Adrianne editathons are organised and everybody is invited to join. To quote the convocation:

Her work is recognized internationally as helping to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia to tackle the gender gap and systemic bias in its content. Wadewitz was one of the first academics to bring Wikipedia into the classroom as part of the Wikipedia Education Program, working with her students to improve Wikipedia instead of writing traditional term papers. 

As anyone can join, we have done some work adding more humans to Wikidata and indicating their sexes. As Wikidata gains more data, its data will reflect more accurately what the sex ratio is for any given Wikipedia. There are 1.45% more humans, 1.13% more men and 1.15% more women since last 
Sunday. It was suggested to harvest information from the Frau and Mann category from the German Wikipedia and, they prove to be a rich resource of data.

Obviously only knowing the gender of a human is not really interesting. What is interesting is to know the number of **Whatever** award for its sex ratio or the number of professionals in a field.  Or the sex ratio of professors from 1960 to 1970.. At this time Wikidata does not have enough data to have a clue. As it gains more data, the results slowly but surely become statistically significant. I am sure some statisticians are able to say when Wikidata has enough data.

I am sure Adrianne would applaud this development.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - about an #organisation

Organisations like the #Wikimedia Foundation, are governed by people. The composition of the people with power or influence changes over the years and, while some organisations are identifiably managed by one person, typically there are structures in place like a "board of trustees" or a "board of directors" or whatever they are called.

To understand the notability of people, it is often important to know of what boards they are a member of. This defines their influence and, for the WMF the people who decide(d) on the issues of the WMF are in its board of trustees.

Once all these people were included in Wikidata, when all the start dates and end dates were included, the "related media" of the Reasonator produced a nice composition of all of them. The time line proved interesting as well. Phoebe is included twice; there was one year when she was no board member. This also shows when you click on the "show items" for the 24 items of "member of".

The information of the Wikimedia Foundation itself is interesting as well. It does show a logo (thank you Magnus) but it does not show many other things for instance its managing director. Particularly for people, their notability is often defined by the influence they wield. This influence is defined in the many relations people have. It is quite similar to politicians. For them we are quite comfortable including the offices they have held.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Simma Holt, a #politician from #Canada

When you are interested in the message of Mrs Holt, you can read her books. When you read about her, it is bound to be relevant and surely of interest.

There is a Wikipedia article in English about her and, there is now a Wikidata item about her. Given that she is a Canadian politician, I would expect that there will be an article about her in the French language in the future.

When you run a bot adding the party affiliation to persons, you find that the overwhelming majority are American or British. There are hardly any politicians of other countries. When you see a name that seems to be not American, you find that the context of these people is lacking.

On the other hand, it is fun to work on the information that is lacking. Mrs Holt is easy; she does have her VIAF registration. People like Mohammad Nabavi may have a VIAF registration. He does not have a Wikipedia article yet.

When you look at criteria for notability, it seems to me that anyone who has ever had a political appointment has his English Wikipedia article. I wonder if the same criteria are used for politicians of the other countries.
Thanks,
      GerardM