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".. 

Jack needs help, so do we and, so do our audiences

Jack penciled his aspirations for Twitter in a tweet. In it he states: "... Second, the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet."

It is good news that Jack seeks a way out, he intends to hire a "small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers" and "Twitter is to become a client of this standard"..

In the Wikimedia projects we have similar challenges and opportunities. We cannot expect for all kinds of reasons that scientists who are very much in the news (aka relevant) there to be a Wikipedia article Dr Tewoldeberhan is a recent example but there is no reason why we cannot have her, her work and the work of any other scientist in Wikidata. With tools like Scholia we already have a significant impact by making more known that just what may be found in a Wikipedia. Jack, we do know many scientists by their Twitter handle, they already make the case for their science on Twitter. This makes it easy for you to link to and expand on Scholia. What we give our readers is more to read so that they can find conformation for what they read.

Jack, Wikidata is not proprietary, Scholia is not proprietary and the Wikimedia motto is "to share in the sum of all knowledge". Together we can shift focus from what we have read before in the Wikipedias to what there is to read on the Internet. Put stuff in context and bring the scientists who care to inform about their science in the limelight.

What we do not have is the pretense that we cover everything well. we do aim to cover everything notable well. What we provide is static, Twitter is much more dynamic and together we will change the landscape. Great technology combined with both the Twitter and Wikimedia communities has the potential of being awesome.
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

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

#Wikidata: Adding credibile info to #Twitter - Margaret Stanley

Twitter, Facebook, organisations like them have this credibility problem. Too many Joes Dicks and dirty Harries poison the well that is the information they provide.

Now meet Margaret Stanley, she is a scientist and, she tweets. Her Twitter name is included in Wikidata and it is highly likely that even though her tweets are her own and, do not indicate the opinion of the institution she works for, what she tweets is credible and well considered.

Margaret is not the only scientist that tweets, there are many of them. More and more of them are included in Wikidata, including their publications, including their twitter handle. One of these scientists, actively encourages female scientists to speak out, seek a platform to encourage women to find their place in science. They twitter, they write Wikipedia articles and they are very much relevant scientists, much of their relevance shines through in their tweets.

Dear Twitter, when scientists have a profile in Wikidata, they personally make a statement. It is theirs. They are as human as everyone else but they are not, as a group, foolish enough to tweet balderdash, nonsense or other stuff you should frown upon.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Skills and tools needed to add #awards

Adding awards to Wikidata is one way to signal notable people who could do with some tender loving care, maybe even an article. Typically it starts with someone who was awarded. This time, three fine ladies: Kay Davies, Alice Rogers and Sarah Cleaveland.

Mrs Davies received the "Croonian Medal and Lecture", an award conferred by the Royal Society. The award was already known as the "Croonian Lecture" and the Wikipedia article contains a long list of recipients. The website included a few recipients and consequently the award was positively identified.

Thanks to Reasonator, I easily navigated from Mrs Davies to the award, I noticed how few recipients were known and using text from the article in combination with the Awarder tool I started adding 250+ recipients within ten minutes. Other awards like the Harveian Oration are still missing in Wikidata.

Mrs Rogers received the "Kavli Education Medal", only four recipients so far. The name Kavli in combination with awards proved a bit ambigue; finding the correct medal was the one challenge. One recipient was missing a Mrs Margaret Brown, easy enough to add her as well. The mother of Mrs Rogers was said to be a very accomplished mathematician of Bletchley Park fame but details are lacking.

Sarah Cleaveland received many awards; of interest are two because they are not linked. She was the first woman to win the Trevor Blackburn Award in 2008. The other, the Leeuwenhoek Medal and Lecture in 2018, got my attention. It did not have many recipients and again, the Awarder tool made it easy to add many missing recipients. There are several red links, I did not add them this time.

When I am to add the Trevor Blackburn Award, I first have to find it. It is mentioned on several Wikipedia articles but the award and Mr Blackburn are missing. Google helps me find the website of the award. With Mrs Cleaveland there are 13 recipients. The first thing to do is add the award, link the organisation that conferred it and the web address for the award.

When you then start looking for recipients, Reasonator immediately provides an updated view. No need to query for its recipients they are obvious. Just to show that you can, I added another fine lady; Mrs Karen Reed.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Twitter - #WikiParliaments.. but what about #Wikidata and #Austria?

Twitter advertised several things that I might like. WikiParliaments could be one of them. Today I learned that Othmar Tödling died. He was a member of the "Nationalrat" of Austria. As such he might be very much of interest to WikiParliaments.

Politicians are human too; they die. When they do, it is often noted in a category what function they held. Today I started adding statements for those humans who hold or held the function of parliamentarian in Austria.

My hope is that people who care about parliaments will make it even prettier and embellish them with even more statements and qualifiers.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Twitter does #RTL

When Twitter started to support right to left languages in earnest, they did need localisation for their software. Given the relevance of Twitter a great localisation is important; many people will actually see it, use it.

With the implementation of RTL languages like Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew, and the simultaneous localisation there are many people who are exposed to the same issues and flaws in the software. What is so wonderful that all the people localising software find each other and work together. It is as a Saudi Wikipedian wrote on the Arabic village pump: "we all have the same problems".

Amir, one of my colleagues in the WMF Localisation team, does a fair amount of localisation on other projects in his own time. The one thing we learn from him is about cool features used in other localisation platforms.

What really pleases us is how often we learn how much the community model of translatewiki.net is valid. It does make a difference when people are not working on their own little island. Many applications are localising an upcoming release and this makes all these people testers as well. People learning together about issues and working together on solutions particularly with developers involved as well make for a perfect and agile software development environment.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Blogger and #twitter #fail the open #Internet

When I publish on my blog, it is published to an international public. Once I have blogged, a tweet on #Twitter is produced to make more people interested in reading the article. When I tweet, it is intended for a worldwide public.

The moves by Google and Twitter to publish my blog, my tweets in country specific domains upsets me. By publishing it on for instance "http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com.au/" upsets me. It upsets me because it allows for easy censorship of Blogger and Twitter. It will be Google or Twitter who decide what gets published where. Their excuse that the governments of countries ask them to do this, does not impress me much.

I am not amused with the situation. I like Blogger, its functionality is great. However, I categorically deny Google the right to box me in, kettle is now the word that comes to mind. It is not okay to restrict my access to the Internet for what I blog. It is not okay to restrict the access of the readers of blogs what they can read.

We have had our SOPA moment and like with SOPA, this is how the Internet is damaged. As this is not acceptable, I will have to reconsider what to do next. We will have to consider what to do next.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#TwitterFeed for communicating the chapter

When a #Wikimedia chapter wants to get its message out, there are all these networks to choose from. Often it is only a matter of configuring your social network. Sometimes you need a tool like TwitterFeed . It helps me by creating a tweet. By using hash tags in the first two sentences, people are likely to find my blog post.

There is a nice article at ehow that explains how you have to set it up. An added extra of TwitterFeed is that it allows the use of OpenID.
Thanks,
       GerardM

To #twitter in "indigenous" languages II

At this moment #Wikipedia supports many more languages than indigenoustweets.com. I can imagine that having tweets in our languages is something that is of interest to our language communities.

S07E29c from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Kevin Scannell in this interview with Brian Lehrer is quite clear: he is interested in every small language. It might be an idea to link to Indigenoustweets on project like OmegaWiki and translatewiki.net where portals can be found for many languages.
Thanks,
        GerardM

To #twitter in "indigenous" languages

The #BBC world service reports on how #Twitter helps people connect in their own language. Have a listen, it is good.

When you google for this topic, you find "Indigenous Tweets.com". It is a really nice website where Kevin Scannell keeps track of activity in these languages. This is done by mapping the Twitter network of people who communicate in languages that are rare on the Internet.

There is a limit to what can be done; for Haitian Creole there are probably more then 100.000 twitterati and building a "telephone book"  for them may be more then Twitter allows. What Kevin does is wonderful because being able to reach out on Twitter is hard enough. Using a language that is not widely spoken makes it even harder.

One solution for this Haitian dilemma is to use the Status.net software; messages can be forwarded to Twitter but within a status.net everyone can read all tweets.  Twitter could provide feeds where you only find tweets of people communicating in a particular language. But it would be really good when Twitter and Kevin produce these indigenous twitterati books together.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Whether #twitter or #identi.ca

I learned that #Twitterfeed allows me to post to indenti.ca. I  post all the tweets that I type in on my identi.ca account and have them forward to Twitter. As the status.net software is localised at translatewiki.net, it is easy to understand why status.net is my first choice.

Both Twitter and even more so Facebook want to determine what privacy and freedom I have and want to bombard me with things I have no interest in.

If everything works out well, Twitterfeed will generate a message to identi.ca. This will be forwarded to Twitter so in a way it is business as usual. When Twitter makes this impossible they will lose custom.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Translatewiki.net update

With a new month, the "group statistics in time" of translatewiki.net are as intersting as ever.. This time the effects of the localisation rally are evident. All the categories have improved considerably.

The one thing that is odd is the decrease of the number of languages. The Picard language was added and Iriga Bicolano, Palembang, Tamazight and Eastern Yiddish were removed. There was no activity for these languages at all.

Communicating about a project like translatewiki is vitally important. We need to tell what is happening and we have been doing that with a newsletter and two blogs. That does not mean that there may be more that could be said. Siebrand has started with the translatewiki twitter account.
Thanks,
       GerardM