World Association of Young Scientists

Below is my quick and dirty list of notes taken during Bill Wedemeyer's talk
"Quality of the science articles on the English Wikipedia", given at Wikimania 2008. Times are approximate, in minutes.

3:00 Dr Ahmed Darwish - need for free and reliable information
3:35 Necessity to train teachers
3:50 Training of students by involving them in scientific writing
5:00 Training of future scientists
5:49 Critiques of WP
7:04 dataset description
8:15 review of "good" WP articles by experts
12:12 WP does cover a broad range of scientific topics
13:45 ca. 11% of science articles are "developed"
14:40 reference to Tim Vickers on peer reviewed stuff
15:45 It should not be a goal for WP to write scientific reviews. Rather, WP should try to make such reviews accessible to the public.
16:00 Tim Vickers edits under his own name and in his area of expertise
16:20 limitations of the media (size limits); does not mention video embedding
16:45 participation/motivation of experts; incl. science funding bodies
18:20 The time to recruit experts is not at the beginning but towards the end, about Featured Article
20:00 WP's authority derives from good referencing
22:00 WP has a method to provide authority to claims ("reliable authoritativeness")
23:00 quality of coverage by WP; weighted selection of mainly Good & Featrured Articles
23:50 only 2% of WP are GA/FA but these are generally OK for outreach and student education
29:30 Conclusions (invite evaluations by independent people)
30:20 Future work
32:00 Discussion
34:00 In what way is writing worse in WP than in EB
35:00 Automate the manual of style!
36:50 Student assignments: Read a WP article, say what is good or bad, and fix it
39:30 How practical is it to invite external reviews?
43:00 Potential dangers of contributing to WP, particularly for a postdoc
44:36 "I personally believe that any scientific study that is published [[...]] must give its data away for free. That's the principle of science that you cannot keep data for yourself. [[..]] So I am completely committed [[to releasing the data]] (if I get published)."
45:15 I will try Nature first. I could also appeal to Science--> why not some OA journal?
46:30 What is the value being added by WP? Don't (just) mirror existing databases!
49:16 END