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mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Duncan.Hull.
Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it ... The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors.[2]
Unfortunately, there is significant
gender bias on Wikipedia which reflects
sexism in society at large, where women are either mis-represented or completely under-represented. As of 14 February 2022[update] only 19% of all biographies in Wikipedia are about women (358,922 of 1,873,707 total), see
womeninred.org.[13][14][15][16]
Even if you are
considered notable by editors, you may not necessarily have a Wikibiography as coverage of scientists is often poor.[4][18] For example, around 30% of
Fellows elected before 2012, have no wiki-biography at all.[4] Lots of notable scientists in the wider scientific community who aren't fellows have no biography either, especially women.[19][20][13][14][15] If you want a Wikibiography, there are several steps you can take to improve your chances of having one:
Requesting a biography by adding your name to the
requested biographies by profession pages. Note that demand for biographies typically outstrips supply.
Updating information about you online to avoid the typical academic homepage of “everything you ever wanted to know about your Professor from ten years ago”.[23]
Identifying yourself by clearly and persistently distinguishing your work using an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (
ORCID)[24][25] in your grants and publications. Your ORCID profile can be populated automatically from the publications in your
Scopus record, saving you the tedious job of re-entering all your publication data again.[26] If you haven't done so already you should also consider creating a
Google Scholar profile[27] and claim your
ResearcherID because they make your work more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (
FAIR data)[17] to the wider world.[28] All this
metadata will also help editors to write better articles about you.
Communicating with the public about your work using
mainstream media,
social media and other platforms for
public engagement that increase
public awareness of science. This will create
secondary sources about you and your research that add significant value to primary sources of scientific literature and enables editors (who are probably not subject experts) to understand and write about your research.
Remember that anyone can edit Wikipedia including
vandals,
bots, practical jokers, your students, collaborators,
abusers and other enemies (assuming you have enemies). So it is a good idea to track changes of your Wikibiography by
subscribing to the syndicated feed of the article using your favourite
news aggregator. Point your aggregator at the
atom feed which can be found on the "view history > tools > Atom" link to receive automatic notifications of edits to that page. Data from new Wikibiographies appears in the
Google Knowledge Graph within a week or two of their publication, with both Wikipedia articles and the KG appearing prominently in search results, should you ever indulge in a spot of
egosurfing.[4][31]
Every month, Wikipedia is viewed more than 15 billion times by over 1.5 billion unique devices.[32] That amounts to over 500 million visits per day, or about 6000 visits per second.[32] To put it another way, every month, people spend ~60,000 years reading Wikipedia articles. For better or worse, Wikipedia is one of the first places the general public go to find out about science.
Consequently, having a Wikibiography is likely to increase the impact of your work inside and outside of academia. You can see your personal
Wikipedia:Pageview statistics using the handy
Pageviews Analysis tool.[36]
The tax-payers, government agencies and charities who have funded your work want to maximise their investment in your research. Having it cited in Wikipedia is one small step to achieving this.
As a scientist you are already a public figure and much of your work is already in the public domain and even wikidata,[37] Wikipedia is a logical extension to that.
Methods for evaluating research impact may change in the future.[38] For example, initiatives like
ImpactStory,
Altmetric.com,
Clarivate Analytics and
Plum Analytics are already measuring online mentions of peer reviewed papers using so-called
alternative metrics (altmetrics).[39][40][41][42] These newer metrics all include estimates of how much literature is mentioned in Wikipedia,[43] so having your research in the worlds biggest encyclopedia will improve your altmetric(s) score(s). That might come in handy some day.
Last but not least, do you really want your work to be excluded from the “
sum of all knowledge”?
Full disclosure
If you're wondering about my
conflict of interests, I am not funded, paid or employed by the Royal Society and never have been. I started
WikiProject Royal Society in 2012 with help from
Paul Nurse[44] and
John Byrne.[4] The aim of the project is to improve the coverage of scientists (and their science) in Wikipedia,
Wikidata and
Wikimedia Commons using the resources of the Royal Society. Like I've already said above, I avoid writing biographies of people I know personally or professionally.
My contributions are made in an individual, personal capacity and so do not represent the official views of my employer or any other organisation to which I am affiliated.
Getting in touch
The best way to contact me about wikistuff is via the talk pages of an article or on
my personal talk page. If you add the text {{ping|Duncan.Hull}} to your comment, I'll get
automagically notified. If you want to contact me off-wiki in less than 140 characters, you can tweet me[6] or email me [email protected] (where mytwitterhandle = wikiscientists). For more urgent or serious problems, you should
email Wikimedia volunteers using the ticketing system (OTRS) so that your issue gets properly logged and dealt with.
^
abSchellekensa, Menno H.; Holstegeb, Floris;
Yasseria, Taha (2019). "Female scholars need to achieve more for equal public recognition". arxiv.
arXiv:1904.06310.
^Schiermeier, Quirin (2017). "Initiative aims to break science's citation paywall: Publishers agree to release proprietary data on references in millions of papers". Nature.
doi:
10.1038/nature.2017.21800.
ISSN1476-4687.
I'm a member of
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