User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Biogeosciences and the Wikimedia ecosystem

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About

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This page assists a talk given on 6 April 2023 at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.

Logistics

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Statistics

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  • How many people are in the room? 20
  • How many people are connected remotely? 23 (their responses to the questions could not be recorded)
  • How many have used open-source software? 20
  • How many have contributed to open-source software? 10
  • How many have used open data? 20
  • How many have contributed to open data? 17
  • How many have used Wikipedia or any of its sister sites? 20
  • How many have contributed to any of the Wikimedia projects? 3.5
  • How many think that asking such questions here requires ethical approval? 2

Wikimedia projects

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Wikimedia logo family complete-2022
An ecosystem of about 1000 wikis

Wikipedia

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Screenshot of Wikipedia.org landing page on 2023-04-05 21-42-04

Wikipedia is available in over 300 languages, together getting multiple billions of monthly page views.

Wikimedia Commons

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Knowledge belongs to all of us. 2030 Wikimedia
Over 90 million reusably licensed media files

Wikidata

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Screenshot of Wikidata homepage as of 5 April 2023

Structured data about more than 100 million entities.

Other Wikimedia projects

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Wikimedia logo family 2021 with SARS-CoV-2 virus

An example of how each of these projects has its own ways of sharing knowledge around a topic

The landscape around Wikimedia

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Strategy Graphic - For collaborative editing
Wikimedia's strategic direction:

"By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us."

Wikimedia for research

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Wikimedia about research

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Megistocera at Kadavoor

This photo of what is thought to be a new species of crane fly was on Wikimedia Commons, through which researchers discovered it (background).

Wikimedia resources relevant for research

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Screenshot of Scholia topic profile for wildfire as of 2023-04-06

Scholia provides about 30 types of scholarly profiles, all based on Wikidata

Wikibase

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Wikibase background

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  • https://wikiba.se/
  • Open-source software suite mediating between MediaWiki and the Semantic Web
  • Used on Wikidata
  • Increasingly used in other MediaWiki instances
  • Wikibase brochure

Wikibase data model

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Datamodel in Wikidata for Phaistos Disk

Data model for the Phaistos Disc (Q465338 on Wikidata)

Wikibase ecosystem

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Wikibase instances indexed in the Wikibase registry as of November 2020

This query provides more recent data

Example Wikibase instance

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Lingua Libre aims to build a collaborative, multilingual, audiovisual corpus under free licence

Lingua Libre can be used to record the pronunciation of words and phrases in any language(s) known to Wikidata

Wikimedia for Biogeosciences

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Screenshot of the mobile view of the Wikimedia Commons category Biogeochemical cycle as of 2023-04-06

Categories, infoboxes, identifiers, links

Media files

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Carbon cycle-cute diagram

A carbon cycle diagram available in 18 languages

Articles

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Screenshot of Citation Hunt for Deforestation and climate change as of 2023-04-05

Tools like Citation Hunt assist in improving verifiability.

Structured data

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Genera by number of species known to contain indolic scaffolds as of 2023-04-06

Structured data from different domains can be queried.

Research for Wikimedia

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Research about Wikimedia

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Research resources relevant for Wikimedia reuse

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  • Research materials can be reused if they use
    • Open standards
    • Open-source software
    • Open hardware
    • Open licenses on website and when sharing papers, software, data, PR materials, hardware designs etc.
    • Machine actionable formats
    • Public version history for any such materials
  • Any published research materials may be cited

Biogeosciences for Wikimedia

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Ohrid Basin map

A map of the basin of Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia, originally published in Biogeosciences, now illustrates the article about the lake in the Macedonian Wikipedia.

Opportunities for further interactions

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Motivation

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  • Wikimedia projects are already widely used in research and many other contexts
  • Reuse on Wikimedia projects is a great way to demonstrate Reusability of research in the FAIR sense
  • Wikimedia contributions can be integrated with educational activities
  • Five ways academics can contribute to Wikipedia

Further reading

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Basic principles of Wikimedia projects

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Five pillars of Wikipedia + three core content policies

Some key principles that the ecosystem is built on

Five pillars of Wikipedia

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  • WP:5P1 Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
  • WP:5P2 Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
  • WP:5P3 Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
  • WP:5P4 Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility
  • WP:5P5 Wikipedia has no firm rules

Core content policies

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Screenshot of the Core content policies page on the English Wikipedia as of 2023-04-06

Core content policies on the English Wikipedia; the other wikis have similar ones.

Contributing to Wikimedia projects

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Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to the edit stream:
multiple Wikipedias, Wikidata, both, recording

Contributing to Wikidata

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Wikidata items map with difference, India, October 2018 to May 2019

Geolocated Wikidata items, with highlighting of changes between October 2018 and May 2019

Contributing to Wikimedia Commons

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Gonioteuthis quadrata (Blainville, 1827) guard with a zigzag-like deformation - photo vs. MRI
An image originally uploaded for a talk was reused in the Wikipedia article Belemnitida.

Contributing to Wikipedia

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WikiProject Climate change - 1000 most popular articles in February 2023

There is always room for improvement, and there are initiatives like WikiProject Climate Change or #365climateedits to address that.

Issues with contributing to Wikimedia projects

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What I wonder is why professors don't curate [pages on] Wikipedia and add course materials and open access sections of textbooks, much of which they post online anyways. We aren't really seeing the potential that you would hope for with all of the Web 2.0 tools out there. We aren't seeing the academic community take advantage of them as much as other subsets of the community. — David Lipman (2010)

Wikifying biogeosciences

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Wikidata-climate-change-logo

Logo of Wikidata's WikiProject Climate Change

Increase opportunities to participate in the research process

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Smithsonian FossiLab at the National Museum of Natural History with fossil preparators being observed by museum visitors - IMG 20190728 153249

In the FossiLab at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, citizen scientists prepare fossils in an open-science fashion, with the public invited to observe.

Contextualizing invasion biology

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Invasion biology in a broader context that includes restoration ecology, urban ecology and freshwater ecology - Wikidata Query Service screenshot from 2023-04-06 05-52-12 (cropped)

A Wikidata query for topics related to invasion biology

Opening up MPI-BGC

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Opening up climate communication

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TDWG 2022 - INT19 94347 hegde - Unpacking IPCC and IPBES Reports

Unpacking IPCC and IPBES Reports (2022) — non-open licensing and encapsulation in PDFs are an obstacle to reuse of images or citation information

Wiki99

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Screenshot of the Wiki99 page for chemistry as of 2023-04-06

Wiki99 for chemistry. What about doing one for biogeochemistry?

Linking computational models across domains

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Climate change models across different scales of resolution

The NFDI consortium for mathematics wants to bring together modellers from different domains to discuss best practices for sharing models.

Linking arts and sciences

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Paintings depicting icebergs - Screenshot of the Wikidata Query Service as of 2019-09-23 (rearranged)

Paintings depicting icebergs

Thanks

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Send-thanks1
What if we could more easily thank those who create and maintain the resources we use?

Abstract

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Background

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This talk explores existing and potential interactions between biogeoscience research and education on the one hand and the Wikimedia ecosystem on the other. This ecosystem - which includes sites like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and their respective communities and workflows - represents a sociotechnical platform providing a vast and continuously curated repository of openly accessible knowledge and reusable materials on a wide range of topics, including many that are relevant for biogeosciences. This resource is leveraged at the scale of billions of monthly direct pageviews and in many more indirect ways, e.g. via search engines or large language models.

Focus

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The presentation begins by providing a general overview of the Wikimedia ecosystem, its structure, and its interactions with and impact on scientific communication. We will then explore how biogeosciences are represented and how biogeoscience-related communities can engage with the Wikimedia ecosystem, including reviewing Wikipedia articles, uploading scientific images or media files to Wikimedia Commons, utilizing Wikidata to connect and visualize reference data across knowledge domains or exploring open-science workflows taking place on Wikimedia infrastructures.

Pros and cons

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We will also discuss the benefits of engaging with the Wikimedia ecosystem, including increasing the visibility and impact of biogeoscience research, improving public understanding of scientific concepts, scientific contributions to societal discourse, and promoting collaboration and networking among scientists as well as between them and others. Additionally, we will cover some of the challenges and potential pitfalls of engaging with the Wikimedia ecosystem, such as the different writing styles and attribution mechanisms and the potential for conflicts of interest, bias and misinformation, along with mechanisms for addressing such issues.

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