CRUK – WIKIPEDIA NEWSLETTER edit
Issue 1, September 1st 2014 By John Byrne, Wikipedian in Residence, Press & Science Communications dept, Angel, x 5318
Hi! I’m sending you this because you have attended a presentation or training session on the CRUK Wikipedia project, or been involved in some other way. I’m planning to send this out every so often, to give news of how the project is going, and point to a few cancer-related issues that are current on Wikipedia – talk page rows, articles in the news or ongoing reviews. Any comments on it very welcome, and I hope it may provoke edits on Wikipedia itself. I will post modified versions online, see here. If anyone wants to be added to, or removed from, the list, please let me know.
Pre-Wikimania Medical Wikipedians event at Angel – August 7th edit
The day before the big international Wikimania 2014 conference, CRUK hosted a meeting with medical editors of Wikipedia which was a great success, with Wikipedian attendees from 5 continents, and CRUK people from several teams – many thanks to those who attended!
The programme concentrated on using accessible language, with a presentation by Henry Scowcroft, and a discussion of some specific issues CRUK had identified with some of the headings in the recommended layout and contents for articles on medical conditions at Wikipedia's Manual of Style for Medical articles. The need for changes was readily agreed by those present, and is Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Medicine-related_articles#A_change_to_some_of_our_headings now being discussed by the community online – changes look certain to happen. At the meeting we also explained the different types of online information available from CRUK. Wikimania 2014 – The main conference itself was over three days at the Barbican Centre, attended by over 2,000 people from around the world. Henry Scowcroft and I co-presented with others for two talks (no video online yet), and there were a number of other mentions of the CRUK project by other presenters, all good. The project has strong supporters in the medical editing community, and has attracted plenty of attention more widely.
A CRUK UK press release rather got pushed out by the monkey selfie story, and a round of interviews with Jimmy Wales.
CRUK images released on open licenses edit
We had our first release of images on an open license a month ago – 390 diagrams from the CancerHelp pages. These have been enthusiastically received by the medical Wikipedians, and already 176 of them are used in Wikipedia articles, 14 twice, which is a phenomenally quick uptake. They are SVG format files, which means that where appropriate the text labels in the images can easily be translated for use in other languages. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will. The Governance Panel to confirm that other images are suitable for release has had its first meeting. Only certain types of unproblematic images will be involved. The idea of releasing the images is not just to allow use on Wikipedia, but anywhere else. One advantage of this is that it will save CancerHelp from having to respond to the many requests for permission to reuse they already get. Wikipedia articles: We’ve had the preliminary reviews by CancerHelp for our main target articles on cancers of the lung, brain, oesophagus and pancreas. The amount of work needed varies very considerably! CancerHelp also kindly did a quick review of Endometrial cancer, which User:Keilana has been working up. After incorporating the changes, it has now been nominated to become a Featured Article. Anyone can comment in the review process with comments or a “support” or “oppose”.
In the news edit
- On a quick look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy looks adequate, but it had no UK section, which I’ve now added, and plenty more could be said. It suddenly got 7,000 views on August 31st, instead of the usual 220-odd daily count. Somewhat surprisingly, no one seems to have started an article on the Ashya King case, but I suspect they will.
- For Children’s Cancer Awareness Month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_cancer is functional but basic, and doesn’t have the new UK figures.
Talk page wrangles: Is “The percentage of obesity that can be attributed to genetics varies, depending on the population examined, from 6% to 85%” a sensible thing to say? Join the discussion at Talk:Obesity.
- On a similar note, is “Almost all cancers (80–90%) are caused by environmental factors, and of these, 30–40% of cancers are directly linked to the diet.” a good way to start the article on “Diet and cancer”? Discussion at the medical project talk-page here.
- MEDSCAPE story, 1 September. Subscription site, so easiest to google "Cancer Research UK Working to Improve Info on Wikipedia".