Sanjaykairam

Welcome!

Hello, Sanjaykairam, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! -- Mdd (talk) 23:20, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Discussion with Editors

Hi Sanjay. I am willing to help if you tell me what you want to know? -- Mdd (talk) 23:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi MDD! Thanks so much for responding! I was hoping to just ask a set of questions about the process you go through when editing an article, starting an article, and adding a reference (with a specific eye towards scientific publications). What would be the best venue to do so? Is there an easy way to give you my email address with posting it publicly (I'm new to the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia). Sanjaykairam (talk) 23:37, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

So let's see what you're interested in, just ask along. You can email me via the WP:EMAIL feature. Morton Shumway—talk 11:58, 28 May 2011 (UTC).

You can mail me the same way with your questions (and a return address). -- Mdd (talk) 21:53, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your inquiry. But I don't have time. Too busy with my research.Bellagio99 (talk) 23:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Your request for help at my talk page got me intrigued. Do you have a seed idea of what you want to do for your PhD, or are you still at the very early stage where you are open to all possibilities? IMHO what you should do right now is posting at your user page a brief summary and instruction steps (that can be revised later) describing what your goal is and what kind of help you're hoping to get, so that the people you contact will have some idea of what they can do for you. Diego Moya (talk) 14:47, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm busy, but I'm interested. Can you send me your dissertation proposal? JTBurman (talk) 05:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Questions for editors who work on scientific topics

Hello to all of the editors who offered to share their insight and experience regarding articles on scientific topics! I decided to eschew the original plan of doing interview questions via email and instead thought we could do this in true wiki style!

I'm including some questions below - I would love it if you answered all of them, but feel free to answer whatever you can (and to respond to each other if so inclined!). I know that some of the answers to these questions are covered by documents pertaining to Wikipedia policy, but I assume that policies are not followed word-for-word, and I am really interested in how you really go about things when you are in the wiki-trenches.

Please know that we really appreciate your input, and I hope that your time will go towards helping us produce a system that benefits Wikipedia overall.

Creating New Articles

• How do you decide if a topic is worthy of a new article or should be lumped into an existing article? How does this decision-making process differ for scientific articles vs. other types of articles?

• When you start a new article, what are the first few steps that you take? Do you follow a specific process?

• When you are starting a new article on a scientific topic, when do you first think about including various types of source material? When do you first start looking for published works to reference?

• Are there any repetitive tasks that you engage in when creating a new article which could be made easier?

Editing Existing Articles

• What are the most common tasks that you perform when editing articles? Are these tasks different for articles on scientific topics than for other types of topics?

• Do you have any specific process that you follow when refining an article?

• Are there editing/refining challenges which are specific to scientific articles?

• Do the standards for the quality of a scientific article differ in your mind from those for other types of article?

• When you are writing on a scientific topic, who do you imagine your audience to be?

Adding Citations to Scientific Publications

• What is your typical process for adding a citation to a scientific publication? When in the editing lifecycle are you most likely to add such a citation?

• How do you decide whether to add it as an official reference or put it in another section such as "further reading"?

• When adding an in-line citation to a published article, are you more likely to find the publication first and then look for a way to cite it or to look for a publication that supports a claim made in the article text?

• How do you find these sources? Can you describe the process that you use to search for these sources?

• How do you measure the relevance of cited articles? How do you measure the importance of these articles? And how do you balance these two to decide which to add.

• How do you address published articles which contain conflicting information?

• What is the biggest obstacle for finding good published articles as sources to include?

Requirements for a System for Suggesting Publications to Cite

• Do you believe that a system which suggested scientific publications relevant to a Wikipedia article would be useful for editors? For readers?

• What types of information could the system show which would be most helpful for editors? For readers?

• When in the editing process could you envision utilizing such a system?

• What types of published articles would you like to see in such a system? What types of articles would you not like to see?

• Where on the page would it be most helpful to have such a system on the page? Top? Bottom? Sidebar? Anywhere else?

• What actions would you like to be able to perform with the system? What interactive features would you like to see?

Thank you!

I really appreciate your taking the time to answer some or all of these questions. If you know anyone else who edits scientific articles and might be interested in contributing, it would be great if you could either mention this to them or post their usernames below (if that sort of thing is generally acceptable) so I could get in touch with them. Thanks!

You wrote "aimed at improving the quality of scientific articles on Wikipedia by providing easier access to relevant published refereed articles" - sounds great, but frankly, I don't understand what you exactly mean by that. Another note, the list above reads as if your interest is in interviewing wikipedians. I (and probably many others) have no time for that and would prefer solving more specific problems. P.S. WP:OR and WP:REF might help answering some your questions. I am afraid we don't have specific guidelines for others, and thus any answers would be a personal opinion. Materialscientist (talk) 04:44, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

What's your idea of a system for suggesting publications to cite, and how do you think you can provide easier access to articles? For your questions on Wikipedia norms, as on how much topics should be lumped and split, the existing guidelines and rules are explained at pages like Wikipedia:Notability—though on that issue, there's plenty of disagreement. The rest of the stuff looks like something you'd need a bit of a survey to answer, and though I could answer these questions if clearly worthwhile I don't have the time just this moment, and don't know what your ideas are. To find Wikipedia editors in a topic (though I don't think you should posted the message on my talk page in its current state en masse), the best places to look are the WikiProjects, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology. —innotata 16:12, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Our specific goal is to build a dashboard that displays information about publications which might be relevant to a particular Wikipedia article for the benefit of both readers and editors. I'm providing a potentially "vague" description instead of having you specifically evaluate a prototype because I want to make sure that the design is grounded in your existing practices. The reason that I am asking more general questions is that I believe that the best way to help editors is to really understand your practices and how such a system could be most seamlessly integrated. I understand that some of the questions I am asking are specifically addressed by Wikipedia policy, but I am also aware that people differ in their interpretations of policy, and thus I believe it will still be informative to gain a sense of how real editors make these types of decisions. This methodology is quite different from how I would normally conduct a study such as this, but I thought that asking the questions publicly on this page would be an interesting experiment given the domain of study. I know that your time is very valuable, but my hope is that this will lead to a system which reduces work for you and other editors of scientific articles in the future. Sanjaykairam (talk) 18:14, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Responses by Dcoetzee

Responses below. Hope this helps. Don't take me as representative, get more data :-) I recommend asking one or two targeted questions to specific users rather than throwing a long list at them. Dcoetzee 06:48, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

• How do you decide if a topic is worthy of a new article or should be lumped into an existing article? How does this decision-making process differ for scientific articles vs. other types of articles?
  • Generally speaking my standard for new article versus merge is how long an article could be potentially be written on the topic. An article that could never be longer than one paragraph, even using all available sources, is a prime candidate for merging. Merging improves things by discussing related topics in a common context without repeating the context over and over. There's quite a fuzzy boundary between the two and it varies by topic area. In scientific areas I've often seen small articles on simple terms get merged into glossaries. Of course if a topic in emerging research becomes more important it can be split out again, using summary style.

• When you start a new article, what are the first few steps that you take? Do you follow a specific process? When you are starting a new article on a scientific topic, when do you first think about including various types of source material? When do you first start looking for published works to reference?
  • It varies. When writing about something I learned in a class, I'll often start with the approach of "just start writing something and worry about sourcing it later." When writing a summary of papers I've been reading, I'll take the opposite approach of listing the citations and a basic introduction first, and then writing a more detailed article. When writing about a topic I haven't started researching yet, I'll start with basic facts that I already know and then fill in more info from sources one by one as I collect them. A good model of my process is Region-based memory management, which so far nobody else has edited substantially.
• Are there any repetitive tasks that you engage in when creating a new article which could be made easier?
  • My references are usually web sources and being able to insert a reference quickly and easily from a web source without finding all the reference info and inserting it into the relevant template would save a lot of time. There are some existing tools along these lines but not very well-integrated (e.g. the cite tool in the editing toolbar, and many web tools that generate info from the URL/ISBN, see Wikipedia:Citation tools). Other arduous tasks are of course finding and reading sources, writing the article content, adding good useful links to and from related articles, and finding or (especially) creating relevant free media files to include.
• Are there editing/refining challenges which are specific to scientific articles? Do the standards for the quality of a scientific article differ in your mind from those for other types of article?
  • Not really that I can think of. I approach all topic areas roughly the same when writing an article about them.

• When you are writing on a scientific topic, who do you imagine your audience to be?
  • Generally whatever sort of people have the background to have an interest in the topic, which varies widely between topics. Articles discussing topics discussed in intro classes generally need to be more accessible, while those on very specialized things not so much. There's a lot of pushing to make articles more accessible all the time, which is very hard to do and often involves finding illustrative examples, metaphors, or creating diagrams.

• What is your typical process for adding a citation to a scientific publication? When in the editing lifecycle are you most likely to add such a citation?
  • Intermittently, both during the addition of new content and later on beefing up on more references for existing content. As the process repeats new cites are added in both stages again.

• How do you decide whether to add it as an official reference or put it in another section such as "further reading"?
  • Further reading is for sources that weren't consulted in writing the article but are relevant to the topic. Usually I put things like good accessible textbook treatments of the topic here.
• When adding an in-line citation to a published article, are you more likely to find the publication first and then look for a way to cite it or to look for a publication that supports a claim made in the article text?
  • I've done both. The latter occurs more when adding citations to existing articles, while the former occurs more writing new articles or sections.

• How do you find these sources? Can you describe the process that you use to search for these sources?
  • Google Scholar or Google web search, using references of other papers, and sometimes using references of other Wikipedia articles. In the field of computer science so much of the literature is online that I rarely go to a library. But I do make extensive use of UC Berkeley's site subscriptions to digital libraries.

• How do you measure the relevance of cited articles? How do you measure the importance of these articles? And how do you balance these two to decide which to add.
  • Sources backing up a specific fact in the article always needed to be added, regardless of how otherwise relevant they are. Relevance and accessibility are however factors in adding further works.

• How do you address published articles which contain conflicting information?
  • These are dealt with by describing both views, attributed to their respective sources, in proportion to their weight (see WP:UNDUE).

• What is the biggest obstacle for finding good published articles as sources to include?
  • Many editors don't have access to digital libraries, and this is a really big obstacle as only a relatively small subset of papers are distributed publicly online.

• Do you believe that a system which suggested scientific publications relevant to a Wikipedia article would be useful for editors? For readers?
  • Sure. Especially one that could intelligently suggest relevant sources for expanding or citing existing articles.

• When in the editing process could you envision utilizing such a system?
  • I envision it being most useful as an impetus for editing - suggested sources allow new material or references to be added to an existing article based on them.

• What types of published articles would you like to see in such a system? What types of articles would you not like to see?
  • Relevant reliable sources.

• Where on the page would it be most helpful to have such a system on the page? Top? Bottom? Sidebar? Anywhere else?
  • Posting them on the talk page seems better to me, because all editors whether they have the extension or not could view and discuss the sources.