“WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers from throughout North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The 2019 conference will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8-11. Join Wikipedia, -media, -data, and -cite enthusiasts for a long weekend of collaboration and discovery….”
Category Archives: oa.wikis
WikiJournal – Meta
“A site where authors can write their works directly online. The works then undergo independent scholarly peer review before being officially published in the journal.
Currently hosted in Wikiversity: WikiJournal User Group, with the main journals being WikiJournal of Medicine and WikiJournal of Science (Humanities journal starting up).
It provides a way of bridging the Wikipedia-Academia gap by enabling academics, scholars and professionals to contribute expert knowledge to the Wikimedia movement in the familiar academic publishing format that directly rewards scholars with cite-able publications….”
Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab)
“Public Lab was founded in the wake of the 2010 BP oil disaster. During the spill, there was an information blackout for residents of the coastal region, as well as the rest of the world. No one was accurately tracking what was happening on the ground. In response a group of concerned residents, environmental advocates, designers, and social scientists lofted “community satellites,” made from balloons, kites and digital cameras, over the spill to collect real time data about its impact. Local citizens collected the images, and through a newly created open source platform, contributors stitch over 100,000 aerial images into maps of the coastline before, during, and after the oil spread. These high-resolution maps were featured by BBC and New York Times, among others, allowing residents to speak their truth about what was going on in the Gulf Coast.
The success of the grassroots mapping effort galvanized the group to found Public Lab as a new research and social space for the development of low-cost tools for community-based environmental monitoring and assessment….”
OpenResearch
“This semantic wiki at OpenResearch aims at making the world of science more visible and accessible. Information about scientific events, research projects, publishers, journals etc. is scattered around on the Web. For researchers (especially young ones without decades of experience) it is often difficult to find the relevant venues, people or tools. Also research is increasingly dynamic and multi-disciplinary, so the boundaries between communities blur and new research directions emerge. With this semantic Wiki, we aim to make information about scientific events, research groups, tools, journals etc. more accessible. OpenResearch is not restricted to any field of science….”
Commons In A Box
“Commons In A Box (CBOX) is a free software project aimed at turning the infrastructure that successfully powers the CUNY Academic Commons into a free, distributable, easy-to-install package. Commons In A Box is a project of the City University of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY and is made possible by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
CBOX takes the complexity out of creating a Commons site, helping organizations create a space where their members can discuss issues, collaborate on projects, and share their work. CBOX also provides:
- Out-of-the-box functionality with an intuitive set-up that guides site administrators through each step of installation.
- A powerful, responsive, highly customizable theme developed for community engagement, based on PressCrew’s Infinity Theming Engine.
- Responsive design for easy viewing on many devices, including tablets and smartphones.
- Collaborative document creation and file sharing.
- Reply-By-Email functionality for quick, on-the-go communication.
- Compatibility with many other WordPress and BuddyPress themes and plug-ins.
- Expansive wiki options….”
What can fact-checkers learn from Wikipedia? We asked the boss of its nonprofit owner – Poynter
“Several studies have shown that Wikipedia is as reliable if not more reliable than more traditional encyclopedias. A 2012 study commissioned by Oxford University and the Wikimedia Foundation, for example, showed that when compared with other encyclopedic entries, Wikipedia articles scored higher overall with respect to accuracy, references and overall judgment when compared with articles from more traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia articles were also generally seen as being more up-to-date, better-referenced and at least as comprehensive and neutral. This study followed a similar 2005 study from Nature that found Wikipedia articles on science as reliable as their counterparts from Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Amplifying the impact of open access: Wikipedia and the diffusion of science – Teplitskiy – 2016 – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library
Abstract: With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific information, it is important to understand whether Wikipedia draws upon the research that scientists value most. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal’s academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the probability of it being referenced on Wikipedia. Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals. These findings provide evidence is that a major consequence of open access policies is to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad audience.
What do you call a homepage? Incorporating indigenous knowledge into Wikipedia – Wikimedia Blog
“First Nation in Canada may soon have a Wikipedia to call their own.
The Atikamekw Nehirowisiw Nation, located in central Quebec, is one of the few aboriginal peoples in Canada where virtually the entire population still speaks the language, making it among the most vibrant among the First Nations.
An ongoing project, the first of its kind in Canada, is working with the Atikamekw community to develop Wikipedia content in their own language. The initiative’s goal is to one day have the Atikamekw Wikipedia, currently in the Wikimedia incubator join one of the hundreds of extant Wikipedias.
‘It is a way to pass on ancestral knowledge using computers and it allows to preserve traditional practices,” project member Nehirowisiw says. ‘It is an educational tool for all.'”
If Voltaire had used Wikipedia… | Voltaire Foundation
“Sharing open knowledge about Voltaire’s histories
To raise awareness of Voltaire as a historian, we used three tools:
- Histropedia: a free tool for creating engaging, interactive visualisations
- Wikidata: a free database and sister site of Wikipedia that drives Histropedia and other visualisations
- Wikipedia: the free multilingual encyclopedia.
As well as holding data about people, publications, and events, Wikidata acts as a cross-reference between the different language versions of Wikipedia, showing which concepts are represented in which languages. By querying Wikidata, we could count how many language versions of Wikipedia had an article on each work by Voltaire. This showed, as expected, a large imbalance: forty languages for Candide versus three for the Essai sur les mœurs, for example. The current number of articles for each work is shown by the size of the bubbles below.”
Part 2: How big was OA Week this year? How comprehensive is the OAD? The Ope…
“The Open Access Directory (+OAD, @oad) is an #openaccess encyclopedia of open access. Among other things, it tracks OA-related conferences and workshops. For October 2016, it captured 411 events, reflecting the surge of global activity surrounding this year’s OA Week.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2016#October …”
Should the Open Access Directory update or retire the #openaccess speakers bu…
“Years ago the Open Access Directory (+OAD) launched a list of people willing to speak about OA at conferences, organized by country.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_speakers_bureau
The idea was to help conference organizers identify potential speakers, especially by country or region, and to consider people they night not have thought about.
It was a good idea, and in the early days it grew to a decent size. But it has barely been revised in years, and today represents only a small fraction of the many good people qualified to speak about OA at conferences.
So the Open Access Directory faced a question. Should we try to expand the list, or retire it?
We’ve decided to try to expand it. If we succeed, it will be useful again. If we don’t succeed, we can always retire it later. We’d rather try first than not try at all.
If you’re not listed and want to be, please add yourself. If you’re already listed but want to update your affiliation or contact info, please do so. And please spread the word to colleagues who ought to be listed….”
Should the Open Access Directory update or retire the #openaccess speakers bu…
“Years ago the Open Access Directory (+OAD) launched a list of people willing to speak about OA at conferences, organized by country.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_speakers_bureau
The idea was to help conference organizers identify potential speakers, especially by country or region, and to consider people they night not have thought about.
It was a good idea, and in the early days it grew to a decent size. But it has barely been revised in years, and today represents only a small fraction of the many good people qualified to speak about OA at conferences.
So the Open Access Directory faced a question. Should we try to expand the list, or retire it?
We’ve decided to try to expand it. If we succeed, it will be useful again. If we don’t succeed, we can always retire it later. We’d rather try first than not try at all.
If you’re not listed and want to be, please add yourself. If you’re already listed but want to update your affiliation or contact info, please do so. And please spread the word to colleagues who ought to be listed….”
Welcome to Open Library (Open Library)
“One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty but achievable goal.
To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.
To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.
Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget–it’s all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone! …”
Open Access Directory launches a list of research wikis
Announcement that the Open Access Directory has launched a list of wikis devoted to research fields or research topics.
Thanks to Kelly Fitzpatrick for updating the social-media list at the OAD
“Kelly Fitzpatrick [updated] the social-media list at the Open Access Directory. In particular, she updated the lists of OA-related Twitter feeds and OA-related Google+ pages and communities.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Social_media_sites_about_OA
…”