Wikipedia:Academy/NIH 2009/Welcome

Members of the NIH, welcome to Wikipedia!

We hope that you'll enjoy your visit and decide to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's goal is to offer well-referenced, comprehensive, accurate articles that are intelligible to lay-people but also useful, at times, to the specialist. All content in Wikipedia — words as well as images and other media — is free, both in terms of cost and in terms of copyright.

Getting started on Wikipedia is fairly easy, but there are areas where some people have trouble. This page explains how to navigate through those areas.

How to find help
If you have a question or need help, a team of friendly, experienced Wikipedians has volunteered to assist you. Your coordinator has the list of their names, expertises and contact information. We've also arranged a software tool for you to contact them directly. If you'd like that tool, please change "Proteins" in the following box to your user name and click "Help please"; on the following page, click on "Save page" to finalize the installation. (You may need to reload the page after saving it.)

Afterwards, a "help me!" tab will be added to the top of every page you visit; clicking on that tab will connect you with a Wikipedian who has volunteered to help you.

This sign-up form will also give you several helpful software tools, which will be explained during the workshop.

Reasons to contribute
Wikipedia is a powerful tool for educating the general public, students, and other scientists. An article on a current topic (such as swine influenza) may have millions of online readers per day, while basic articles such as lung cancer, Down syndrome, or Alzheimer's disease are read by millions of people every year. Wikipedia articles are usually the top hit returned by search engines such as Google. This reach presents a unique opportunity for scientists to explain important research to those that fund their research, to generate enthusiasm for their field, to recruit students, and to inspire the next generation of scientists. Accurate Wikipedia articles also help people better inform themselves about diseases, preventative medicine, and public health.

Contributions to a Wikipedia article extend far beyond how often it is read online. Reporters use Wikipedia as background for their news stories. Teachers may use a well-developed Wikipedia article in their lessons, passing its information to students. Wikipedia exists in hundreds of languages, and contributions to the English Wikipedia may be translated and used for teaching in Spain, Cote d'Ivoire or Vietnam.

Some of Wikipedia's articles are among the best Internet resources available on their topic. They are accurate, comprehensive, well-illustrated, referenced to the scientific literature, and professionally written. They strike an excellent balance between being intelligible to the lay person and yet still detailed enough to remain helpful to students and scientists. Wikipedia articles also allow scientists to integrate disparate resources on a topic into a single coherent presentation with a consistent nomenclature. Unfortunately, the majority of articles are poorly written, poorly referenced, incomplete, and inaccurate. Although experts can distinguish between the two, it is not always possible for the lay person to do so. Protecting the public from scientific and medical misinformation is another reason to contribute.

Finally, contributing to Wikipedia is fun. Wikipedia volunteers include many witty, gracious and well-educated people, selflessly committed to developing high-quality articles. They may help you to improve your writing, especially its intelligibility for the general public, and they may show you different perspectives on your focus area.

Ways to contribute
Probably the best and most obvious way for you, as a scientist, to contribute to Wikipedia is to edit articles related to your field. There are many ways to do that, depending on your editing skills and the time you wish to invest. Click on "show" (far right) to read more.

A simple but powerful way to contribute is to review existing articles and offer suggestions for their improvement. Reviewers are especially needed for Featured Articles, Good Articles, and peer review, but editors can also provide constructive criticism of any Wikipedia article by leaving a message on the article's Talk page (just click the "discussion" tab, then the "new section" tab). You can also make corrections yourself, although large-scale changes should always be discussed first.

Another basic way to contribute is to add references to support the text of an article. Scientists are well-suited for this, knowing the scientific literature in their field. References are a little tricky to format, but the skill is learned quickly and this online tool will do all the work given the PMID code (or many other database codes).

A third way to contribute is to upload images, preferably to Wikimedia Commons. Scientists are again well-suited for this, having access to many unusual images, such as electron micrographs of exotic archaea. Uploading images is relatively easy to master, and doesn't take much time.

Scientists wishing to make a more substantial contribution can do so in several ways. First, many articles are incomplete. You can contribute by adding new sections (with references to the literature) to fill in those gaps. Second, many articles are poorly organized and lack coherence. You can contribute by rearranging sections into a logical order and writing good transitions between the sections. Third, the writing of many articles is poor, particularly in the lead (top) section, which often consists of but a sentence or two. Ironically, the lead section is the one most often read in an article.

Scientists are particularly suited to focusing on a single article and developing it into a Good Article or even a Featured Article. The latter may appear on the Main Page, which is viewed by more than five million people per day. Featured Articles undergo rigorous reviewing by the community, and typically have over a hundred references. Even an expert may spend many weeks bringing an article to that level and going through the review process.

The pinnacle of Wikipedia authoring is the Featured Topic, which is a collection of Good and Featured Articles on a specific topic. As a hypothetical example, a Featured Topic on polio could have Featured Articles on the history of polio, the life-cycle of the virus, vaccination and treatment methods, etc.

Besides articles and topics, another major way to contribute is to design and create media, such as animations and skillfully drawn educational diagrams of the kidney or of the gluconeogenesis pathway.

The preceding suggestions have focused on article contributions. However, you can contribute in other ways as well. Here are a few examples:


 * The Copyright Cleanup WikiProject addresses plagiarism.
 * At the Reliable Sources Noticeboard, editors discuss the suitability of specific references and citations.
 * At Articles for deletion (AfD), Wikipedians discuss whether nominated articles should be deleted because they are not important ("notable") enough.

This is only the tip of the iceberg! As you become an experienced Wikipedia editor, you'll discover many other dimensions to Wikipedia.

WikiProjects
The scientists and physicians contributing to Wikipedia often form small communities dedicated to improving the coverage of certain fields. These communities are known as WikiProjects and in some ways resemble a scientific society. WikiProjects also can also have sub-communities (task forces) working on more specialized topics. For example, the WikiProject for Molecular and Cellular Biology might have task forces dedicated to enzymology, signalling pathways, and structural biology.

WikiProjects are excellent venues to discuss Wikipedia's coverage of a topic, and to find collaborators. Five WikiProjects may be particularly helpful:

Sandbox
Let's break the ice by showing you how easy it is to contribute to Wikipedia. There are three steps.


 * 1) Click on the [edit] link at the far right, and you'll see these lines as they are stored in the computer, in "wiki-markup".
 * 2) Add your name (or anything else) below these lines in the edit box.
 * 3) Click on the button "Save page" just below the edit box, and your new text will be added to this section.  Congratulations, you're a Wikipedian!

Of course, there's much more to editing. You can add images, references, break the article into sections, make links to other articles, etc., etc. Those skills are covered in the workshop, and in the online materials above.