Wikipedia:WikiProject Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology/ASCB workshop 2008

Members of the ASCB, welcome to Wikipedia!

Here, we will help you get started in editing Wikipedia and preparing for the 2008 workshop on December 16, 2008. We'll try to answer your questions, introduce you to helpful Wikipedians, and offer you online tutorials in editing.

The webpage of the ASCB meeting may be found here.

Why contribute to Wikipedia?
Two motivations for improving Wikipedia are scientific outreach and education. According to this study, Wikipedia is usually the first place that undergraduate students go for information on a topic, which agrees with the experience of most professors. A survey of undergraduate biochemistry students at Michigan State University suggests that a majority prefer to use Wikipedia over their assigned textbook, even knowing it to be less trustworthy. Graduate students thinking of joining your lab may well begin their study of your research topic on Wikipedia; why not develop a Featured article to highlight your work and explain its significance?

Outside of academia, Wikipedia ranks between the 7th and 8th most visited site on the Internet, according to statistics provided by the Alexa Internet company. This high traffic carries over to science articles; this site reports how often a particular article is viewed. For example, this page reveals that the Wikipedia article on mitochondrion was viewed 51,607 times in February 2008; a simple extrapolation suggests that this article will be read over 600,000 times in 2008 alone. If your topic becomes a Featured article and appears on the main page of Wikipedia, it could read by as many as 50,000 people in a single day. These data suggest that Wikipedia is the de facto reference source from which non-scientists learn about scientific research. Scientists should use Wikipedia's advantages to communicate those ideas and studies to students and the general public, giving the "broader impact" often desired by funding agencies.

A guided tour of Wikipedia's articles
To see what we are aiming at with Wikipedia, read through some of our best articles, which are called Featured articles. Articles reach this rank only after being vetted in a long review process. This is sometimes carried out by Wikipedians associated with a WikiProject (a group of editors interested in a common area). An example is the WikiProject in Molecular and Cellular Biology. A sampling of Featured articles on biology topics is given below.

Featured articles resemble scientific mini-reviews written for a general audience. These illustrate the layout and scholarly level that all of Wikipedia's articles aim to achieve. The article begins with a 3–4 paragraph abstract called the lead, followed by the body of the article, which may be up to 50 kilobytes in length. The lead is written at as simple a level as possible so it can act as a stand-alone introduction. The body is typically written at a high school to junior undergraduate level. Featured articles typically have 3–4 scientific citations per paragraph of text; thus, a Featured article may have between 100 and 200 scientific references. This helps people check the article for accuracy and gives resources for further research. Featured articles are usually well-illustrated, with many having over 10 figures. Tables are not as commonplace on Wikipedia as they are in scientific papers, but they are sometimes included and can be made sortable.

In general, Featured articles end with 4–6 special sections: See also, Notes, References, Bibliography, Further reading, and External links.


 * The See also section consists of links to related Wikipedia articles that were not linked in the article itself.


 * The optional Notes section contains text that clarifies or expands on points made within the article.


 * The References section consists of formatted citations to the literature. Where possible, these citations contain a hyperlink to the full text of the article (for free-access journals).


 * The optional Bibliography section gives full bibliographic source data for sources that were cited using the Harvard method in the references section.


 * The Further reading section lists works that were not cited in the text of the article, but that would be a good place to start exploring the topic in more depth.


 * The final section is External links, which provides links to external (i.e., non-Wikipedia) websites and databases.

For illustration, here is a selection of the roughly 200 Featured articles on biological topics. Participants may wish to read through a few to get a feel for the structure and style of Wikipedia articles. A full list of Featured articles may be found here.


 * Biochemicals


 * DNA
 * Enzyme
 * Caffeine
 * Antioxidant
 * Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide


 * Cell processes


 * DNA repair
 * RNA interference
 * Metabolism
 * Oxidative phosphorylation


 * Cells and cell structures


 * Proteasome
 * Cell nucleus
 * Exosome complex
 * Chromatophore


 * Microbiology


 * Archaea
 * Bacteria
 * Rotavirus
 * Helicobacter pylori
 * Myxobolus cerebralis


 * Animals


 * Ant
 * Bird
 * Dinosaur
 * Domestic sheep
 * Chrysiridia rhipheus


 * Plants and fungi


 * Amanita phalloides
 * Banksia integrifolia
 * Gyromitra esculenta
 * Ailanthus altissima


 * Diseases


 * Tuberculosis
 * Cystic fibrosis
 * Poliomyelitis
 * Influenza
 * Lung cancer


 * Physiology


 * Immune system
 * Action potential


 * Evolution/Genetics


 * Evolution
 * Genetics
 * Sequence alignment
 * Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event


 * Biographies


 * Charles Darwin
 * Barbara McClintock
 * G. Ledyard Stebbins
 * Frank Macfarlane Burnet
 * Hippocrates


 * Introductory/survey articles


 * Introduction to evolution
 * Introduction to viruses
 * History of biology
 * History of evolutionary thought
 * Introduction to genetics

Getting started: Creating a user account
If you haven't done this already, you should create a user account. This will help in keeping track of your editing, and give you access to editing tools that are unavailable to non-users. To create a user account, click on the link in the upper right corner labeled Log in / create account. You will be asked for a username and password; the optional e-mail address allows you to recover your password in case you forget it. Wikipedia is scrupulous about anonymity; you will not get more spam by creating a user account.

Scholars are encouraged to create a user account under their real name, such as User:TimVickers, which lends authority to their contributions. However, this is not a requirement, and some professors may wish to preserve their anonymity. These topics are discussed in the following articles:


 * Why create an account?


 * Factors in choosing a username

Once you have logged in as a user, the Log in / create account at the top of the page should be replaced by six links: your chosen user name, my talk , my preferences , my watchlist , my contributions and log out. The first two links will be colored red initially, whereas the other four should be blue. The red color indicates that nothing has been written on your user page, or on your user talk page; when you add something to those pages, those links will turn blue.


 * Your user page is a place to describe yourself, your interests and your accomplishments. Example: User:TimVickers.


 * Your user talk page (my talk) is a place for other users to communicate with you, e.g., to plan a joint article. Example: User talk:TimVickers.


 * My preferences allows you to set various parameters for easier editing. Initially, it's best not to tinker with this.


 * My watchlist provides a method for monitoring changes to a specified set of pages. Users may "watch" a specific Wikipedia article by clicking on its "Watch" tab seen at the top edge of every article once you are logged in as a user.  Clicking on "my watchlist" lists the latest changes to those articles, and who made them.


 * My contributions lists all the changes ("edits") that you have ever made, in reverse chronological order.


 * Log out is self-explanatory. You do not need to be logged in to edit most of Wikipedia, although some pages restrict who can edit. If you edit while logged out, your edits will be credited to your IP address instead of your user-name.

Learning to edit Wikipedia
Wikipedia has resources for new editors to become familiar with it, which are gathered on its general help page. In particular, new editors may wish to follow Wikipedia's general tutorial.

A new tutorial is being developed for this workshop. To access this tutorial, go to your user page, click on the edit this page tab at the top, and add the following text:

After clicking on the Save page button below the editing box, the tutorial will be incorporated into your user page. Your user-name will be added automatically to the category of participants, so that we can pair you with a friendly Wikipedian who can answer your questions and resolve any difficulties as you begin editing Wikipedia. If you wish to remove the tutorial or your name from the category, you may edit the page again, remove the text, and click Save page again.

Your questions and comments
Please add your questions and comments here, by clicking on the "[ edit ]" link at the right, typing them in and clicking on the Save page button at the bottom. You can sign and date your comments by adding four tildes at the end of your message, " ~ "; these tildes will be expanded into your user-name and a time-stamp.

Help from experienced Wikipedians
Wikipedians will be available in person and online to help you during the ASCB workshop. However, if you'd like to get started earlier and would like some personalized help, we'll try to pair you with an experienced Wikipedian, to make your first experiences on Wikipedia more enjoyable and productive.