User:StellaMcQ/Wikipedia for Freshwater Scientists

Wikipedia for Freshwater Scientists

This speaking notes were for a talk presented at the Joint Conference for the New Zealand Freshwater Sciences Society and Australian Society for Limnology, 23–26 November 2015.

By Stella McQueen (User:StellaMcQ) (presenter) and Mike Dickison (User:Giantflightlessbirds).

This is Wikipedia.

You all know it. You have all used it.

Your lecturers have told you not to use it. You have told your students not to use it.

But you all use it anyway, because it's useful.

Wikipedia is so useful that it is the first result for most Google searches these days. It is so useful that over 375 million people around the world use it every month.

New Zealand Freshwater Wikipedia Pages

But the New Zealand freshwater fish pages are not useful. Compare the very brief page about the native grayling with the detailed and much more thorough and useful page on the Arctic grayling.

The freshwater invertebrates are even worse. Amazingly, this family of Chilean and Australasian caddisflies actually has a page, but it is not very useful, and none of the genera or species have pages.

Overview pages about current issues and methods in New Zealand freshwater science are a gaping void. There is nothing about the NIWA Freshwater Fish Database. Bob McDowall’s page is pitifully short, boring, and few of the fish pages link to it, while apparently Mike Joy is an American sports announcer.

We want the public to be aware of the issues concerning our waterways and of the fantastic species we are trying to look after. But currently they won't find that on Wikipedia. DOC, NIWA and others have created some useful sites. But when were these pages last updated? How much new knowledge will never make it onto those sites because of space limits, or the one author was uninterested or unaware? And how long will those sites be found at that URL?

The power of Wikipedia is that it will outlast pretty much every business and institution in this room.

How We Can Change This

Now I am going to show you the most powerful part of Wikipedia.

There: the edit button.

It was actually there all along.

Wikipedia only exist through people just like you making edits. Yes, vandalism happens. Yes, incorrect things are written. But more importantly, thousands of people just like you are adding to it and correcting and expanding and improving.

Not only can you edit, but you can create an account so you can keep track of your edits more easily. You can even see all of the edits and versions of this page back to the dawn of time, and you can talk about the page with other editors.

The power of Wikipedia is that the day that Manna Warburton's wonderful thesis on torrentfish is finished, he can log on to Wikipedia, add some of his findings, and immediately cite his thesis. Research mentioned on a Wikipedia page will reach a far wider audience than any open source journal article. He will then tidy up other parts of the page since he knows more about torrent fish than everyone in this building, and it is really hard to stop editing WIkipedia once you have started.

But you don't need to be an expert. Say you were a student just starting out and you somehow got saddled with this fish you have barely heard of. Editing the Wikipedia page is a powerful learning tool. As you read and learn you can add bits to the Wikipedia page. You don't have to hunt down a citation because it is right in front of you. Later, when you are writing your literature review, you have that Wikipedia page right there with all of the information and your references. You also learned to write for a general audience along the way, which is a seriously useful skill.

Wikipedia single pages can be accessed by huge numbers of people each day. This graph shows the number of times the whitebait page was accessed in the last 90 days, averaging around 130 visits per day. For the scientist that needs to fulfill the public outreach part of their job description, bringing up the Wikipedia pages on topics in their field would reach a wider audience than a speaking tour by Mike Joy, without even leaving their desk.

There are other ways people can help out, especially large institutions. Take this page on a tiny, see-through, blind cave snail from Nelson. It is a small page but would be infinitely better if there was a photo. Most of the information for this page came from this NIWA page which has a neat image showing various species, but is tiny and copyrighted. There is a fantastic photo on the Te Papa site, but the copyright license, although Creative Commons, is too restrictive for Wikipedia use.

But of course there are limitations. You can’t use it for shameless self-promotion. You should cite your own work sparingly. Your lovingly crafted vanity page about yourself, your supervisor or your employer will be justifiably deleted. You must write without bias.

Let's Make a Difference

We can't just talk to other scientists. We want the public to know the terrible state of our rivers. Let's get the New Zealand freshwater Wikipedia pages up to a high standard. That way, when a member of the public wants to know more, the information is not only accessible, detailed and interesting, but it gets updated as every new paper and thesis comes out.

When people search for information on freshwater species and issues they will land on a Wikipedia page.

Let's make sure it wasn't an empty stub page. Let's give them something to read.

— Stella McQueen

If you have questions or want to chat more with me about Wikipedia for scientists, leave a message on the Talk page for these speaker notes – it's the Talk tab at the top. You sign your name by typing four of these squiggles: ~