User talk:Proteins/ASCB workshop archive

Hi!

The project looks great. Let me gather my thoughts and post something in a few weeks? Awadewit (talk) 15:29, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Sure thing, and thanks for your help. We're not in a hurry, since the workshop is in December, but I'd like to get most of it organized before the semester starts; I have a fair amount of teaching. The ASCB will also send out a newsletter describing and advertising the workshop in September, so that's another deadline. Meanwhile, I'm going to try my hand at writing templates and creating a streamlined tutorial for scientists. Proteins (talk) 20:39, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

I'll have some time over the next few weeks. A first thought is that we need a template to classify all the people in the class to a user category, this will let our on-line mentors match up with them. Otherwise if we try to have lots of new accounts signing up on a single page simultaneously they'll spend the first 30 min having edit conflicts. Tim Vickers (talk) 21:35, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

workshop!

Looks awesome. Of course I'd love to help out in person. We have a big meetup group in SF; I bet we can get a bunch of people involved. More thoughts soon! And I'm glad you had a safe journey back... great to meet you as well. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 22:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much, Phoebe! It would be great if we had a good Wikipedian turnout to help the scientists and merge the two communities. I'll post more details as we get them. Proteins (talk) 21:29, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

You might contact m:User:Frank_Schulenburg as well -- he's moving to SF shortly and has done this sort of thing before. cheers, -- phoebe / (talk to me) 05:01, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, Phoebe! I wrote to you and Frank both. Proteins (talk) 00:06, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Tutorial

I've borrowed the workshop to introduce User talk:Arlojmiller to Wikipedia. Tim Vickers (talk) 04:34, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

That means a lot coming from such a prominent Wikipedian. The tutorial still needs to be finished, though; I've been busy with grant stuff. As I wrote in my e-mail, you should feel free to add anything or fix my mistakes. BTW, that was a gracious gesture from David, wasn't it? Bodes well for the workshop. Proteins (talk) 23:04, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Prominence is not something I'd welcome! As my modified version of that Chinese curse puts it, "May you come to the attention of people in authority and receive the recognition you deserve." Tim Vickers (talk) 00:17, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Ouch! a worthy curse indeed. Fortunately, people of all ranks rarely receive the recognition they deserve. I'll try to shelter your obscurities while clarifying your meanings, and I hope you'll do likewise for me, Proteins (talk) 00:31, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

AP bio students meet cell biologists?

JimmyButler, who I worked with on Introduction to evolution, contacted me about the AP Biology project he has going on Wikipedia. And I thought "wouldn't it be cool for these advanced biology students to meet real scientists?" What do you think about having some sort of connection between this project and cell biology workshop? Awadewit (talk) 14:49, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

workshop! and stuff

Hi there! Thanks for the note.

re: the workshop -- unfortunately I can't make it to the next SF meetup. But we have a mailing list -- if you send me an email with information on the workshop, what you're looking for in volunteers, who to contact, etc., I'd be glad to pass it along. (And I'm still happy to help myself, of course!)

re: the book -- thanks for your kind words. Leaving out definition lists was basically an oversight :P An appendix of shortcuts is a good idea -- we might create it online then move it into print if there's another edition. And scripts... I don't know very much about scripts! You'll have to tutor me :) I've not used them myself much.

Thanks again. Can I help with the workshop planning at all? Do you have a schedule?

best, phoebe / (talk to me) 21:57, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and re: shortcuts, of course I'll take a look, and ask Charles as well. You might also get a list of them from the excellent "editor's index", which was mostly put together by John Broughton, author of the other wikipedia book :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 22:00, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi Phoebe, it's great to hear from you! I appreciate your help with the conference. Here are the details:

The workshop is scheduled to take place from 12:30-2;30pm on December 16th at the Moscone Center, which you might know is just south of Market St. in San Francisco, at 747 Howard Street. The organizers anticipate roughly 60 scientists, who will come with laptops, references, images and a cell-biology topic on which they'd like to write an article. Our mission is to help them do that within two hours: difficult, much?

Tim and I sketched an introduction for the scientists here, which I believe Awadewit looked over. We also made a welcome page for them as well. Here's the ASCB advertisement, which is abstracted on the conference's main page.

Tim Vickers had the idea of organizing online Wikipedians to help the scientists with copyediting and other wiki-specific issues, but I thought it would be also good to bring the two communities (scientists and Wikipedians) together, face-to-face, and let them work together and form better opinions of one another. The organizers agreed enthusiastically, and basically said the more the merrier, up to about 20 volunteers.

There's a slight difficulty in getting the Wikipedians into the conference, since there's some security as is usual at scientific conferences. So the organizers very kindly offered to take all the Wikipedian volunteers out to lunch beforehand and to escort them personally through security to the workshop. That's why it's important that we all meet up together at 11am at the Moscone Center.

Scripts don't seem to be used much until they become gadgets in the Preferences menu. Basically, scripts and gadgets allow you to alter your personal version of a Wikipedia page in almost any way you like, and also to do analyses of pages. I first began using them for our research, to quantify properties of randomly sampled Wikipedia articles quickly. Now that I have a little time (teaching and grant-writing are at a temporary lull), I've started to write them, mostly for accessibility but also for my personal fun. Graham87 has been very helpful and friendly in testing them and suggesting ways to improve them. You can try them yourself by copying whatever you like from my monobook page to yours. After hitting Ctrl-F5 to refresh your cache, you should see new tabs along the top edge and also new listings in the portlet boxes in the left-hand columns.

Thanks for the tip about John Broughton's book, which I've been meaning to look at. Was he at Wikimania 2008? I'm sorry that I don't remember meeting him there. Proteins (talk) 22:37, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Hey! I sent a note about this to the WM-SF list and told folks to contact you directly. And no, John wasn't at Wikimania, unless he was there incognito... -- phoebe / (talk to me) 20:26, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Hey Phoebe, thanks for passing the word! I've been in contact with Cary, who's going to try to recruit good Wikipedians. The first ASCB scientist has already become a Wikipedian editing under his own name, User:Lionel_Jaffe. He'd like to write about calcium waves, which he discovered; we've been conversing a bit by e-mail. I'm going to try to roll out the red carpet for him, but if you could add him to your watchlist and help him as needed, that'd be great.

I'm gradually adding acronyms from WP:SHORTCUTS, AfD and policy pages for that newbie-helping script. So far, the dictionary has about 1300 acronyms, but I'm still not getting all the ones in common use. I had no idea that there were so many acronyms, but it's a good way to learn Wikipedia's policies chapter and verse. Your book was helpful in identifying the most important acronyms, although I still have about 60 left to add to the dictionary.

Building the dictionary is the main work; it's much easier to change how the script describes what the acronym means. Right now, the script adds the explanation in parentheses on the same line as the acronym. But the script could do it more subtly, for example, by a hovering tooltip or a popup window. Do you have any suggestions for how to convey the info to the newbies? Proteins (talk) 21:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion for workshop

Have you suggested to participants that they install WikEd? I find that it makes editing much easier. It color codes wikicode. Awadewit (talk) 22:12, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

I've tried wikEd already, but my own experience has been mixed. It's useful for pattern replacement, but I find it slow and quirky, and I'm worried that beginners might find it confusing, too much all at once. On the other hand, its color coding might help in explaining different features of the wiki markup later in the workshop. It's something we still need to think through.

I've begun to experiment with writing my own script/tools for making a first article, along the lines of WP:WIZ, and for adding tables, references, etc. at typical points in an article, but they're not simple scripts. That's another reason for starting with easier scripts, especially since I've just learned the JavaScript language. Proteins (talk) 22:58, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

The major problem with WikEd, IMO, is that it doesn't work in IE. All of the people I've encouraged to try it have liked it - they think it does make editing easier. Anyway, just a thought - we could offer it as an option.

An article-making wizard? OMG. I can think of nothing more horrible. :) That must be the humanities person coming out in me. Every article I write is organized slightly differently and needs slightly different kinds of sections, illustrations, and links. I think wizards might promote cookie-cutter articles (the horror! the horror!). I am always encouraging people to think about how best to present the specific material they have. For example, List of works by Mary Shelley is different from List of works by Joseph Priestley. They are both "lists of works", but the kinds of information we need to convey to the reader are quite different. Compare again to the List of scientific publications of Albert Einstein! I'm not sure how much is "typical" about an article. How about you pull me a little towards automation and I pull you a little away? Awadewit (talk) 15:55, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I wasn't advocating WP:WIZ, and I haven't made up my mind about the usefulness of more WYSIWYG-style editing when we hold the ASCB workshop in five weeks. Professors are reportedly smart, and perhaps we can expect them to pick up normal editing quickly.

I also see the danger of cookie-cutter solutions; that's not my goal with scripts. Rather, I'd like to give editors and readers more power to do what they want and to do it more quickly; and at the same time, make it easier for newbies to learn, so that there's less "barrier to entry" and more encouragement to contribute. For example, I'd like to allow editors to move one section ahead of another just by dragging it and dropping it in the Table of Contents, rather than having to cut and paste whole sections. I'd also like to allow readers to "clone and detach" images and let them resize them for legibility and to move them around on the page to where they need them. That sort of thing.

I'd also like to make a set of WYSIWYG editors similar to HotCat for adding other types of content, such as images, tables, and references. Not everyone is going to be patient enough to learn Wikipedia's syntax, or even to use existing programs/servers such as Zotero or Diberri's tool. Since creating new elements and moving them around within the article are independent tasks, it might be OK to use a cookie-cutter approach for creation, if it were easy to move the element afterwards. For example, the reference-creator might always add the reference at the end of a sentence or a clause; but that limitation might not be so bad if it were easy to move the reference elsewhere in the sentence.

I'm also interested in new types of content that would enhance Wikipedia. For example, I'd like to make a series of little "calculators" for making scientific content (such as chemical reactions and mathematical equations) interactive, although I recognize that that might be better placed in Wikiversity than here. (You can try out a prototype script, User:Proteins/chemicalreactions.js, at this sandbox; I'd appreciate suggestions before I introduce it at the Chemistry WikiProject.) I'd like to allow authors to write study questions that readers could invoke to test their knowledge section-by-section. Except for the HotCat-inspired scripts, none of these scripts seems very hard to write.

I've written a few more scripts over the past weeks, which are listed on my user page. You might especially enjoy the one that carries you to a random link on a page. There's also the redlink analyzer and the acronym expander. I'm thinking of writing a script to help organize the information on FAC's, which I've begun discussing with Graham at WT:ACCESS. Given how many FA's you've written and reviewed, your suggestions would be very welcome for that script. Proteins (talk) 16:43, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

ASCB

I'll be flying out on the 12th and coming back on the 18th. Yes, I agree that we need a brief introduction to orientate people, and then get everybody started. What about you giving a few slides about "What Wikipedia is and why its important" and then I could talk briefly about "The characteristics of a good wikipedia article"? Yes, I'm planning some gentle arm-twisting to garner "volunteers"!

I'll try to look over those scripts at the weekend, but I'm wary of overloading the people in the seminar with useful information - if we describe the very minimum and get them over the initial "Aargh what IS all this?" hump we'll be doing well. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:56, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I replied about the script and the article template on your talk page. Your suggestion of "tag-team PowerPoint" for the workshop sounds great. Before we get to article writing, I think we'll need to introduce them to the basic page elements, such as the various tabs ("discussion", "history", "edit this page", etc.). It won't be intuitively obvious to some professors, I believe. Proteins (talk) 22:18, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Got any money for a poor humanities student? :) Awadewit (talk) 22:35, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Awadewit, I'm not sure if you're referring to the Core Contest? I've received messages from a few people willing to help sponsor it, although surprisingly little response so far from my fellow professors, with the exception of Boris Tsirelson, a excellent mathematician at Tel Aviv University. I plan another round of requests next week to different WikiProjects where I suspect professors might be lurking. It's probably pointless to ask twice at the same WikiProject. Proteins (talk) 22:46, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering if anyone had any spare money so I could fly out to the ACSB. :) My little salary doesn't cover trips like that and travel grants in my department don't fund science conferences. What a shock. Awadewit (talk) 22:53, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Too bad you're not studying the history of science. I'm hoping this will be a historic workshop. ;) Proteins (talk) 23:14, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that sounds like an excellent plan. I've also registered on the name-creation server at Meta, so that we can work around any cap on the number of accounts created at a single IP over a short period. Tim Vickers (talk) 03:43, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for the name-creation thing, I never would've thought of that. I'll start drafting a few PowerPoint slides on my section, and send them to you in a few days.

Your caution about not translating ENG->US in references (and quotations perhaps?) is excellent. Luckily, that's easily avoided by a script. The main problem is to come up with a rule, or set of rules, for doing the translation. Any suggestions? Personally, I haven't a real clue. I should probably look online, but surely someone has thought it through already? Here's hoping at least, Proteins (talk) 03:52, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

There is this, which is a peer-review script that does some of the things you mentioned. Tim Vickers (talk) 04:52, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

English teacher knee jerk reaction

Any aversion to me copyediting User:Proteins/Practical Wikipedia tutorial? I was reading it today so that I could offer some suggestions and I saw some typos and stuff. :) Awadewit (talk) 01:08, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Not at all, please do. I'm afraid you'll find more errors there than just typos; feel free to fix those as well. I'm going to draft my slides over the next few days; perhaps I'll post them for everyone to look at and offer suggestions. Proteins (talk) 01:13, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I think a Wikipedia article has three parts: lead, body, and references. Your thoughts? (I so wanted to change that part of the tutorial!) Awadewit (talk) 18:32, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

It's been too long since I wrote it for me to remember what I said there. I'm meeting with a student shortly, so I've no time now to re-read it. as I understand WP articles now, they have three parts as you say, except that I would replace your "references" with "closing sections", such as the See also, Footnotes, Bibliography, Further reading and External links" section. Feel free to change the tutorial as you wish. Proteins (talk) 20:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

There are usually between 5 and 15 external links, although fewer and more numerous sections are sometimes seen. - If you are specifically aiming to produce featured articles, I would focus on quality external links. FAC reviewers tend to complain about "link farms" and excessive numbers of links. Awadewit (talk) 18:47, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point, although I doubt that the scientists will engage in linkspam. I don't imagine that they'd be motivated. Proteins (talk) 20:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Only Featured Articles may appear on the Main Page of Wikipedia - This is not true - DYK articles, those linked from "In the News", and those linked from "On this Day" don't have to be featured. Featured articles just get prime real estate on the main page and a blurb. :) Awadewit (talk) 20:16, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

True, although the TFA lies "above the fold", to borrow an old newspaper term, and gets far more attention, I believe. I believe a TFA would be far more meaningful to the scientists than a DYK or "On this date". Proteins (talk) 20:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

"Tips for collaborative writing" - let me know if you would like me to draft some bullet points here. Awadewit (talk) 20:19, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that'd be great. I'm busy working on my slides. Proteins (talk) 20:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I replied

... at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Featured_articles/FA-Team#Help_with_a_Wikipedia_workshop_for_cell_biologists. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:46, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

images from HWW

yes of course; sent you an email. :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 21:40, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

re: videos -- I don't off the top of my head, though I have the nagging feeling that this has come up before and there are some floating around out there. This seems like a good question for the village pump/mailing lists -- shall I ask? Also, I know Ben was interested in creating videos once upon a time. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 00:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

videos -- I actually had a difficult time getting the tutorial to load :( I'm sorry -- video is often flaky on my system. But that might be a problem for the participants, too, unless you played it for them directly off your machine.

On another note, someone pointed out on the list that the "wikied" editor is available for a sortof-word processor like environment. You can enable it under "preferences" under "gadgets". Might be easier for a novice editor? Or not -- it's sort of complicated. Anyway, a thought.

In my recent experience teaching students, some things that come up are:

• explaining the tabs across the top of the page -- many people may have not even noticed them before;
• for those unfamiliar with html, what does "wiki markup" do?;
• how do you put in a reference -- this is complicated to explain and it's something we especially hope the scientists do :)

hope this helps, -- phoebe / (talk to me) 05:19, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

slides -- of course you can email them to me. Sorry I didn't see your note earlier. best, -- phoebe / (talk to me) 16:34, 9 December 2008 (UTC)