Wikipedia:WikiProject CRUK/September & October Report

Newly uploaded: The research staff of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (one of CRUK's pre-merger organizations) in 1909

Another new file, the London Research Institute, where there was a training session in the period.

Cancer Research UK ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ project Wellcome People Award no. WT103116AIA

Third bimonthly update – for September and October 2014

Summary

• Embedding new working practices to continue after the grant period is developing, especially with statistics department and around releasing media – and possibly web copy - on open licenses
• Article improvement is continuing, with most contributions now likely to come from inside CRUK for the rest of the project
• Approximately 1.8 million page views in each of September and October for CRUK images uploaded on open licenses to Wikimedia Commons – a tremendous figure.

Introduction

CRUK’s Wellcome-funded Wikipedian in Residence, John Byrne, started on 1st May 2014, on a 4-day a week contract due to run until mid-December. The overall aim of the project is to forge links and dialogue between CRUK, Wikipedia, Wikimedia UK and the wider cancer research community, and so begin to improve the cancer-related content on Wikipedia.

This report covers September and October 2014.

The project focuses on four areas:

• 1. Research: a short project to understand a) how people use Wikipedia when searching for cancer information online, and b) how they rate the information on Wikipedia before and after article improvements.
• 2. Content: forging links between CRUK experts, clinicians and Wikipedians, to improve Wikipedia content. We will initially focus on improving four cancer type articles – Pancreatic cancer, Oesophageal cancer, Lung cancer, and Brain tumour – since these are the four cancers of ‘unmet need’ identified in the CRUK research strategy.
• 3. Creative Commons: investigating the possibility of releasing CRUK content to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
• 4. Training: To increase awareness of how Wikipedia works, and how to edit and review articles, across CRUK staff, researchers and more widely.

With a further objective to disseminate lessons learnt during the project.

Progress so far:

Objective 1 – Research

Progress against this objective has been slower than anticipated, for a variety of reasons, including the relative novelty of this in both Henry and John’s skillsets.

However, planning has been progressing and the research protocols and practical arrangements for both pieces are near-final. The fieldwork is anticipated to begin in late-November.

Objective 2 - Content

A keyhole hysterectomy, one possible surgery to treat endometrial cancer. One of a number of CRUK images in the new Featured article

Endometrial cancer was awarded WP:Featured Article status in October, after two reviews by CRUK staff, and a few edits. Although not one of the original target articles for the project, and with the real heavy lifting done by User:Keilana, a volunteer editor in the US, this was a useful test of how CRUK assistance to the Wikipedia medical editing community could work after the Wikipedian in Residence has departed. The results were encouraging, with the reviewer’s points welcomed and acted upon, to the benefit of the article.

The lining-up of external expert reviewers has continued, and two of the target articles should be sent to them shortly. However, perhaps partly because of the diversion of the regular medical editing community to the articles on Ebola virus disease, their contributions to the target articles other than Lung cancer has been limited. The availability of CRUK assistance seems to have acted as a stimulus to editing in that area only in a rather sporadic way.

Instead CRUK staff and contacts, especially John Byrne, the Wikipedian in Residence, have had to do most of the work on the target articles that most need it. This is likely to remain the case for the remaining part of the project, as both the “outside” volunteers who did the work on Lung cancer and Endometrial cancer have completed their intended work.

An editing event, mainly for those already trained among CRUK staff, will be held in November to progress Brain tumor, which is the least developed and in some ways the most tricky of the articles, as there are so many different types, with limited amounts in common.

Following training for the Statistics team, basic information on UK figures has been added to the articles for the 35 cancers they follow, and some other edits made. When new official statistics are released, it is intended the Wikipedia articles will be updated with these.

By various hands, the project has generated improvements to a considerable number of articles other than the planned target ones.

At the meeting of medical Wikipedians at CRUK before the Wikimania 2014 conference, a discussion process was launched to improve some of the headings recommended in the “MEDMOS” or Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles, which the writers of CRUK patient pages pointed out were especially poor for wide accessibility.

As planned, this discussion was continued online to obtain wider community consensus, at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Medicine-related_articles#A_change_to_some_of_our_headings. Decisions have now been made to recommend “Mechanism” instead of “Pathophysiology”, and “Outcomes” instead of “Prognosis”. As several thousand articles will need to be changed to implement this, a “bot” programme will be needed to do this. Other changes remain open for discussion.

Objective 3 – Wikimedia Commons

Internal radiotherapy for breast cancer, one of 17 CRUK images used in that article, though most show cancer stages.

Further small groups of images were released to Category:Images from Cancer Research UK, including photos of CRUK buildings and historic researchers. After another meeting of the Governance Panel for this, a group of short patient information animations are now approved for release, and likely to be as useful as the anatomical diagrams have proved, as they are very simple and culturally neutral, unlike equivalents in film. We now have Wikimedia Labs reports (with the baglama 2 tool) showing the monthly views from August to October of the articles containing the CRUK images uploaded at the end of July. This showed that the 390 diagrams released from CancerHelp had total monthly page views of 1,410,218 in September, and 1,430,348 in October. They received 1.1 million page views in August, traditionally the month with the lowest traffic of the year, and the month during which most placings in articles were done. These figures exclude mobile/tablet etc views, which Wikipedia can’t accurately match to individual pages, and which represent about 30% of traffic on the English Wikipedia. So it is not unreasonable to say that the true pageview figure might be in the region of 1.8 million per month.

Most of the top-viewed articles were those on cancer type pages, and had several CRUK images, especially series of the diagrams showing the cancer stages. The largest number in a single article is 17 in Breast cancer (but those pageviews are only counted once).

There remains potential for growth in the figures for the initial large release of diagrams, as the processes of categorizing these and placing them in articles continues. Although none of those images have yet had had their captions translated, as the file format allows, a small number are already used in articles in other language Wikipedias.

As at November 6, CRUK images were used 198 times in the English Wikipedia, and 8 times in 6 other language versions. Altogether 181 (43%) of the now 419 images released were being used, an exceptionally high figure after such a short time (or after any period for a large donation). In addition the images have started being re-used elsewhere.

Other images will be uploaded during the project, but more importantly embedding of the release of media on open licenses is progressing very well, with a new model release form for non-paid models adopted. This incorporates a tick box to opt-in to allow release of images of them on open licenses. A decision as to whether to place CRUK’s online cancer information text copy under a Creative Commons BY-SA license is due to be made at a meeting on 18th November.

Objective 4 – Training

The two months saw four of the standard training workshops for new editors - two at CRUK headquarters at Angel, one at their London Research Institute (LRI) and one at the Cochrane Collaboration in Oxford. In addition there was a drop-in session at LRI, and a specialized training session on uploading and maintaining images on Wikimedia Commons.

All future planned training sessions are now arranged, and there will be one more at Angel, and sessions at the CRUK research institutes in Manchester, Glasgow, Oxford and Cambridge. Where timing permits, there will also be drop-in sessions at the institutes on the same day as the workshop. These work well around lunchtime when there is a suitable lounge-type setting with good footfall.

The LRI training included a successful short section where a staff member who used to edit Wikipedia talked about his work and experiences; he had made himself known at an earlier drop-in session there.

Dissemination

After the Wikimania 2014 convention in August this was a relatively quiet period. John Byrne and Henry Scowcroft have offered sessions at the “unconference” part of the SpotOn conference in November. John Byrne has taken an active part in internal discussions within the Wikimedia movement on the future direction of content management and improvement and the project has been frequently referred to by others in these. The top levels of the Wikimedia Foundation are very aware of the project.