Grants:IdeaLab/Inviting Professors Emeriti to contribute to Wikipedia

Inviting Professors Emeriti to contribute to Wikipedia

In this project, I only would like to recruit volunteers to convince professors emeriti worldwide to freely contribute to Wikipedia as it can help disseminating their experience and their globally recognized scientific findings.

idea creator• Csisc

volunteer• Csisc

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Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Lack of the participation of specialized people to Wikipedia
Lack of precision and accuracy of most of the articles about scientific knowledge in Wikipedia

What is your solution?

For the problem you identified in the previous section, briefly describe your how you would like to address this problem. We recognize that there are many ways to solve a problem. We’d like to understand why you chose this particular solution, and why you think it is worth pursuing. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
Professors Emeriti are university professors who are aged more than 65 years and who are given a lifelong function as professors within their university thanks to their proficiency, to their experience and to their significant contributions to their scientific field of interest. These professors do not teach a lot, do not perform many researches and are only used to give advice to younger researchers and professors about what they do and assess them. Consequently, they have much spare time. As these scientists are in the end of their life, they would like to disseminate their experience, their knowledge, and their best findings so that it can continue to exist after their death. They begin to write books and participate to scientific societies to do that... So, they would not refuse to add the information they know to Wikipedia as it is the best used online open encyclopedia daily visited by millions of people and they can become excellent contributors to Wikipedia. As a member of Wikimedia TN User Group, I have assessed that and had excellent results as shown here.

Project goals

What are your goals for this project? Your goals should describe the top two or three benefits that will come out of your project. These should be benefits to the Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia communities. They should not be benefits to you individually. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

Ameliorating the scientific accuracy and coverage of Wikipedia
Ameliorating the rate of specialized scientists within Wikipedia communities

Who will you be doing outreach with?

Associations of Professors Emeriti of universities (We will collaborate with these associations to have the available contact information of professors emeriti).
Clarivate Analytics (We will use Web of Science to automatically detect excellent Professors Emeriti using Web of Science Citation network and metrics analysis of research fields).
Interested Wikimedia User Groups (We will collaborate with them in order to convince professors emeriti of the importance of the project and to show to these excellent scientists how to easily contribute to Wikipedia).

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I am Csisc. I am a member of Wikimedia TN User Group, The Wikipedia Library, WikiProject Maghrebi Arabic and Wiki Project Med. I contribute to several Wikimedia projects in Tunisian, French, English, Italian and Arabic since 2009. I was a candidate to Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees once in 2015.

Participants

Volunteer as I made it. I want to be a volunteer. Csisc (talk) 11:45, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Endorsements

I think that this is an awesome idea! Tokyogirl79 (talk) 08:41, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Excellent idea that should be applied in every country ! Rached
It seems perfect as an idea. Sami Mlouhi (talk) 19:34, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Good idea ! Emnamizouni (talk) 15:33, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Very good idea, I support Oldstoneage (talk) 18:57, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Great idea --Reda benkhadra (talk) 22:17, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Will require substantial training/assistance, but seems like a great pool of knowledge from which to draw. Soupvector (talk) 00:44, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Good idea! Youssefbhy (talk) 17:22, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Great idea. Should help in adding quality content to Wikipedia. A taskforce can be formed to identify contact details of such Emeriti. Thereafter, they can either be contacted offline or sent emails congratulating them for the great work they have already done and then pointing that they can do much more by contributing to the composite of human knowledge. I am sure that many of them would be interested. Possibly a template could be designed for marking such Emeriti. Diptanshu^Talk 16:34, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
This will have benefit the community. —M@sssly^✉ 16:54, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Completely make sense. Anthere (talk)
nice idea Touzrimounir (talk) 20:53, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Nice idea! --Jamie Tubers (talk) 21:11, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
an excellent idea! But I would like to see this expanded further - not just professors emeriti but retired teachers/educators of all kinds. In general, retired teachers retain a strong commitment to sharing information & they have developed a habit of service. Engaging these volunteers will take more than just a form letter invitation I think. Redwidgeon (talk) 23:20, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia and its other sister projects are still edited by most of non specialist persons and for that, most of scientifics and others don't trust them although we find intersting content. So, it will have much credit if so many scientific contributors (as professor emeritii) edit contents that match their own field research BamLifa (talk) 02:08, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
I think it is a good idea that could also be expanded to topics on the social sciences and other areas of study. Discott (talk) 09:54, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Support - Nice idea. Wikicology (talk) 11:11, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Great idea! --Alaa :)..! 11:34, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
A great way to help foster links with some of the most distinguished experts in their respective fields. Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 15:32, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
To invite people with high level knowledge to participate in Wikipedia Téméraire (talk) 09:31, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Support - Nice idea Meriem Mach (talk)
Support - This will work out nicely with the position of Wikimedian in Residence at educational institutions who will have access to those contacts from the college or university. Did you know that a significant amount of editing in en:WikiProject Medicine is done by retired physicians? So this model really does work! It would take little effort to incorporate this project into others. Great idea! Barbara (WVS) (talk) 23:18, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Expand your idea

Would a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation help make your idea happen? You can expand this idea into a grant proposal.

Expand into a Rapid Grant

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No funding needed?

The idea does not need funding. It needs only volunteers who will find professors emeriti with the best skills and encourage them to freely contribute to Wikipedia in order to disseminate their professional knowledge and their significant research findings.
If I will apply for funding, this will be for an amount of 160 USD. 80 USD for a writing contest for the letter that will be automatically sent to chosen professors emeriti and 80 USD for the development of a software that automates the algorithm of the detection of professors emeriti from Web of Science. If the WMF staff of Marketing specialists and software developers can adopt the work, there will be no need for this grant.

Funding might not be needed but perhaps there should be some funds requested for travel for those who want to do this project. Face-to-face training is more effective and also demonstrates the importance of such a project. Finding on-line contributors and volunteers to do this sort of thing remotely might not be easy because every editor I know is pretty busy. Still a great and insightful idea. I think it could really take off. Barbara (WVS) (talk) 23:21, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Barbara (WVS): I agree. Funding is needed if we like to apply the idea at large scale. --Csisc (talk) 15:01, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

This is still a great project and I support it with or without funding. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 11:25, 14 March 2018 (UTC)