WikiIndaba conference 2019/Submissions/Medical Wikipedia: a Neuroscience in Wikidata Challenge + Internet-In-A-Box

Submission no. 025

Title of the submission

Medical Wikipedia: a Neuroscience in Wikidata Challenge + Internet-In-A-Box

Type of submission

lecture

Author of the submission

Mina Theofilatou (User:Saintfevrier)

Language of presentation

English

E-mail address

saintfevriergmailcom

Username

Saintfevrier

Country of origin

Greece

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikipedia Community Schools Association Greece

Personal homepage or blog

Agrypnocoma: My bilingual (Greek-English) blog about Education, Society, Politics and Wikipedia

Abstract

The Problem I am an electrical/computing engineer with 11 years on the Wikimedia projects, mainly in my capacity as computer science teacher. Over the past few years I have developed an interest in medicine: after devising the Wikitherapy programme and with the encouragement of James Heilman, I joined Wiki Project Med and dedicated my Wikimedia time almost exclusively to editing medical content. Soon I discovered that my special field of interest was Neuroscience, however lacking medical background it would be difficult for me to take my pursuit to a higher level. With the abundance of MOOCs on the Internet, it was easy to find a comprehensive course that would help me grasp the basics of this fascinating science. But how could I combine professional development and editing the Wikimedia projects on a tight schedule?

The Solution I embarked on the course in June 2018 and attended the first 2 weeks of the demanding 13-week course. Unfortunately it came to a point where other obligations forced me to interrupt; however, I was active on the MOOC long enough to discover the added value of editing Wikidata along the way! The course is delivered in English, and I live in Greece, so I started translating the labels and descriptions of neuroscience items to Greek. The initial results of my experiment were presented at the WikiProject Med session of Wikimania 2018 (see notes here).

The Challenge I have now renewed my registration in the same course; In 11 weeks of learning Neuroscience I expect to make around 1000 translation edits to Wikidata, while keeping a log of my progress week by week. It is this "two birds with one stone" approach that I want to share with the audience of WikiIndaba :)

update 30 October 2018: I have slightly altered my original plan and am currently attending a shorter course in Fundamental Neuroscience for Neuroimaging which I have found more appropriate as a primer, intending to return to the 13-week course or progressing to another one afterwards. So far I have successfully completed Week 1 with an excellent score (91%), and added 30 Greek label/description translations to Wikidata items. So far this has been very fulfilling and exciting, and I am looking forward to learning - and editing! - more about Neuroscience :-)

Internet-In-A-Box James Heilman is passionately developing this magical little device that enables people to gain access to Wikipedia's medical content even without an Internet connection. With the IIAB device I acquired in Cape Town, in the second part of my presentation I would like to demonstrate to the audience how fascinating IIAB is for bringing the efforts of medical editors on Wikipedia to a much larger audience.

What will attendees take away from this session?

I expect attendees to be inspired by my challenge and contemplate how they too can pursue professional development in the field of their choice while bringing added value to themselves and the WM projects. This is especially relevant to participants with good working knowledge of English (or any other language a MOOC may be delivered in), wishing to contribute highly important scientific content to their minor language projects on Wikipedia. Moreover, participants will have the opportunity to log on to, and use IIAB in real time. Hopefully the discussion afterwards will lead to even more good ideas and potential collaborations!

Theme of presentation

• Sister Projects
• Technology, Interface & Infrastructure
• Education

(as my proposal overlaps with all three themes, please feel free to select the most appropriate)

For workshops and discussions, what level is the intended audience?

Beginning, intermediate, advanced: all are welcome :-)

Length of session (if other than 25 minutes, specify how long)

25 minutes

Will you attend WikiIndaba if your submission is not accepted?

Not sure

Slides or further information (optional)

TBA

Special requests

Is this Submission a Draft or Final?

Final

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

1. Youssefbhy (talk) 21:37, 18 October 2018 (UTC)