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  • From: Jodi Schneider <jschneider AT pobox.com>
  • To: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
  • Cc: "AcaWiki general (listserv)" <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] AcaWiki 6 year thoughts
  • Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2015 07:14:10 -0500

Great to see summaries with credible content by folks whose names I don't recognize!

Like you, I find writing summaries helps me remember a text -- perhaps I'll get back to it! 

:) -Jodi 

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 11:54 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com> wrote:
On 11/13/2015 12:28 PM, Jodi Schneider wrote:
> A very comprehensive discussion of the past and potential future of AcaWiki!
>
> I agree that I wish I summarized every article I read.
>
> Yes, I agree that grey-literature is in scope for summaries.
>
> Cool to integrate with Wikidata -- I think that's an area to prioritize.
> And there's much more free metadata these days (I think) -- so
> revisiting whether we can (say) use a DOI import would be worthwhile.
>
> :) -Jodi


Thanks! I've not followed up on any of the items below yet but will
eventually; anyone feel free to bug me about items you care about.

On your other note, acawiki.org expires March 2017. Even if we decided
to sunset AcaWiki I'd probably keep it registered for awhile and
redirecting to ... hmm, I'm not sure, maybe a one page static site with
contents similar to http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:Similar_projects ... but
I'd rather not sunset AcaWiki until there is somewhere of similar
ambition but much greater resources or interest exists.

Some new summaries recently in http://acawiki.org/Special:RecentChanges

Mike

> On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 5:38 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com
> <mailto:ml AT gondwanaland.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi AcaWiki interested people,
>
>     I've meant for a long meant to write down some thoughts about AcaWiki. I
>     gave myself a deadline of the current Open Access Week (Oct 19-25),
>     barely met. Realized while writing that AcaWiki was launched 6 years ago
>     earlier this month.
>
>     Text dump of
>     http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2015/10/25/acawiki-non-summary/ follows.
>
>     Mike
>
>     [1]Six years ago I helped launch [2]AcaWiki, a site
>     based on Semantic MediaWiki (software for which I had
>     [3]very high expectations, mostly [4]transferred to
>     Wikidata) for summarizing academic research.
>
>     A substantial community failed to materialize. I’ve
>     probably been the only [5]semi-consistent contributor
>     over its entire six years. The best contributions have
>     come from [6]Jodi Schneider, who summarized a bunch of
>     papers related to her research on the semantic web and
>     online discourse, Benjamin Mako Hill, who summarized
>     his [7]PhD qualification exam readings, and [8]Nate
>     Matias who did the same and added a bunch of summaries
>     related to online harassment. Students of an
>     [9]archaeology course taught by [10]Ben Marwick
>     summarized many papers as part of the class. Thank you
>     Jodi, Mako, Nate, Ben, and a bunch of people who have
>     each contributed one or a few summaries.
>
>     I’m not going to try to enumerate the deficiencies of
>     AcaWiki here. They boil down to lack of time dedicated
>     to outreach and to improving the site, and zero effort
>     to raise funds to support such work, following a small
>     startup grant obtained by AcaWiki’s founder [11]Neeru
>     Paharia, who has since been busy earning a doctorate
>     and becoming a professor. With Neeru I’ve been the
>     organization’s other long-term director so bear
>     responsibility for this lack of effort. In retrospect
>     dedicating more time to AcaWiki these last years at a
>     cost to non-collaborative activity (e.g., this blog)
>     would have been wise. I haven’t moved to take the other
>     obvious course of shutting down the site, because I
>     still believe something like it is badly needed, not
>     least by me, as I wrote in 2009:
>
>       This could be seen as an end-run around access and
>       copyright restrictions (the Open Access movement has
>       made [12]tremendous progress though there is still
>       much to be done), but AcaWiki is a very partial
>       solution to that problem — sometimes an article
>       summary (assuming AcaWiki has one) would be enough,
>       though often a researcher would still need access to
>       the full paper (and the full dataset, but that’s
>       [13]another battle).
>
>       More interesting to me is the potential for AcaWiki
>       summaries to increase the impact of research by
>       making it more accessible in another way —
>       comprehensible to non-specialists and approachable
>       by non-speedreaders. I read a fair number of
>       academic papers and many more get left on my reading
>       queue unread. A “human readable” distillation of the
>       key points of articles (abstracts typically convey
>       next to nothing or are filled with jargon) would
>       really let me ingest more.
>
>     This has held true even given AcaWiki’s tiny size to
>     date: I regularly look back at summaries I’ve written
>     to remember what I’ve read, and wish I summarized much
>     more of what I’ve read, because most of it I’ve almost
>     totally forgotten! I recommend summarizing papers even
>     though it is hard.
>
>     Much harder still and more valuable are [14]literature
>     reviews. These were envisioned to be a [15]part of
>     AcaWiki, but I now think that every Wikipedia article
>     should effectively be a literature review (and more). A
>     year ago I blogged about an example of [16]Wikipedia
>     article as literature review led by James Heilman.
>     Earlier this year Heilman wrote a call to action around
>     a genre of literature review, [17]Open Access to a
>     High-Quality, Impartial, Point-of-Care Medical Summary
>     Would Save Lives: Why Does It Not Exist? (which of
>     course I [18]summarized on AcaWiki). I have a partially
>     written commentary on this piece but for now I can only
>     urge you to read Heilman, or start with and improve my
>     summary.
>
>     This brings me to one of my excuses for not dedicating
>     more time to AcaWiki: hope that it would be superseded
>     by a project directly under the Wikimedia umbrella,
>     benefiting from that organization’s and movement’s
>     scale. But, I’ve done almost nothing to make this
>     happen, either. I imagine the current effort that could
>     lead in that direction is [19]WikiProject Open
>     Signalling OA-ness, as I’ve noted at the top of a
>     [20]page on AcaWiki listing similar projects. By far
>     the best project on the list is [21]Journalist’s
>     Resources, also launched in 2009, with vastly greater
>     resources. The projects listed so far as “similar” must
>     only the tip of an iceberg of efforts to summarize
>     academic research, for it’s widely recognized (yes,
>     citation needed; I just created a [22]placeholder on
>     AcaWiki for gathering these) that summarization in
>     various forms is valuable and much more is needed.
>
>     If this hasn’t been enough of a ramble already, I’ll
>     close with miscellaneous notes about and unsorted
>     to-dos AcaWiki:
>       * Very brief summaries, perhaps 140 character or not
>         much longer, would be useful complements to longer
>         summaries. It would be easy to add a short summary
>         field to AcaWiki.
>       * For summaries of articles which are themselves
>         freely licensed, it might be useful to include the
>         author’s abstract in AcaWiki. Again, it would be
>         easy to add a field.
>       * There’s lots of research on automated
>         summarization, some of it producing open source
>         tools. These could be applied to initialize
>         summaries, either for human summaries, or en masse
>         bot summary creation.
>       * I have added a field for an article’s Wikidata
>         identifier. AcaWiki is one of a handful of sites
>         potentially using [23]Wikidata for authority
>         control. There will be many more. But it’d be far
>         more useful to do something with that identifier,
>         most obviously to ingest article metadata from
>         Wikidata and create Wikidata items/push metadata to
>         Wikidata where items corresponding to summarized
>         articles do not exist. I’ve not yet seriously
>         looked into how much of this can be currently
>         accomplished using [24]Wikibase Client.
>       * Last month there was [25]debate about a program
>         giving some Wikipedia contributors gratis access to
>         closed academic journals. Does this program help
>         improve Wikipedia as a free resource, or promote
>         non-free literature? It must do some of both; which
>         is the bigger impact on long-term free knowledge
>         outcomes probably depends on one’s perspective. My
>         bias is that improving and promoting free resources
>         is vastly more important than suppressing non-free
>         ones. But I also think that free academic summaries
>         could help in both respects. For Wikipedia readers,
>         a reference with an immediately available summary
>         would be more useful than one without. The summary
>         would also reduce the need to access the original
>         non-free article. AcaWiki in its current state is
>         inadequate, but perhaps the the debate ought
>         motivate more work on free academic summaries, here
>         or elsewhere.
>       * Has any closed access publisher freed only article
>         abstracts (including a free license; abstracts are
>         almost always gratis access)? This would be useful
>         to a site like AcaWiki at the least, especially if
>         abstracts were more consistently useful.
>       * Should the scope of AcaWiki be [26]explicitly
>         expanded to include summarizing material that is
>         somehow academic but is not in the form of a
>         peer-reviewed paper published in an academic
>         journal? Some of the summaries I’ve contributed are
>         for books or [27]grey literature.
>       * Periodically it’s been suggested to [28]change the
>         default license for AcaWiki summaries from CC-BY to
>         CC-BY-SA. I should add updated thoughts at the
>         link.
>       * Some time ago in order to put a stop to the
>         creation of spam accounts, I enabled the
>         [29]ConfirmAccount extension, which forces users
>         who want to contribute to fill out an account
>         request form. I admit this is hugely annoying. I
>         have done zero research into it, but I would love
>         to have an extension which auto-enables account
>         creation based on some external authentication and
>         reputation, e.g., Wikimedia wiki accounts or even
>         users followed/subscribed to/endorsed by existing
>         AcaWiki users on other sites, e.g., social
>         networks.
>       * Upgrade site to https when [30]Let’s Encrypt
>         becomes generally available. Alternatively, see if
>         it is possible to move hosting (currently a
>         $10/month Digital Ocean VPS) to [31]Miraheze, which
>         mandates https.
>       * I intended to write an update on AcaWiki for
>         [32]Open Access Week (October 19-25). I only
>         realized after beginning that AcaWiki was recently
>         6 years old.
>       * I’m going to ping the people who have contributed
>         to AcaWiki so far to look at this post and provide
>         feedback. What would it take for them to feel good
>         about recommending others do what they’ve done,
>         e.g., summarizing PhD or research program readers,
>         or assigning contributing or improving AcaWiki
>         summaries to their classes? Or if something else
>         entirely should be done to push forward free
>         summarization of academic literature, what is that
>         something?
>       * For some time [33]Fabricatorz did a bit of work on
>         and hosted AcaWiki. From my email correspondence I
>         see that [34]Bassel Khartabil did some of that. As
>         I’ve blogged before ([35]1, [36]2, [37]3), Bassel
>         has been detained by the Syrian government since
>         2012. Recently he has gone missing and presumably
>         is in grave danger. Props to his Frabricatorz and
>         many other friends who have done more to raise
>         awareness of Bassel’s plight than I would have
>         imagined possible when writing those previous
>         posts. See [38]freebassel.org <http://freebassel.org> for info
>     and links,
>         and spread the word. I’ll add a note about
>         #freebassel to the AcaWiki home page (which badly
>         needs a general revamp) shortly.
>
>     If any of this interests you, get in touch or merely
>     watch for updates on the [39]acawiki-general mailing
>     list, AcaWiki on [40]pump.io <http://pump.io>, [41]Twitter, or
>     [42]Facebook, or blog comments below, or the
>     [43]AcaWiki site.
>
>        1. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2009/10/06/acawiki/
>        2. http://acawiki.org/
>        3.
>     http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2006/12/10/semantic-mediawiki-revolution/
>        4. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/10/30/wikidata-ii/
>        5. http://acawiki.org/Special:Contributions/Mike_Linksvayer
>        6. http://acawiki.org/User:Jodi.a.schneider
>        7. http://acawiki.org/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Generals
>        8. http://acawiki.org/User:Natematias
>        9.
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Program:University_of_Washington/ARCHY_483_(AU14)
>       10. http://faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/
>       11. http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/np412/
>       12.
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)#Adoption_statistics
>       13. http://blog.stodden.net/category/reproducible-research/
>       14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature_review
>       15. http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:Literature_Reviews
>       16. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/10/02/wiki-journal/
>       17.
>     http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001868
>       18.
>     http://acawiki.org/Open_Access_to_a_High-Quality,_Impartial,_Point-of-Care_Medical_Summary_Would_Save_Lives:_Why_Does_It_Not_Exist?
>       19.
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness
>       20. http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:Similar_projects
>       21. http://journalistsresource.org/
>       22. http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:Calls_for_more_summarization
>       23.
>     https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_for_authority_control
>       24. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase_Client
>       25.
>     http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/09/16/open-access-in-a-closed-world/
>       26.
>     https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/acawiki-general/2014-November/thread.html#432
>       27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_literature
>       28. http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:License_change_proposal
>       29. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount
>       30. https://letsencrypt.org/
>       31. https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze
>       32. http://www.openaccessweek.org/
>       33. http://fabricatorz.com/
>       34. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassel_Khartabil
>       35. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/03/14/freebassel/
>       36. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/12/16/cc11/
>       37. http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/03/15/freebassel-openborders/
>       38. http://freebassel.org/
>       39. http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/acawiki-general
>       40. https://identi.ca/acawiki
>       41. https://twitter.com/acawiki
>       42. https://www.facebook.com/acawiki
>       43. http://acawiki.org/
>     _______________________________________________
>     acawiki-general mailing list
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>     <mailto:acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
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>
>




  • Re: [acawiki-general] AcaWiki 6 year thoughts, Jodi Schneider, 12/01/2015

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