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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
  • To: "AcaWiki general (listserv)" <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [acawiki-general] AcaWiki 6 year thoughts
  • Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2015 02:38:57 -0700

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 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, [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] AcaWiki 6 year thoughts, Mike Linksvayer, 10/25/2015

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