SfN Announces Neuroscience Wikipedia Initiative

Since its creation in January 2001, Wikipedia has grown into one of the largest reference Web sites in the world, with over 2,750,000 English-language entries on a vast array of subject areas — including neuroscience. To further its mission of promoting public education about neuroscience, SfN has just launched an initiative to engage its members in improving and expanding the neuroscience-related content on Wikipedia. Members will receive a letter (PDF) from SfN President Tom Carew seeking their active participation. “SfN is calling upon members to improve and expand the neuroscience resources on Wikipedia by contributing and editing content related to your area of expertise,” said Carew. “This creates an opportunity for all of us to share our knowledge with the broader community, build neuroscience literacy, and create a climate of more robust support for scientific research.”

Initially conceived by Past President Eve Marder, the effort also reflects a broader public outreach strategy that seeks to create a climate of more robust support for scientific research. “Wikipedia is a hugely popular and powerful tool that, in principle, provides authoritative information about any topic for anyone on this planet,” said Marder. “This should be seen as a natural opportunity for scientists, as we have an obligation to share our knowledge with everyone — including taxpayers around the world who have, by and large, paid for our research.”

Striving to become a comprehensive, online, multilingual encyclopedia, Wikipedia is currently a collaboration of more than 75,000 active contributors who volunteer to develop and continuously improve articles on topics with which they are familiar. It is currently the number one external site visited after users conduct a Google search and has become a significant source of free online science knowledge. After reviewing the landscape of existing online resources, SfN’s Public Education and Communication Committee (PECC) concluded that working to improve the quality of neuroscience content on Wikipedia would be the most effective avenue to explore since, compared to other major online resources that exist or are under development (e.g., Scholarpedia, Medpedia, and the Neuroscience Wikia), Wikipedia is written for a general audience (not exclusively for academics and researchers) and it has a substantially wider reach.

SfN has chosen to focus its effort on the Wikipedia main Neuroscience page. While there are additional sections and specialty projects dedicated to neuroscience content, PECC has chosen the main page, a major point of entry for many Wikipedia users, as a starting point.

SfN is seeking the support of its members to volunteer as contributors and facilitators to begin improving this content.

SfN has developed guidelines for contributors and facilitators. These provide basic information about how to most effectively register and work with the Wikipedia site as well as links to resources that should help guide the process of developing new articles and using consistent terminology. To support this latter goal, SfN is encouraging members to take advantage of the NeuroLex resource that has been developed by the NIH-funded Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project. NeuroLex is “a comprehensive collection of common neuroscience domain terminologies,” which can serve as a useful guide as volunteer content facilitators and contributors begin looking at the way content is structured on the Wikipedia Neuroscience pages. NeuroLex has started its own Wiki to help with the process of expanding and tuning its terminology resources. One of the goals is to cross-reference and cross-fertilize NeuroLex with Wikipedia. See Neuroscience Information Framework article.

Over the coming months, SfN will assess the impact its members are having on the overall neuroscience-related content on Wikipedia, and explore a second phase through which it could engage undergraduate and graduate neuroscience programs to formally involve students in developing Wikipedia content. It has become a growing trend for university professors to assign students projects involving developing articles for Wikipedia. For example, senior neuroscience students at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, are required to revise articles in the area of drugs and behavior as part of their coursework. See a complete list of Wikipedia school and university projects.

In thinking about a Wikipedia project, Marder noted that the project leverages a key SfN strength: the growing number of younger SfN members. “Graduate students, postdocs, and beginning faculty are already using many emerging social communications tools and are very interested in public outreach. We hope to enlist thousands of young scientists in this effort, leveraging grassroots power in the science community to advance global science knowledge.”

Get involved with the Neuroscience Wikipedia Initiative.