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The Wikipedia Science Conference took place in London this week, and brought together scientists, Wikipedians, science communicators, programmers and others for a two-day discussion about those areas where Wikipedia and science overlap. There were talks about getting scientists to help edit Wikipedia, about the extent of the scientific information available on Wikipedia, and how we can link Wikipedia with scientific databases. We were introduced to the concept of “Wikimedians in Residence“, who spent 6 months part-time working with various scholarly organisations.

Many of the topics – related to content mining, linking databases, licensing of images, DOIs, ORCID, peer review, and open science – were of particular interest to F1000Research, but my personal favourite talk was the talk by Andy Mabbett (Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry and ORCID) who gave very practical tips for scientists who have little time and want to help improve content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. A few of his tips were:

• Check biography pages for scientists at your institute. Upload photos for them and record their voice for the infobox section.
• Look at project pages for topics that are relevant to you and join the talk pages
• If you’re a chemist, check and add the infoboxes for chemicals’ wikipedia pages.
• Check the category “Science articles needing expert attention” and see if you can help
• Translate articles if you’re multilingual
• Provide quotations of scientists to Wikiquote
• Take pictures of scientists to contribute to Wikimedia Commons – especially scientists that look different from the pictures that are already there. The section needs more women, more non-white scientists and more scientists who are photographed without a lab coat.
• If you’re a student interested in a future career in science communication and need a start on your portfolio, you can begin by writing science news articles for WikiNews

A lot of the other talks addressed the need for more scientists to contribute to Wikipedia, but these were practical tips that someone could get started with right away – and many did, during the unconference section of the meeting.

I collected many tweets about the talks on Storify, where you can find discussion of talks from Day 1 and Day 2.