CZ:Biology Week/PLoS

One way to initiate some repetitive interaction between CZ and more traditional venues of scholarly communication like science journals would be a community page article in PLoS Biology (an Open Access journal, and perhaps the most widely read one in biology) describing the concept of Biology Week to a life science audience. The author guidelines for this are here, and previous examples of such community pages include

• The Costs of Exclusion: Recognizing a Role for Local Communities in Biodiversity Conservation,
• CAMERA: A Community Resource for Metagenomics,
• Peer Review - The Newcomers' Perspective and
• Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling.

In order to harness the powers of a wiki for drafting the article, I suggest we do that here, in close collaboration with the CZ:Biology Workgroup and anybody else interested in Biology Week.

Aims of the article

Main points to make, considering the audience at PLoS Biology:

1. What is Biology Week?
   • Give first occurence (September 22-28, 2008) and details on planned regularity
2. OK, and what is Citizendium then?
   • Briefly explain most important aspects of CZ policy (cf. CZ:About and some useful decisions as well as CZ:Myths and Facts)
3. Why should readers (scientists, teachers, students, interested public) participate?
   • What sorts of contributions are possible and/or expected (here, the groups should be addressed separately, though that's not easy within a concise piece of narrative writing)?
4. Describe options for integration with other free educational projects
5. Mention other CZ Workgroup weeks, most notably those for Health sciences and Anthropology (as these fields have a large overlap with Biology), and envisaged frequency of such events

Structure of the article

This is just a collection of keywords and phrases (about 500 words alltogether) that should facilitate discussion about the structure of the article. Once this has been agreed upon, they will serve as a guideline for detailed phrasing below.

What is Biology Week?

• Nice quote on knowledge and science (or should we start with biology right away?), followed by a one-line invitation to lend their expertise to a collaborative education project: Biology Week at Citizendium, September 22-28, 2008

OK, and what is Citizendium then?

• Science is the process by which knowledge about the physical world is structured on the basis of systematic inquiry by theoretical, experimental or empirical means.

(would be cool to sync this introductory phrase with Science/Definition)

• Reference works, and encyclopedias in particular, represent a cornerstone in research
• Reliability is key, and so is the involvement of experts
  • Traditional models relied on a set of paid editors whose combined expertise covered all fields within the scope of the reference work and who wrote individual articles rather independently, with little involvement of others. However, this model does not scale with the expansion of scientific (and other) knowledge
  • An obviously scalable approach is the involvement of volunteers via an internet-based wiki, as evidenced by the growth curve of Wikipedia. But here, quality can not generally be assured, since basically anybody can write (even anonymously) about any topic, regardless of their respective expertise in it, and changes instantly become part of that body of knowledge often referred to as the first free encyclopedia, without any vetting by experts. mention vandalism?
  • Citizendium is an attempt to combine the best of these two worlds:
    • Registration with real names required
    • The scope is wider than in traditional encyclopedias (e.g. it contains entries on pop culture; give examples) but narrower than in WP (family-friendlyness)
    • Two basic types of articles: Approved (after careful examination by experts) or not
    • Every registered user can edit any draft page but a draft page only gets the status of an encyclopedic article after expert review.

Why should readers (scientists, teachers, students, journalists, interested public) participate?

• why should experts join?
  • public outreach and community service
  • eduzendium as an interactive learning/teaching environment - collaborative learning by structuring knowledge is a good preparation for later collaborative knowledge production in research teams
  • policy on taking academic credit is under way
  • contributions to traditional academic peer review (and the enormous efforts experts put in there) are largely invisible, which would not be the case with a wiki model with real name policy
  • civilized discussion atmosphere due to real-name policy
• what about biology?
  • CZ covers many fields, both academic and beyond, but activities in the biomedical fields have been especially visible: Biology is second to history in terms of number of articles (followed by health sciences), and second to computers in terms of number of authors (followed by history) and fourth (after computers, engineering and health sciences) in number of editors, see also CZ:Statistics (--> there are people to work with)
  • CZ:Biology Workgroup/Biology Week/Pending decisions
  • bot assistance for fact picking can be made available on a case by case basis
• what about original research?
  • it will not be allowed in the main namespace but might be so in subpages or other namespaces, details being discussed

Biology Week: What sorts of contributions are possible and/or expected?

• Here, the groups -- scientists, teachers, students, journalists, interested public -- should be addressed separately, though that's not easy within a concise piece of narrative writing.
  • biologists and other researchers
  • teachers
  • students
  • journalists
  • interested public
  • others (e.g. politicians)
• Technical support available?
• Related Workgroup weeks

Options for integration with other free educational projects

• e.g. WatchKnow

Similar events?

• Mention other CZ Workgroup weeks, most notably those for Health sciences and Anthropology, as these fields have a large overlap with Biology
• Workgroup weeks will initially be held once a month

Schedule

• July 7, submit manuscript
• June 30, first draft finished, invite community feedback
• June 23, structure of article finished (this includes structure of the figure and/ or box)
• June 18, suggested phrasing to appropriately reflect the state of discussion on Things to be decided upon before first Biology Week, taking into account that the article should still be up to date in September when these decisions will, hopefully, have given rise to some appropriate policy

Draft

Text

Up to 1200 words.

Potentially useful phrases

The Citizendium (CZ) - a wiki that allows registered, non-anonymous authors to edit any article, with the results approved by qualified editors - is planning a big "online convention" of Biologists on the Citizendium. For all biologists this is a chance to make a difference.

The Citizendium was developed with the belief that "There is a better way for humanity to come together to make an encyclopedia."

Since only "real names" are used, The Citizendium has virtually no vandalism and very little abuse of any kind.

Domain experts are given credence in CZ, since a project devoted to knowledge ought to give special inducements to people who make it their life's work to know things.

The Citizendium features the rule of law, not anarchy and not mob rule.

In time, the article anyone contributes to will be approved by an expert editor, and so represented to the world as containing a credible, reliable introduction to a topic.

Imagine enormous quantities of content combined with the highest quality and exhaustiveness of scope. To give thrust to the ever-expanding field of Biology, the "Biology Week" will be the first of the different weeks planned for each discipline. It is scheduled to be held during September 22 to September 28, 2008.

Present approval mechanism and some examples from Category:Biology Approved.

Discuss possibilities to integrate Biology Week with other initiatives (non-profit, educational) with similar goals (CZ or otherwise).

Image or box?

We can have either an image or a box but perhaps also both (see previous community pages).

• What about a box that lists the key properties of CZ with respect to similar projects readers might be familiar with (mainly EB and WP)?

• A good image would probably be of help, and something in the style of or

would seem appropriate - the field is depicted as a whole, yet its diversity is evident, too. Any suggestions as to how we can get the idea of a recurrent Biology week into such a figure?

We can have professional graphics support if we decide on the structure of the figure before June 21.

• What about designing a mosaic-like image that can serve in the Biology article (instead of Image:Montage2.jpg) and, together with some symbolic indication of "Week" or even Citizendium, as the illustration of the PLoS article?