This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikipedian and the convener of the Wikipedia Science Conference
Wikimedia UK and Wellcome Trust are delighted to welcome session proposals for the Wikipedia Science Conference – the first of its kind – taking place in London on the 2nd and 3rd of September.
The two-day conference reflects the growing interest in Wikipedia and its sister projects as a platform not just for communicating science but for scientific research and publishing. Last year, a clinical review paper authored on Wikipedia was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Meanwhile, scientists and Wikipedians are using papers, data, and figures to improve Wikipedia and related projects such as Wikidata .
Using these free, open platforms, scientific content is benefiting both from increased impact and an increased opportunity for checking and review. This in turn is a benefit of open-access publication models which make the outputs of research free for anyone to reuse and repurpose.
The two keynote speakers are Dr Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge and Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton. Professor Hall was a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Association for Computing Machinery, previously leading the ACM and the British Computer Society. Dr Murray-Rust, a chemist, campaigns for open sharing of scientific publications and data. He leads the Content Mine project to extract data from published papers and has called Wikidata “the future of science data.”
The rest of the programme will consist of invited speakers, sessions suggested through this call, and an “unconference” block in which participants create their own sessions on the day.
The conference is arranged by Wikimedia UK and will be hosted by the Wellcome Trust at its premises on Euston Road in London. The Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in health by supporting the brightest minds. Wikimedia UK is the national charity that supports Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, and is a voice for free and open knowledge in all its forms.
You can learn more about the conference, and submit your proposal, here
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