User:DarTar/Citing as a public service

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Personal details

Your name
Dario Taraborelli
Affiliation
Wikimedia Foundation; altmetrics.org
How can we contact you?
dario@wikimedia.org
Where will you be travelling from to attend this conference?
San Francisco
Availability
Both days

Session details

Conference themes
  • Wikipedia+ as platforms for promoting informed public discussion of scientific topics
  • Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia as platforms for research (including citizen science)/ as models for scientific publishing
Type of session
  • Presentation (20 mins + 10 mins questions)
Further details

In 2012 David Weinberger called linking "a small act of generosity that sends people away from your site to some other that you think shows the world in a way worth considering”. Works and sites linking to themselves – as opposed to the sources they cite – in an effort to lock in their readers represent, in Weinberger’s words, "a stopping point in the ecology of information."

“Oracular" answer engines returning information with no provenance or verifiable sources have now become mainstream. Algorithmic answer engines represent a threat to our collective ability to fact-check and verify knowledge (including scientiifc knowledge) in its original context. In this talk I’ll argue that one of Wikimedia's strongest assets is its ability to transparently represent links between statements and sources. I'll give an overview of initiatives I've been involved in trying to bridge the gap between the scholarly communication and Wikimedia communities, such as WikiProject Source MetaData and present the benefits for the scientific community, scholarly publishers, funding bodies, and the general public of projects aiming to build a centralized repository of sources, using Wikidata as its backend.