Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Science Information & Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Science Links at HealthHaven.com

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This subject is featured in the Outline of science, which is incomplete and needs further development. That page, along with the other outlines on Wikipedia, comprise Wikipedia's Outline of Knowledge, which also serves as the table of contents or site map of Wikipedia.

WikiProject Science

(Rated Project-Class)

Science portal

This page is within the scope of WikiProject Science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Science on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.

Project

This page does not require a rating on the project's quality scale.

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To-do list for Wikipedia:WikiProject Science:

The Science WikiProject is now one year old! Please help to:

Work on formatting and updating content of the portal
Write in the journal
Archive older discussions
Brainstorm the new guidelines
Write them here
Update Project main page
Set up an assessment scheme

This talk page is automatically archived by MiszaBot II. Sections with no replies in 90 days are automatically moved. An archive index is available here.

1 Task and info boxes
2 General versus Scientific Readership
3 What-links-here census method
4 Academic Journal information
5 Growing WikiProject_Science
6 Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics
7 POLICY DEBATE: Use of source code, mathematical examples and other examples in articles
8 Proposal to link WP:MTAA from WP:NOT PAPERS
9 Digit grouping style (notice of discussion)
10 Disputes and controversies
11 Popular pages
12 Can you help at Genetic history of the British Isles?
13 Religious stance on Template:Infobox scientist
14 Pageview stats
15 Ecolig

[edit] Task and info boxes

I think that there should be a template for tasks similar to the philosophy task box: Template:PhilosophyTasks. Also, I like their categorization scheme. It's good that you're focusing on high traffic articles, but the project's organization currently seems to ignore articles that need to be started from scratch and stubs that need to be expanded. A detailed review of a long article is a big project, I would guess that there are many people who wish to contribute, but are daunted by the task of reviewing a comprehensive article on a major topic. If the project were more accessible, this page and discussions might stay a little livelier. --AAMiller 30 June 2005 16:40 (UTC)

It seems like Template:PhilosophyTasks is for major philosophy pages, which is fine, but I agree that there is a need for a way to improve even minor science-related pages. --Memenen 1 July 2005 13:28 (UTC)

There's a good deal of overlap between science and philosophy anyway. I think this List_of_topics_(scientific_method) is a good organizational tool. We might consider adopting it as a dynamic navigation tool. There's also the List of science topics which is great. I put the {{WikiProjectNotice|Science}} tag on the talk pages of those lists to link them here. The WikiProjectNotice renders identically with {{WPStructure|Science}} for some reason. Anyway its a good way to link discussions about articles to WikiProject_Science, and they're getting pretty stingy with the Template namespace. Quinobi 8 July 2005 16:46 (UTC)

{{WPStructure|Science}}
{{WikiProjectNotice|Science}}

[edit] General versus Scientific Readership

The following was prompted by this Village pump topic:

The pupa article is fairly typical of many biology-related pages. There are two main directions that such pages tend to move in. The first is a basic description of the topic for students who need help with their homework. Such articles tend to be uninteresting to scientists who actually know something about the topic. The second direction is towards including the types of information that are of interest to scientists. When a few people with scientific training start to take an interest in a wikpedia article, you start to see references and links to on-going research. Biology articles that have not attracted the attention of scientists tend to contain over-simplified generalizations that are technically wrong and ignore the interesting details of the topic. A vague sense of outrage or disgust may be the reaction of many scientists when they see a wikipedia article like pupa for the first time.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Science says, "a good scientific article should be understandable by the "general public", as well as interesting to the scientifically inclined."

I think pages like pupa should have a label like this: Template:Science:Needs Help

[edit] What-links-here census method

I've added a methodology for determining if an article has >500 what-links-here entries or not to the main page (Wikipedia:WikiProject Science). Courtland July 1, 2005 09:22 (UTC)

[edit] Academic Journal information

I recently created {{Infobox Journal}} and have applied it to a couple of articles. Would there be objection to my adding a section to this page for "Scientific publications" and include both comments on the formatting of academic journal entries in Wikipedia as well as a couple of notes on other publication types? Courtland July 1, 2005 09:25 (UTC)

I saw your info box at Science (journal); great idea, run with it. --Memenen 1 July 2005 12:49 (UTC)

Looks great. Maybe include publishing country though? Isn't there a prestige rating system for scientific journals based on references from other papers? If anyone has a link to the list, it might be a good idea to work from the top down. --AAMiller 5 July 2005 06:14 (UTC)

This project needs more room! I'm opening our own project guidelines and project journal sections as suggested by the latest version of Template:WikiProject and the Community project. Quinobi 8 July 2005 17:42 (UTC)

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

publishing country: yes, this could be added. Maybe as a parenthetical after publisher so that an entry would look like "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (United States)"? Or do you think that a separate field would be better? (see American Naturalist as an example of the parenthetical approach Courtland 03:10, July 13, 2005 (UTC))
there is a "prestige rating system"; it's called the Impact Factor and is based on an algorithm run and maintained by ISI. I say something about this in the Talk page for the template. I added today more information on this as I collected information for Genome Research and added it as a plot at the bottom of the Infobox. The figure was uploaded to Wikipedia rather than Commons due to the dubious copyright situation around the sources from which I gathered the information; the exact numbers from each of the sources are included in the Image page. If this looks good as a semi-standard addition to the Infobox, then I would suggest standardizing the plot on the same scale across all journals; I thought on this possibility when doing the plot for Genome Research.

Courtland 02:47, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

I've added the field "ISSN" and a subfield "country" to the template, with additions to the usage notes. I've also added some brackets to the template to assist in suggesting where links (internal and external) might be put. I've also added a section to the bottom of the Talk page that relates major changes, the date, and the person conducting the change ... I'm thinking that this type of log should be included for all templates as it is sometimes truly a problem to tease out how a template has changed over time. Courtland 02:35, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Growing WikiProject_Science

WikiPraxis: WikiProject Newsroom

WikiProject Science received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics

Just wanted to draw attention to this inactive WikiProject. Can it be adopted or cannabilised? Hiding talk 19:52, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] POLICY DEBATE: Use of source code, mathematical examples and other examples in articles

Apologies if you read this message more than once - I am cross-posting variants of it to science, math and computing wikiprojects.

I have opened a debate on the use of examples in Wikipedia articles (mainly focusing on computer source code and mathematical formulas, proofs, etc.). It seems to me that many examples currently in Wikipedia violate Wikipedia policy, so I believe we need to either clarify or change the situation. Depending on the result of the discussion, this may result in a number of examples being summarily removed from articles!

[edit] Proposal to link WP:MTAA from WP:NOT PAPERS

I find the current version of WP:NOT PAPERS both reductive, containing some redundancy, and rather poorly explained (in particular the ban on "academic language" at dictum 7). It also fails to defer to the guideline where the finer points of those issues are discussed. I've made a proposal to address these shortcomings. Actually, I had already implemented it, but I've been reverted by someone insisting that I "get consensus", although that editor had to comments on the substance of my edits. So, this notice is an attempt to get the interested parties to form a consensus. Pcap ping 16:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Digit grouping style (notice of discussion)

In case anyone is interested, a discussion about digit grouping styles is taking place at Village Pump (policy), related to this question:

On Wikipedia, should the selection of digit grouping styles depend upon regional and topical conventions used in the English language?

Please refer to that page for details and discussion. TheFeds 03:59, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Disputes and controversies

How should we cover scientific theories which - at least in the media or in public opinion polls - are widely disputed? Evolution and global warming are, apparently, the "scientific mainstream", but 5% of scientists disagree with evolution, and 40% to 85% of the American public rejects "unguided evolution". As of this moment, we don't even have articles defining the scientific mainstream or describing what unguided evolution is.

Are we supposed to cover contrarian or skeptical viewpoints, or just those which are popular?
Should we consider whether economic incentives or political pressures affect what scientific papers are published?
Does reporting a viewpoint which opposes the mainstream automatically give it "equal validity"?

I'm looking for a place in this mammoth project where all these questions are answered. Otherwise, I don't feel I can contribute anything on intelligent design, global warming, the DDT ban, the Alar scare, Passive smoking, asbestos abatement and so on. --Uncle Ed (talk) 17:32, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Popular pages

I have requested a list of popular pages for this project at [1]. --Ysangkok (talk) 15:44, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Can you help at Genetic history of the British Isles?

Some expert input would be greatly appreciated here. Thanks. Pondle (talk) 09:33, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Religious stance on Template:Infobox scientist

I've started a discussion on Template talk:Infobox scientist (see here) about the possible removal of the "Religious stance" field from this template. Comments will be appreciated. Cheers, Ben (talk) 22:35, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Science to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Science/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 00:53, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! It is very useful for us. NCurse _work 06:52, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Ecolig

Can any spare scientists have a look at this article? I proposed it for deletion, reasons given here, it's since been undeleted but my concerns remain unassuaged. Rather than immediately proceed to AfD I'd appreciate some more eyes on it. Thanks. pablo_hablo. 23:51, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

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