CERN Improving CERN’s Presence on Wikipedia Project Report, Summer Student Program 2017 IDA STOREHAUG University of Bergen, Norway Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark August 25, 2017 Abstract Dissemination of information on high energy physics and related technologies is at the core of CERN’s mission, making research done at CERN available, both to the public and other researchers. Wikipedia, being the most used social media site for researchers and a popular source of science information for the public, is an obvious platform for CERN to be present on. Between 19 June and 25 August 2017, as part of the CERN Summer Student Program, a project to improve CERN’s presence on Wikipedia was carried out in the department of Scientific Information Service at CERN. In the following the use of references in the collection of CERN-related Wikipedia articles is discussed, and the topics of plagiarism and licenses are raised. Furthermore, methods to benefit from the CERN community and archives are described, followed by a summary of how to get a Wikipedia article accepted by the Wikipedia community. Lists of Wikipedia articles created or improved and of Wikipedia articles in need of improvement are given. Introduction "To inspire and nurture scientific awareness in all citizens" is one of seven goals of CERN opera- tion, listed in the newly revised communications strategy of CERN.[1] CERN scientific output is documented and made available to the scientific community through the CERN Document Server (CDS), a large-scale multimedia digital library comprising more than 1,100,000 records. In addition to this vast scientific resource, CERN is engaging in disseminating information targeted at the general public. As part of this endeavour, CERN is actively contributing encyclopedic content to Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia articles on the LHC and experiments are satisfac- tory, articles on other CERN accelerators and historical experiments are either nonexistent or inadequate. As part of the CERN Summer Student Program, my work has been to improve CERN’s presence on Wikipedia. The collection of CERN related Wikipedia articles can easily be categorized in three groups: articles on people, accelerators and experiments. The different types of articles required different methods, described in the following sections. 1 A good Wikipedia-article A layman approaching a topic in physics can easily be discouraged. The use of theoretical concepts without any proper explanation, of formulas and terminology can fend of the most interested person. A satisfactory Wikipedia-article should therefore be written in a straightfor- ward and clear language. Theoretical concepts underlying the experiment or accelerator should be explained in an introductory paragraph. Some Wikipedia-articles hits you like a wall of letters – structuring the article into sections with subtitles is crucial to make the article reader-friendly. My articles on experiments and accelerators have generally been arranged as follows: Introduction, Background (theoretical concepts), History, Experimental setup or operation, Results and discoveries. Articles on persons associated with CERN are generally structured in the following way: Introduction, Early life and education, Research Career, Awards and honors, Most notable publications. Adding a summary of the topic (infobox), pictures and figures further aids the reader in understanding the topic. The users of Wikipedia range from readers with no education in physics to experts and researchers. Describing the topic on a suitable level is therefore a challenge. To assume that the reader has little or no education in physics is in most cases the safest. In order to appease the more informed readers, on should rather reference to the academic publications. Wikipedia has an untapped potential of being used as a gateway to the CERN archives and publications. Choosing your topic CERN is one of the biggest research centers in the world, and in the course of its sixty years of history a tremendous amount of physics results have been produced and thousands of people have been associated to the organization. How do you decide which topics to prioritize? Many of the Wikipedia articles in the CERN collection are marked as too short, badly referenced or in need of citation. These articles (some are listed in the conclusion) should be a priority. During my project I have focused on two major CERN discoveries, that of the W and Z bosons and that of neutral currents. Working from these discoveries I have improved and created new articles on topics mentioned in the sources I read to write the articles or mentioned in meetings with staff members. In my opinion, it is more important to have fewer, more thorough articles on the ground- breaking discoveries of CERN, than less detailed and less accurate articles but in larger numbers. The use of references Wikipedia’s variability policy requires citation for any material likely to be challenged and for any quotations. Lack of citations or unreliable sources can result in the article being deleted by the Wikipedia community. The process of writing a Wikipedia article starts with a broad search of references in CDS. More specifically, when writing articles on the CERN accelerators and experiments, History of CERN and other anthologies on CERN history have been useful.[2,3,4, 5] In order to find the physics program and experimental setup, I made a search for the initial proposals to the CERN committees. As proposals are rarely tagged with experiment name, I 2 used the CERN Greybook to find the approval date, using that to locate the appropriate minute from the relevant committee, and finally the case number of the experiment. When writing articles on persons associated to CERN, sources might not be easily accessible, unless an obituary, a memorial lecture or a CV has been made available online. I have used the HEPNames Search on INSPIRE-HEP – an open access digital library for high energy physics in cooperation with DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, and SLAC – to find all publications by the scientists, scanning them for references to their research career. When possible I have conducted interviews. Plagiarism will also result in the article being deleted by the Wikipedia community. Text from the references must not be copied, except when the source is under a copyleft license. If the license is compatible with Wikipedia, some of the text from the source can be included in the Wikipedia article. Most relevant to this project: CC BY up to and including 4.0 and CC BY-SA 1.0, 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 are compatible, whereas CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC are not. The source must be cited by using the referencing templates of Wikipedia, listing all informa- tion stated in the CDS entry. Publications from journals should be referenced citing the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). If the source is open access, a link to the CDS entry should be provided. Contact with CERN Staff Members Using sources deemed reliable, an article was drafted. When writing about an experiment on the basis of some, often quite unintelligible sources, it can be difficult to get an overview of the experiment, and theoretical concepts and experimental setup can be misunderstood altogether. To contact CERN staff members with experience working on the particular experiment or accelerator has therefore been a fundamental step in the process. When deciding which physicists to contact, I have relied on advice from Annette Holtkamp and Jens Vigen. I have also taken note of authors associated with CERN when going through sources. After reading the draft, sent to them by e-mail, the staff members either provided a written list of comments or we arranged a meeting to discuss the article. They also pointed me in the direction of additional sources. In connections with articles on the discovery of the W and Z boson I met with Luigi Di Lella, Roger Bailey, Peter Jenni, Werner Herr and Rudiger Schmidt, and I corresponded with Pierre Darriulat. When writing articles on the discovery of neutral currents I met with Maria Fidecaro and Donald Cundy. Some articles required several meetings. Contact with staff members also resulted in several articles on people associated with CERN. As an example, when contacting former spokespersons Pierre Darriulat and Luigi Di Lella to get feedback on an article about the UA2 experiment, I used the occasion to interview them, and later created Wikipedia articles about them. Writing articles on staff members raises some particular difficulties as it can be hard to maintain a neutral point of view. However, the disadvantage is greatly overshadowed by the benefit of being able to conduct an interview. It was much more difficult to write the articles about Marcello Conversi or André Lagarrigue, where an interview was precluded, for obvious reasons. 3 Table 1: List of Wikipedia-articles created or significantly improved Article name (linked) Type of edit Comments Antiproton Accumulator Expanded article, adding sections and additional references; added infobox and pictures CERN Accelerator Complex Created infobox showing all current accelerators at CERN, added it to all articles on CERN accelerators Vinod Chohan Corrected references and improved language Assessed by Jens Vigen Marcello Conversi Created Pierre Darriulat Created, main sources being CV, publications Approved by and e-mail contact with Pierre Darriulat Pierre Darriulat Maria Fidecaro Added sections, additional references and an infobox Gargamelle experiment Created new, more in-depth article with