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 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 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, , 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 , Roger Bailey, , Werner Herr and Rudiger Schmidt, and I corresponded with . 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 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 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 experiment Created new, more in-depth article with Approved by improved references, after two interviews with Donald Cundy Donald Cundy and one with Maria Fidecaro André Lagarrigue Created Luigi Di Lella Created using CV, publications and interview Approved by with Luigi Di Lella Luigi Di Lella -Antiproton Collider Created after interview with Roger Bailey and Approved by Werner Rudiger Schmidt, created infobox and added Herr and Rudiger them to all associated experiments Schmidt Created new, more in-depth article with Sent to Werner Herr improved references John Gordon Rushbrooke Created short, non-thorough article UA2 experiment Extended, adding improved references, Assessed by Luigi Di interviewed Luigi Di Lella and Peter Jenni Lella, Pierre Darriulat and Peter Jenni UA4 experiment Created short, non-thorough article UA5 experiment Created short, non-thorough article UA8 experiment Created short, non-thorough article

Publishing on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is free licence, meaning everyone, registered user or not, can edit the articles in the encyclopedia. In addition to listing several reliable references, there are other actions you can take to avoid that your edits are reverted or deleted. In order to be accepted by the Wikipedia community it is advisable to create a userpage that includes some information about your field of study and expertise. The Wikipedia community monitors new users more harshly, and it is therefore recommended to only do minor edits on existing articles in the beginning, before creating new ones. Except one minor disagreement, my contributions to Wikipedia were accepted with positive feedback. Interacting with the Wikipedia community turned out to be an enriching experience, resulting in the improvement of several of my articles. In order to improve the accessibility and visibility of the articles related to CERN, it is recommended to link extensively between related CERN articles. One should further make use of the CERN navigation template and other relevant navigation templates, and infoboxes. During the summer I created several infoboxes, for instance on the current CERN accelerator

4 complex. Linking to the author profile on INSPIRE and vice versa, makes it easier for the reader to access additional publications by the author. When creating new articles on people associated to CERN, I have added the Wikipedia-link to their author profile on INSPIRE (see for example the author profile of Luigi Di Lella). Over the course of the summer I have made a total of 418 edits on 67 unique pages, and created 33 pages (including redirect pages). The amount of work gone into an article greatly varies. The major articles either created or rewritten completely, as the article on the Proton- Antiproton Collider, the UA2 experiment and Gargamelle, I have worked on over several weeks doing tens of edits. The restructuring and expansion of existing articles were less labour intensive. Over the course of 10 weeks I created or significantly improved the articles listed in Table 1. By viewing the history of the article, it is possible to see the exact version created. To make the extensive photo archive of CERN public, it is advisable to search for and include explanatory pictures in the articles. Two archives were consulted: Photos in CDS and the CERN PhotoLab Archive of unscanned pictures. Photos are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and tagged with "CERN". It is important to make sure that the pictures are under CC BY-4.0 licence. During this project 31 pictures from the CERN archives have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Conclusion

When embarking on a mission to improve CERN’s presence on Wikipedia, your first step should be to create a user, get familiar with the Wikimarkup code and learn the rules of the Wikipedia community. In order to avoid any errors in the published articles one should involve staff members, not only through correspondence, but also by conducting interviews. Involving staff members in the Wikipedia project also has consequential advantages: an increased attention to the already existing articles, and perhaps initiative to write articles themselves. If the project is extended, one should strive for a continued focus on searching for and highlighting CERN publications of historical importance. By use of references, Wikipedia can become a more significant gateway to INSPIRE and CDS. After having become familiar with the collection of Wikipedia articles on CERN, I believe that there is room for improvement. Many articles are badly written, contain errors and lack references. Table 2 lists some of the articles I believe are in need of improvement. As I am deeply interested in science communication and history of physics, this project has been truly fulfilling and given me a good overview of the history of CERN and the developments in experimental and theoretical in the last hundred years. Still, CERN’s presence on Wikipedia and the quality of the articles could be improved tremendously if there was greater awareness of the platform in the CERN research community. Encouraging CERN research groups to improve Wikipedia articles would be a simple and less laborious way of striving towards the goal: to nurture scientific awareness in the public.

5 Table 2: List of Wikipedia-articles in need of further improvement Name of article Reason for improvement Marked as "stub" Robert Aymar Marked as "stub" CERN LINACs Article on all CERN Linacs, marked as in "need of attention" Giuseppe Fidecaro Does not exist Frank Kenneth Goward Does not exist, see List of streets at CERN Intersecting Storage Ring Marked as "stub" Low Energy Antiproton Ring Marked as in "need of better references" and "stub" Marked as "stub" Proton Synchrotron Booster Marked as "stub" Christopher Llewellyn Smith Marked as "stub" Henry Stroke Does not exist According to Werner Herr the article contains several errors Synchrocyclotron Marked as "stub"

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my supervisor, Annette Holtkamp, for giving me free rein and allowing me to follow my curiosity and whims. She has given me time and room to learn in my own pace, and the door to her office was always open when I ran into trouble or had questions about my writing. Secondly, I would like to thank Jens Vigen, without whom I would probably not be working on this project at all. He has generously introduced me to experienced and charismatic physicists, given me advice on which doors to knock on and made me feel very welcome. I must express my gratitude to all the CERN Staff Members, retired and not, who have taken the time to read and comment my articles, and answer my sometimes oblivious questions on physics. Through them I have learned about the history of experimental physics, particle physics and academic writing. Their inspirational stories from a life dedicated to science will surely be my fondest memory from this summer. I would like to thank all my co-workers at the Scientific Information Service for their warm welcome. I would especially like to thank my fellow summer student, Max Lindqvist, who relentlessly poof-read my articles, always took time – sometimes at the expense of his own project – to discuss any concept I struggled with, and, last but not least, kept my spirits high all summer.

6 References

[1] CERN. CERN’s Communications Strategy. Education, Communication and Outreach group, 2017. URL: http://communications.web.cern.ch/sites/communications.web..ch/ files/files/strategy/CERN_CommunicationsStrategy_2017.pdf. [2] Hermann A.; B. Lanfranco; J. Krige; U. Merits; D. Pestre. History of CERN; Volume I. North- Holland, 1987. ISBN: 0444870377. [3] Hermann A.; J. Krige; U. Merits; D. Pestre. History of CERN; Volume II. North-Holland, 1990. ISBN: 0444882073.

[4] J. Krige (ed.) History of CERN; Volume III. North-Holland, 1996. ISBN: 0444896554. [5] Schopper H.; L. Di Lella (Ed.) 60 Years of CERN Experiments and Discoveries. Advanced Series on Directions in High Energy Physics vol. 23. World Scientific, 2015. ISBN: 9789814663182.

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