Work Project Report – Summer Student Programme 2018

STUDENT: KATHARINA KOLATZKI MAIN SUPERVISOR: MICHA MOSKOVIC SECOND SUPERVISOR: ANNETTE HOLTKAMP

Abstract

With this report, I summarize the work conducted during my internship with the CERN Scientific Information Service as part of the Summer Student Programme 2017. I was in charge of writing Wikipedia articles about CERN experiments, accelerators and scientists. In total, I have contributed seven articles to the English Wikipedia and four to the German Wikipedia, next to smaller improvements on other articles and platforms.

Introduction

It is one of CERN’s main goals not just to conduct fundamental research in the field of high-energy physics, but also to share its vision and discoveries with society. Therefore, a good communication strategy is of key interest in this endeavour. CERN’s Scientific Information Service (SIS) manages the library as well as the historical and scientific archives of CERN, ensuring that both scientists and the general public have convenient access to the contents produced at CERN. The distribution of this knowledge can be implemented via different methods and media. Next to the physical archives and library, online databases have grown more and more important in recent years. These are for example the CERN Grey Book, the high-energy physics information platform INSPIRE, the CERN Document Server CDS and the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

During my Summer Student Internship between 25 June 2018 and 17 August 2018, I had the task to improve the representation of past CERN accelerators, experiments and important scientists on Wikipedia. In total, I have submitted 129 edits to the English Wikipedia. Seven of those were either page creations or considerable additions to pages that had been marked as “stub” before.

Since I am a native German speaker and the German Wikipedia is the second largest Wikipedia after the English one, I have also contributed there. Among 38 total edits I have added three new pages and substantially improved one article, all based on the pages created for the English Wikipedia beforehand.

pg. 1 Work with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is defined as “a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content.”1 It is openly editable, i.e. everyone with internet access can freely contribute to it, given that Wikipedia’s quality standards are met. This differentiates Wikipedia from all other encyclopedias and dictionaries, where a defined group of editors decides about the content.

Wikipedia is used by people world-wide, with diverse backgrounds and interests. Therefore, it is of CERN’s interest to be represented well and correctly on the platform. There are long and thorough Wikipedia pages about CERN itself, as well as its current experiments. For example, the Wikipedia page CERN is read by an average of 1624 people every day.2 For the article about the Large Hadron Collider, this number is even higher; the page counts an average of 2067 readers per day.3

Even though general interest in CERN is high, information about many of CERN’s experiments and accelerator structures are not or just rudimentary available on Wikipedia. This is especially the case for those structures that are not active anymore. It was therefore my task to improve this situation by writing Wikipedia pages about accelerators and experiments that were active at CERN in the past. Additionally, I was also in charge of a few articles about CERN scientists.

Writing a Wikipedia page

The work of writing a Wikipedia page can be divided into four different stages:

 1 Finding a topic to write about  2 Researching  3 Writing the article and implementing it on Wikipedia  4 Receiving/incorporating feedback from colleagues, scientists and Wikipedia users

During the first stage of finding a suitable topic, I started with suggestions from my supervisors. Additionally, my predecessor Ida Storehaug’s report from last year was very helpful, since she lists Wikipedia articles that she has found in need of further improvement.4

After having decided on a topic, the main part of the work consisted of researching material and finding information that I could base the article upon. Here, I consulted the CERN Grey Book5, the

1 Wikipedia:About Retrieved on 15 August 2018 2 Pageviews Analysis: CERN Retrieved on 15 August 2018 3 Pageviews Analysis: Large Hadron Collider Retrieved on 15 August 2018 4 CDS: Improving CERN’s presence on Wikipedia (Ida Storehaug, 2017) Retrieved on 15 August 2018 5 CERN Grey book database: The CERN Experimental Programme, retrieved on 15 August 2018

pg. 2 high-energy physics information platform INSPIRE6, and mostly the CERN Document Server.7 I was also in contact with CERN scientists who are experts on the respective topics and helped me clarify my understanding of the physical and historical details. These were Bettina Mikulec and Heiko Damerau for the Proton Synchrotron Booster, CERN Hadron Linacs and LEP Pre-Injector, as well as Heinrich Wahl and Mieczyslaw Krasny concerning the CDHS experiment.

As soon as I had enough material and references, I started writing the Wikipedia page. It proved to be very convenient to create the first drafts within my personal Wikipedia sandbox.8 There, I could already implement the article in Wikipedia syntax, inserting references and crosslinks the way they would be visible in the real Wikipedia page later.

Once the first draft was finished, I sent it to different people to proofread. These were generally my supervisors Micha Moskovic and Annette Holtkamp and the respective experts that I had been in contact with. As soon as I had incorporated their feedback, I published the article on its official Wikipedia page. Once this was done, everybody accessing Wikipedia could read and edit the article.

Summary of my work

As stated above, I have contributed to the English Wikipedia with seven major articles and to the German Wikipedia with four. The page names, including the type of edit and the number of edits by other Wikipedia users once I had submitted my edit, are summarized in Table 1 and Table 2.

While researching content for the articles, I worked with several information platforms provided by CERN. This was mainly the CERN Document Server (CDS). Here, I sometimes came across information discrepancies between the different platforms. For example, sometimes the official date of an experiment proposal stated in the CERN Grey Book did not agree with the date of the proposal document I found on CDS. Whenever I came across such discrepancies, I made sure to harmonise the information provided on all involved platforms.

In addition to plain text information, I also looked for images that could be included into the pages to illustrate the described matter. Here, I had to make sure to act according to CERN’s and Wikipedia’s copyright regulations. Usually, pictures are openly available on CDS under the CC BY-SA Creative Commons License, although this is not generally stated on each CDS page. Therefore, whenever I wanted to use a picture that I had found on CDS, I first had to manually set its copyright information to Creative Commons before downloading it. After that was done, I uploaded the image on

6 INSPIRE: High Energy Physics information system, retrieved on 15 August 2018 7 CDS: CERN Document Server, retrieved on 15 August 2018 8 Help:My sandbox on Wikipedia, retrieved on 15 August 2018

pg. 3 Wikimedia Commons9. In total, I have uploaded 20 new images on Wikimedia and inserted them into their respective Wikipedia pages. For example, I expanded the Wikipedia page about CERN physicist Guiseppe Cocconi by adding a picture of him giving a lecture.10

Although the German and English Wikipedia are very similar and both belong to the Wikimedia Foundation, I observed differences in the writing and editing process. This mainly refers to the way newly submitted articles and general changes to already existing articles are treated. While an update of an English Wikipedia page immediately is published and visible for every page visitor, German Wikipedia pages first have to be “screened” (German: “sichten”) by verified long-term Wikipedia users.11 Before, the latest edits are marked as “not screened” and can only be seen by logged-in users. As a result of this additional step, which can sometimes take a few days, the articles I submitted to the German Wikipedia have been reviewed more thoroughly and frequently than the corresponding English articles. This observation is summarized in the right column of Table 1 and Table 2. Whereas most of my English pages have never or just once been minimally edited by another Wikipedia user, there was significantly more interaction on the German pages. All feedback was very constructive and mostly, just minor typing or syntax errors were corrected.

Table 1: Contributions to the English Wikipedia

Page name (linked) Type of edit # edits by other users

Marzio Nessi Created new short page with info about 4 biography and career

Proton Synchrotron Booster Created in-depth page 1 (had been marked as “stub” before)

CERN Hadron Linacs Created in-depth page (had been marked 1 as “in need of attention” before)

LEP Pre-Injector Created new, thorough page 1

Antiproton Collector Extended page, added pictures 0 (had been marked as “stub” before)

Frank Kenneth Goward Created new page with info about 0 biography and career

CDHS experiment Created thorough page (had been 0 marked as “stub” before)

9 Wikimedia Commons: a collection of freely usable media files, retrieved on 16 August 2018 10 Giuseppe Cocconi (Wikipedia) , retrieved on 16 August 2018 11 Hilfe:Gesichtete Versionen (German Wikipedia) , retrieved on 16 August 2018

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Table 2: Contributions to the German Wikipedia

Page name (linked) Type of edit # edits by other users

Proton Synchrotron Booster Extended page 2

CERN Hadron Linacs Created new page, based on English page 7

Vorlage:CERNBeschleuniger Created new template with an overview of 3 CERN’s accelerator complex, based on the English version

LEP Pre-Injector Created new page, based on English page 5

Conclusion and Outlook

During the eight weeks as a Summer Student Intern at CERN’s Scientific Information Service, I have worked with several information platforms, mainly Wikipedia. There, among smaller edits and contributions, I have created or extended seven English and four German pages.

The work turned out to be very interesting and educating for me. I have learned about the different ways in which CERN and the high-energy physics community archive and share scientific data. Searching through CERN’s digital archives and compiling information for Wikipedia has been a truly enjoyable task for me. Additionally, the discussions with Micha Moskovic, Annette Holtkamp and Jens Vigen, as well as several CERN scientists, have given me many new and inspiring insights into the history and future of fundamental science. To all of them, I am thankful for sharing their expertise and knowledge with me.

It is in every encyclopedia’s nature to never be complete. Therefore, there will always be new Wikipedia pages to be created and more information to be added. That is why I hope that also in the future, summer students and other interested scientists will take the opportunity to contribute to this powerful and versatile platform.

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