From the Wikimedia Blog Post:

Maybe you’ve been editing Wikipedia for years. Or maybe you made your first edit a few days ago. Whatever your experience, you likely know at least one central fact about editing – that it can be difficult for newcomers to master the skills necessary for contributing to Wikipedia.

We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by increasing participation. We’re designing the Bookshelf Project to create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today. And we believe recruiting new high-value contributors to Wikipedia will necessarily increase the usefulness and quality of our encyclopedia.

[Snip]

Now we already know that many Wikipedia readers have never thought about editing the encyclopedia – even though there’s lots of information available about how to do so. Our goal is to reach out to those editors more actively – both to make them feel welcome and give them a great set of starting tools. We hope to seed the knowledge and enthusiasm about contributing to Wikipedia in such a way that it propagates itself.

[Snip]

The Bookshelf Project will include materials to help journalists and other communications professionals do their jobs more easily, including techniques and information to help them be sure the information they use and the copy they write is accurate and up to date.

Much More in the Complete Post

See Also: Silicon.com Interviews Jimmy Wales

In the interview Wales talks about Wikipedia editors and his desire to have a wide variety of people add and edit type the encyclopedia.

From the Interview

This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site’s biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia’s pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous – or “a certain type of person”, in Wales’ words.

“Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy,” he says. “What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male – tragically 85 per cent male.”–Jimmy Wales

New Stats from Rapleaf

In our last post, [An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender] we analyzed age and gender of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users. For this post, we sampled the same 120,000 users and studied their online social media profile counts and friend counts across 25 social media sites in order to gauge how active these email users are on the social web.

Unlike age and gender data, online activity and friend counts do not have clear trends across email service providers. What the data seems to suggest is that Hotmail users tend to have slightly more social media profiles, and Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected overall.

[Snip]

The vast majority of email users have two or fewer social media memberships and less than 50 friends online. Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected while Hotmail users generally have more social media memberships. Marketers interested in word-of-mouth advertising on social media should focus their efforts on the 7% of users with more than 150 friends to engage influencers.

The complete results contain numerous charts and graphs.

Source: Rapleaf

Yesterday, we posted a couple of items from The Scholarly Kitchen with differing viewpoints about the use of social media and social networking. Read both posts factor in your personal experiences and then make up your own mind.

Today, an article from Cell discusses how some scientists are using Twitter.

Twitter needs no introduction. This “microblogging” service has gained tremendous popularity in the 2 years since its launch. Yet, most scientists are steering clear of it. Laura Bonetta speaks to some who have found value in tweeting.

One scientist who has found value in Twitter is Brent Stockwell, associate professor of biology and chemistry at Columbia University. “I use it to collect information from science newsfeeds and from various individuals,” he says. “It provides a single source where you can go to scan news and papers.”

There are many ways to stay abreast of research findings, including automated PubMed searches and Google alerts. But, says Stockwell, Twitter provides a unique way to hear about papers “tangentially related to what I am doing, so that they would not come up through my usual alerts, and not sufficiently high profile that I would read about them in The New York Times.

Much More After a Click
(more…)

Two posts from The Scholarly Kitchen blog might be of interest to some of you.

1) About three weeks ago (10/19/2009), David Crotty posted that how scientists ARE NOT using social media.

[David] Bradley gives what I think are overly generous estimates of use of the sites, given the level of traffic one sees on most. Using sheer numbers of members is always problematic since so many people sign up, take a look around, and never return. Numbers of members actively posting in the last week/month are much more telling, but very few sites are willing to give out such data. Proponents of such networks argue that we’re still in early days and that eventually, membership will grow. Personally, I think that ship has already sailed, at least for the current set of offerings. The issue isn’t a lack of awareness of social networks–who hasn’t heard of Myspace or Facebook?–but instead is a lack of compelling reasons to participate.

2) Today (11/3/2009), Kent Anderson reports that scientists ARE using social media and in some cases social networks.

In an analysis published in the October 30th issue of Cell, Laura Bonetta quotes a number of scientists who are using Twitter to broadcast awareness of papers they find interesting while learning about papers others find interesting. Most of those quoted have 1,000+ followers. In addition, scientists Bonetta found are Twittering from meetings to help peers follow along…t seems there’s plenty of evidence that scientists are using social networks (from general ones like Facebook and LinkedIn to more specialized ones like Academia.edu and others), as well as social media tools, from blogs to Twitter to RSS.

We included just two brief passages from each post. You make the call after reading both of them.

Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

See Also: Facebook for Scientists Gets Millions in Funding, Seven Founding Schools Involved