This WikiProject aims primarily to coordinate the efforts of Wikipedians interested in science in an effort to improve popular science-related articles. It is motivated by the belief that a good scientific article should be both understandable by the "general public" and interesting to the scientifically inclined. This is important because many popular articles are about science, so contributing to them brings us the satisfaction that it will be appreciated by many.
The goals of this WikiProject are:
To attract Wikipedians to this project and focus the effort for maximum efficiency
To serve as a nexus and discussion area to build consensus on how to write good scientific articles.
The approach is to start with the most popular scientific articles, then focus on the more specific ones. The most popular scientific articles are the ones that are most referenced by other articles (as Google does).
The Outline of science and its branch outline articles are intended to summarize all of the sciences. These are in turn part of Wikipedia's outline system which is one of Wikipedia's main contents systems. Please look it and its branches over and fill-in missing topics. If Wikipedia has an article or article section about those topics, please add links to them.
While analyzing the outlines, please consider (and fix as needed):
What's missing?
Is the structure of the outline (sections and indents) representative of the subject?
Does the outline help convey the relationships between the topics presented in the best way possible?
The overall purpose of the outlines is to help readers comprehend science. The science outline provides a taxonomy of the subject, and also serves as a table of contents and navigation aid to browse Wikipedia's articles (and article sections) about the subject. It is also a useful tool for the WikiProject to analyze, plan and develop science-related material. Outlines are a hub from which to organize scientific topics.
The concept of "reverse outlines" is a very relevant example. Reverse outlines provide a structural model overview, which in addition to being a summary of the work, can reveal gaps in coverage and other weaknesses for revision purposes. Please help improve the Outline of science article, which is this project's bird's eye view.
Complete requests of other editors on the talk pages of science-related articles (2025 in science and/or other articles for science-related topics of the year (in the box on the right)
Create new articles for items of this article, mostly articles relating to new scientific fields/topics/findings (the page does not use redlinks anymore but you will quickly identify possible new articles when reading it; here you can find a version with over 60 redlinked examples)
Some of the lists' items have not yet been integrated into their wikilinked articles; if you add a study there it should also be relevant to at least one other article
Find studies published under a compatible open license (like CC BY 4.0) and upload the studies' images with descriptions from the study and add these images to articles if they are relevant and useful there
When a study with a useful image is published under an incompatible or unclear license (or the image is published not in a study but elsewhere), you could contact its authors (Twitter/Mail) and ask them to give you the permission to upload them under CC BY 4.0 (or whether they could upload the image/s under a compatible license)
You can also think about whether images would be useful as you read a science-related article and then search for such images:
if they already exist add them (if already on WMCommons) or upload them (if the license is ok) or ask their authors for permissions
Peer review at this project is no longer active and scientific articles should be directed to the general Wikipedia peer review.
Reviews of articles that were completed are archived here.
According to this survey, the prime disincentive against making scholarly contributions to Wikipedia is that it will not advance careers. Wikiversity:First Journal of Science will be a peer-reviewed journal that should alleviate this problem for recent college graduates who are not expected to have published in the established scholarly journals.
Another unique feature of Wikiversity:First Journal of Science is that edited versions of Wikipedia articles are welcome, and are presented as Wikipedia articles on the Wikiversity journal via permalinks to the history of Wikipedia articles. This is currently accomplished in a rather awkward fashion, by moving the Wikipedia article into the editor's user space, and after proper attribution, deleting all that extraneous prose that Wikipedia articles tend to acquire. An example of this shown in one of the three "pseudo-articles" that were used to create a mockup issue. Of the three "pseudo-articles" in this mockup, I consider only one to be suitable for publication. It is Wikipedia's Introduction to quantum mechanics. Note how the logo was inserted into the "pseudo-accepted" version without permission of the article's current editors. In other words, all of Wikipedia's 5 million articles are candidates for publication in this journal, and in a manner of speaking, have already effectively submitted their manuscripts to Wikiversity:First Journal of Science for review--Guy vandegrift (talk) 05:24, 14 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
