Scholarpedia:Assistant Editor

From Scholarpedia

This page is not peer reviewed. Contributors to this page are not anonymous. Only editors can modify it.

Interested graduate students and postdocs are invited to volunteer with Scholarpedia as assistant editors. There is a small but vital amount of work to be done in key projects involving a few hours per week. Please, check the list below regularly, as new projects may appear. Contact editor-in-chief@scholarpedia.org if you would like to volunteer for any of them. Mention your knowledge of WikiText, HTML, LaTeX, and your English skills.

Contents

Featured author column

Main Page of Scholarpedia features selected authors on a monthly basis. Ideally, the featured author column should be updated weekly.

Job: Interact with the editor-in-chief and other editors of Scholarpedia to identify candidates for the "featured author" column. Contact the authors to prepare/confirm their biography and to get a recent photo. Post the biography to the main page.

Project Page: /Featured Author Column.

Follow-up authors of approved articles

Interaction with authors of approved articles on behalf of Scholarpedia (good communication skills are required). Most of the authors are living-legends in their respective fields.

Linking to articles from author's web pages

To ensure that Scholarpedia articles appear at the top of the Google search, authors not only need to cite articles in their university pages, but also link to them. Unfortunately, many authors do not know how to do that.

Job: Check the authors' websites, contact those that do not have links to Scholarpedia, and help them incorporate such links.

Project Page: /Linking to Articles From Author Pages.

Follow-up invited authors

Editors of Scholarpedia send invitations to the best experts most of whom respond within a week. Approximately 10% of invitations are never answered despite repeated (automatic) follow-ups from Scholarpedia server.

Job: Contact the experts via phone, answer any questions they have about the project, and help them to reserve the article or to decline the invitation (ask for the name of "the second best expert" in the latter case).

Project Page: /Follow-Up Invited Authors.

Identify original authors/inventors

The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite the original authors and inventors to write articles. Sometimes, the choice is quite obvious: L. Chua for Chua Circuit, T. Kohonen for Kohonen Network, or J. Hopfield for Hopfield Network. Often, it is not clear at all whom to invite. For example, who invented wavelets? Sometimes, it is not clear how to contact the original author. For example, where is Kalman of the Kalman Filter?

Job: Search the web, talk to experts, make phone calls, get the name and the contact info of the original author/inventor.

Project Page: /Identify Original Authors.

Copyediting and assistance to authors with WikiText

Many invited authors of Scholarpedia are senior experts, often retired, who have no knowledge of wiki environment and WikiText format. They are also confused by the online submission system and the web in general.

Some authors need help with converting illustrations from one format into another (e.g., large .gif file into smaller .jpeg, or .avi movie into animated gif).

Job: Be the liaison between authors and Scholarpedia. Help authors to convert articles from MSWord/LaTeX to WikiText, to upload figures, to submit them for peer-review. In addition, work with the editor-in-chief to develop guidelines for a good style. Modify existing articles to conform with the guidelines. Enforce the style in new articles.

Requirements: knowledge of WikiText, LaTeX, and HTML is required, plus native English and superb sense of style.

Project Page: /Copyeditor Help.

Search Engine Optimization

It is important that Scholarpedia articles come first in web search results. For this, the internal structure of Scholarpedia must be optimized to maximize Google PageRank and other criteria used by search engines.

Job: Interact with editor-in-chief to optimize Scholarpedia for search engines. Requirements: must be familiar with white-hat SEO.

Project Page: /SEO.

For authors