1. Promoting Laboratory
Software with Wikipedia
Aaron G. Sauers
September 5, 2012
www.inl.gov
Purpose
• Wikipedia entries are powerful marketing elements for Lab software
– They provide page view analytics
– They rank high in Google searches
– Can be Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
– Can be rapidly modified
– P.I.s appreciate these entries
– Potential end-users teach themselves about the offering prior to
licensing inquiry
– They help tie authorship back to your laboratory
• Laboratory software is particularly suited for Wikipedia entries, as there
is typically a robust corpus of scholarly articles
• Having a body of papers to cite goes a long way towards satisfying
Wikipedia’s notability requirements
• Serves broad, nonexclusive licensing strategy
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2. Key interaction areas
Create an account: it protects your IP address
and allows you to create entries.
Key interaction areas
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3. Click here to edit
Key interaction areas
Publication release number in header
Key interaction areas
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4. Neutral Point Of View (NPOV)
July 9, 2012: 58 page views
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6. Fear not…
• Use my entries as templates for your own software
• Your interns may have editing experience
• Contact me for help
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7. Interested in Learning More?
Contact me:
Aaron G. Sauers
Commercialization Manager
Technology Transfer
Idaho National Laboratory
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aaronsauers
Find me on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronsauers
Email me: aaron.sauers@inl.gov
Backup Slides
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8. Open Source Licenses for Wikipedia Text
• Much of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are dual-licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported
License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License
(GFDL)
• Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the CC-BY-
SA and GFDL licenses ensure the content is freely-distributable and
reproducible
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