RE: How Do You Write Your STEM Post?
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I love your pathology posts, I am not a pathologist, and I don't have the experience to identify sometimes the things that you point out in the slides. I love the fluency of your text though.
I think that you added too much emotion to this text! I read some parts twice to try to see if I got it right. I was trying to find you, maybe, on Discord to see if I could have some points clarified, but I don't know if I can. So I will leave here my questions:
- What exactly motivated you in this post?
- Ok you are in favor of short posts, for me if it is a 300-words post and if you have passed through the steps of creation + passed information, I don't have any problem with it, it is ok. But I saw in here people getting a novelty in STEM topics and just reformulated the paragraphs, you can see similar paragraphs in the original text with different words, so what is the creative effort from the STEM author?
- It wasn't clear if you were against or in favor of adding references in a let's say "lay" text about a STEM topic. For example, once in a while, I read " scientists just said that eating the vegetable x can cause an effect y in your body" without a reference. So I need to go for this information to check if it is true or not. If I find some reliable sources of this information I usually post it in the comments as a recommendation for the next time to be careful on that. During the last two years, we had lots of fake news on the internet about the COVID pandemic, I think as a curator is a duty to flag something that isn't "kosher".
- What do you think about self-plagiarism here? There is a user that likes to mostly copy and paste his own scientific articles in here? It isn't a creative effort, since he is mostly copying and pasting figures and texts.
Cheers
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I was about to write something along the lines above, with a few questions too to understand better the problem at stake. You were however faster than me. I will then just avoid writing anything in addition, and wait for the answer from the post's author.
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
After receiving a suggestion that I have to add sources to a post I began to look back on the things I really find odd looking at Hive social media culture specifically on STEM community and then comparing it to STEM community off the platform. If I want to use the platform as a social media writing a STEM post, I would do so with the degree of freedom given to me by the community page or my own personal blog permits. It was a constructive suggestion but it made me ponder further on the culture that we have as a community on STEM.
Are we putting sources because we want to sound credible? are we putting sources to conform to a curation guideline? are we putting sources so that our readers can further enrich themselves with the knowledge we share? then a spot check on the topics and engagement people have on their posts with heavily sourced articles and long form content, I ask, who are the members of the community even writing for and what goals do they have for posting?
I got my shit together that I just want to share stuff interesting I find from my work and the $ that comes become a side incentive. But for people that are just creating derivative content from contents they find interesting and obeying these norms called curation guidelines, I tell you, we have different purposes to post. This whole post was to raise awareness on the culture we have as a STEM community.
I have never been asked to source information I share on other social media related to my profession on groups because it is assumed that being in the same field, the audience I have understood the topic and are there for the trivia. If there are any things unclear, asking for the sources were done politely and comparing references was done in the discussion. There is no community guideline that says post the link to provide credibility to the claim. Readers or in this case, curators here, should do their own thinking/research to validate what they read.
Short or long form is fine, I have no objection to the author's preference how long they want to present what they share. It's just a personal bias if I find the topic even interesting to begin with but that's just me.
It's a bit long but I answered the question to a different person you can find here
I think adding references is nice as an option and if there was none, it can be politely asked for. It's in this bubble called Hive where I see the addition of references becomes a prerequisite or social gatepass to add credibility to the information when it's been seen before that even when one adds references, the text isn't free from plagiarism. If the reference material explains the subject better than the author, the author will do the reader a favor and just link the reader to the source that paraphrase the content to save each other's time. This is how I see some write their STEM post.
"Some people are more interested in writing textbooks than showing what the textbooks meant - enforcer48"
Was a great way of putting up how I write my own post. I read about Disease X, encountered it in my practice and shared the pictures from the actual specimen, and included some snippets of the textbook definitions and then argued that yeah the textbook pictures look great and describe the disease classically as this but in practice, you hardly get a cookie cutter shot for content. This is the part where I show what the textbooks meant because I am hands on in the field.
Now if I write something about programming and advances in coding of today's time while not my profession, I think I could take a pass if I sourced it right and do the right wordsmithing BUT does that really make my post valuable? I'm not interested in the subject but I can fake interest enough to get people to curate my work like it has value. And this is what I observe some authors commit to, engage in various topics that I don't even see some consistency in them being passionate about but hey, that's just me and my bias.
As a curator and reader, if you really value what you absorb, you can do your own research on the subject and verify the claim, asking for the source from the author makes the task easier but if the curator is actually worth their salt, they'll still verify the reference and not take the author's word for it alone like it wasn't handed to them easily from the beginning. Some curators (not only on STEM community) just skip this part of the process after seeing a list of references.
If they own the copyrighted material, it's their choice to use that material how much they want and curators to decide if they want to reward that material. It's only a matter of how well the presentation is and whether the information presented was validated.
Thanks for answering everything! I agree with most of the things I guess. I understand your thoughts about throwing all the responsibility for DYOR like any other source found on the internet, however, I don't know yet if it is the best way to hive scientific-based texts. As I wrote in an article not long ago, hopefully, your critics were not based on that, for me, I don't want to see a text here with each statement with one citation. Maybe only if the hive is going to be used as a scientific journal like another article that I wrote, but I guess we are far from that. The problem is that maybe 90% or more of the readers are lay, and our responsibility as scientists is to give fundaments for these people to believe in the facts stated in our text, lay audience is questioning all the things, probably you saw that with all the vaccine and covid information stuff, people nowadays are debating about the efficacy of vaccines in the lottery line! Another option is for people to know that x,y, and z are scientific curators here, and if something was curated it has more probability of the article not having problems.
About the size of the text, it is a hive culture that you need to write tons of stuff! I got a critique once in a movie review about that, and for god sake, I didn't want to write more about that review. Maybe I did the wrong thing by just adding a couple of more paragraphs just to satisfy the user. an important one for that community, as like you can see, I am a newbie and I wanted to grow in that community. That sucks.
Well, I hope that wasn't me the guy the criticized your citation! If I remember I had never had any problems with your texts like I said before! Cheers
I may or may not have based on it yours, I was browsing topics and posts but not particular about specific authors. I think of the trend as a community problem as these are the guidelines for curation, we post according to those guidelines otherwise we don't get upvotes. And then the behavior gets reinforced until everyone does the same thing without doubting or thinking why was there even that policy to begin with?
It's a possibility but there's no hard incentive other than being passionate about sharing knowledge. We aren't visible enough to be a resource center and given how decentralized the place is, it's expected that it'll be littered with fake info just like any other parts of the internet.
In the day of information where truth can be accessible and be compared to everything else, ignorance is a choice. I don't necessarily believe what I read but if I'm interested in what I read, I'd compare notes. If the lay people want to take my word for it or any other STEM writer here because of some credible links and what not, that's their prerogative. As far as I'm concerned, I make conscious effort to dumb down some things to be readable enough.
If I was talking to another microbiologist about how some Serratia species of bacteria can produce red pigments, I wouldn't get asked what is my source by a colleague, this is the same energy as discussing an apple is red and we both know it. We both are on the same page but a layman would look up what is a Serratia bacteria and one of the encounters they would get is literature supporting how some species of this can produce red pigment, they did their extra reading and that's great. The willingness to learn and not just take stuff at face value. It's not my responsibility to teach people how to validate what they read online, I'm just treating the site as a social media with content that happens to be STEM related.
That works if the curators themselves are working or have expertise in the field they are curating. I can't make a comment on mathematics, programming and etc because that's not my forte, I can make a comment on how a blog is formatted as a blogger only but not fully do justice on the information shared. What we have is a limited pool of professionals curating on fields that may or may not be on their expert knowledge but this is just my opinion.
No problem at all. I just don't like the culture of asking for references when knowledge isn't being contested. One would usually ask for references if they want to understand more or want to contest info they read. It's a common courtesy to guide the reader where you get the info from but it's not mandatory for me anyway. I firmly believe it's the curator or reader that should have the initiative to contest the information they read than take the author's word and links to credible sources. Because right now, it just feels like no reference? not credible.
If I make a claim an apple is red, I doubt no one is going to contest that. But being my own devil's advocate, I'd ask the author what apple variety, time of harvest and geographic location was the apple from to justify it is red?
I could write about programming, spin it like I understood it, pretend I love it, and then conform to the blogging formats for the community but no passion for the knowledge shared and just here for the $ because this is what the community wants to see.