How to Be a Science Writer

I'm really excited for my seminar class tomorrow because Teisha Rowland, a grad student at UCSB, will be our special guest science writer. I'll post more after the class, but for now, I wanted to link to an interesting post she made about attending the Science Writers 2009 Conference.

Her coverage of the conference provides a lot of insight into the challenges facing science writers today. I think I'll definitely be referring back to the post in the future. Among all the useful info, a quote from one of the speakers she heard, Dan Gillmor, caught my attention. He said that "Wikipedia is 'the best place to start, [but the] worst place to stop.' "

Though I certainly don't consider my science posts on this blog to be science "journalism" (I think of them more as personal explorations of things that catch my attention), I try hard to be thorough in linking to all my sources and sites that may provide some extra background info. I do often link to Wikipedia for my "further information" links, so maybe this would be a good time to say that I agree with Dan Gillmor's opinion on the site.

Wikipedia can be a great place to start because it gathers a lot of information about very specific topics into one place. While a Wikipedia page should never be cited as a source, the source material for the article (listed at the bottom of the page) can provide a wealth of information.

For example, in preparation for our discussion tomorrow, I read some articles discussing the Woo Suk Hwang cloning scandal. I only had articles from 2005, and was curious about subsequent developments in the controversy, so I checked it out on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article mentioned something the papers hadn't: that Hwang's research may have actually provided a major breakthrough for stem cell research, just not the one he claimed it did.

But I didn't stop there. I checked the sources cited for that specific piece of information, and found links to two articles confirming it, one of which was an article in Scientific American.

Wikipedia can be misleading (see my post from last Wednesday), but it can be extremely useful when approached as a starting point, with the ultimate goal of discovering information from more reputable sources.

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