On blogging science

Added a few entries to the SciTech portion of Wikipedia Current Events.

Such posts are harder than I thought. And is it worth doing so on WCE anyway? Or better done on Science Blog?

For example, what sources should one cite? Press Releases are good, since that's where the press gets its information from usually. How about the original journal abstract? Good, but not always understandable. NYT is good for a while, but after a certain amount of time articles become pay-per-view. BBC is good, since those links are pretty permanent. But how many good science articles don't get BBC pages? I'll have to look for those.

I debated whether to note that the first author on one of the articles - about the discovery of the three largest stars to date - is actually an undergraduate (nice work, Emily!) but decided against it. Figured I'd focus on the science rather than the scientists.

And should such posts include the scientists' names or nationalities? Dunno. I'm putting in nationalities to force myself to get a larger variety.

And should one blog science stories that are not well covered but aren't recent? Like the SALT telescope in South Africa, the largest single telescope in the Southern Hemisphere? (Note the word 'single'. Otherwise you'd probably want the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina.

I'm also pretty tired of science journalists only getting stories from Nature and Science and sometimes PNAS, or stuff announced at large meetings, so I'm going to look around for other stuff. Especially about speech and language related topics.