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The IMFAR page has sort of languished here for a long while as a low-quality low-traffic page, while there is still no wikipedia page for the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR; https://autism-insar.org/), the actual professional society that hosted the IMFAR meeting back in the day (and in fact changed the name of IMFAR to the "INSAR annual meeting" as of 2019). As an INSAR member and former autistic researchers committee chair in the organization (not currently), I feel that I'm at least a little conflicted, so I don't want to be seen as unilaterally promoting the org on WP (i.e., other people should consider it notable enough to have a page, etc.) However, it's an international professional society that runs a major academic conference, the meeting it used to run has a page despite the society not having such a page (there are plenty of other society pages like Society for Neuroscience [well-known] and Psychometric Society [more obscure]), so I don't think this would be an unreasonable ask. I just want literally anyone else to ensure that I'm not overstepping here by making the change myself. DoubleDoctorZack (talk) 21:00, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think what you propose could be an improvement, but from a Wikipedia editorial perspective, the major problem here is lack of citations to WP:Reliable sources. To establish that INSAR merits a Wikipedia article, can you summarize and present 2-5 claims from as many sources? This demonstrates that journalists or researchers who are sufficiently removed from the organization have actually written about the organization.
I see two news articles which cover the conference in Montreal and one for the Salt Lake City event. That seems reasonable to add to a subsection about the conference for the main organization.
It seems that the rest of the article cites sources which are self-published by the conference organizers. Wikipedia generally avoids including such information, but I think it could be acceptable to use wikilinks to conference presenters and keynotes since several of them are researchers who have biographies in Wikipedia.
Ask more questions if you like, but yes I support you developing this article, and again, my recommendation is to start by seeking sources off wiki. Wikipedia is a summary of what reputable sources say, so start by sharing those sources. Bluerasberry (talk)14:54, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From a cursory search, INSAR itself seems notable enough for its own page. The meeting itself feels like it's on the edge of notability—I'm not opposed to keeping this page and having a separate page for INSAR, but I'm also not opposed to having the meeting as just a subsection of the page for the society. TheZoodles (talk) 14:54, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to both of you for the input. FWIW, I would make the argument that "INSAR annual meeting" does not warrant its own page and should be a subsection of the soon-to-be-created INSAR (society) page (given the fact that the INSAR page won't itself have that much content). I would say most of the INSAR society content (like who their president is and who is on their committees and such) is probably going to be sourced from their official website, though could be verified through other sources. The biggest ones to look at would be Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative's editorially-independent autism-specific news outlet (formerly Spectrum News but now The Transmitter; a very topical long-form article that's basically "all of the society's/field's drama for the past decade" can be found here: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/autism-research-at-the-crossroads/) and Neuroscience News(who I know have reporters at the conference every year as well; see https://neurosciencenews.com/?s=international+society+for+autism+research). Unclear if this is different enough, but the Society publishes a journal (Autism Research through Wiley-Blackwell; another thing that should probably go on the page), and on the Journal website, there's also information about the society that can be sourced: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/19393806/homepage/society.html. DoubleDoctorZack (talk) 20:17, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another thing to note that there are lots of published papers that (at least in passing) summarize "INSAR special interest groups" that are essentially organized by the society via the annual meeting. I can share a few here:
There is also one more peer-reviewed article (https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3027; which is published in a journal, but by me when I was an officer of the organization [I'm senior/corresponding], along with my colleagues), describes one of the new "features" of the website that I built out (the ICCR: a service to connect autism researchers to community partners in order to lower the bar to participatory research; this was also covered by Spectrum in a piece where they interviewed me about it a year or so earlier: https://doi.org/10.53053/MOZM4905). Again, I'd feel weird adding this stuff myself, given the conflicts, but when it comes to the society itself, I do think the ICCR is notable as something the society "does" (clearly biased here, I did develop it after all, though it's out of my hands now, phew!) and would love to give it airspace on the page if other people at least feel the same [which in my not-so-limited experience being told to go around giving talks about it to other researchers, stakeholders, etc., that has tended to be my impression].
Again, thanks to you guys (and others) who have decided to help out with this. I don't know exactly when to pull the trigger on converting the page, if that's something we just want to do (or if more discussion should take place), but I'll probably just leave it for at least another few days or a week to see if others want to weigh in.
@DoubleDoctorZack: The standard template and process to use here is {{Edit COI}}. It is not so complicated to go that route, and it always works. The general way forward in that direction is to draft proposed text here on the talkpage or in any draft space, then use that template to call over a reviewer. If you drafted some text, then I could pre-review it, then when the additional COI reviewer came, then perhaps my pre-review could be another opinion on the table to help them finalize their review.
Are you able to draft some sentences and put those citations in place for what you suggest? I also edit at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals and in my opinion, conferences are closely connected to that, because conferences and journals are both sources of high quality knowledge. It makes sense for Wikipedia to try to describe conferences as best as it can, especially since conferences like this one are the source of other citations being used to fact-check claims in Wikipedia elsewhere. Try drafting a few sentences here then ping me. Bluerasberry (talk)15:59, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is obviously the right call, and I don't think there's any question that both the society and (perhaps especially) its annual conference are notable enough to warrant inclusion, but it probably doesn't matter too much if they're separate or not.
