The Seven Stones

Wikification: will 2007 be a good “millésime”?

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Literature reviews invariably get outdated. Could reviews benefit from being hosted within a wiki environment (be “wikified”) and kept up-to-date by the community? This is the experiment the Openwetware community has just started on the OWWReviews page (see also post on Public Rambling).

One of the first articles selected for this interesting project is Ron Weiss’ review on synthetic biology (Andrianantoandro et al, 2006, Mol Syst Biol 2:2006.0028) published in Molecular Systems Biology last year. It will be interesting to follow the evolution of this derivative work and see how new knowledge is incorporated but also how the community deals with the more personal opinions expressed in such a review.

The model chosen for this initial experiment is to wikify previously published reviews. It might certainly also be appropriate to explore the reverse process, that is, to write a Review in the wiki first and let it evolve. Should such a piece be “frozen” at some point as a peer-reviewed publication? Who would be the authors? Would the definition of a minimal template providing some unifying structure be helpful? What topics are best suited to stimulate “distributed writing” via multiple incremental contributions from the community?

Comments

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    Stephen Freeland said:

    Thanks for this post: it’s something that my students and I have been thinking about a lot over the past couple of years.

    You clearly nail the problem here: a “healthy” wikified review (i.e. one that is steadily evolving under multi-authored guidance) would clearly be a good thing for science (and for readers) but not such a good thing for “up-and-coming” researchers who need to focus on publication credit for everything they write.

    I was up for tenure this past year, and a large part of what I’ve written in the last two or three years has been “reviewish” (usually seeking to define a playing field for one of my grad’s PhD’s). It would be a heavy disincentive to contribute the best of our thinking without anything tangible to hold before a tenure evaluation committee.

    One thought is whether there might be room for an option half-way between wiki’s and blogs. In other words, journal-mediated reviews that allow ad hoc comments between formal, invited “updates” (or “offshoots”). As is often the case already, new authors would have to make a pitch to the journal that such an update/offshoot is necessary, and would then receive full credit for this.

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