Literature reviews invariably get outdated.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?