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Published online 16 December 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1312
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Publish in Wikipedia or perish
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Really-really nice ! On my side I created many biographies of scientists just from the information contained in the abstracts ( e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... ). All this information would else be lost in the article.
Wooops, I should have check my comment, the broken link was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kaznelson or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Edwin_Shope or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Anastasi or .... etc...
The article seems unclear about the exact workflow. How is the Wikipedia rule about not allowing original research dealt with?
As Sam points out Wikipedia does not include original unpublished research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research However, the key element here is unpublished. The RNA family articles published by RNA Biology undergo full peer review and should only be included once published. These articles are rather self contained discoveries or reviews that fit very well to the concept of a wikipedia article.
Adding to what Alex just said: the workflow is that the peer-reviewed article in RNA Biology comes first, defining a new RNA family or redefining an old one. The Wikipedia page appears when the article appears (with reference to the article). The Wikipedia page is then the base for additional encyclopedic information to be collected for the new (or revised) RNA sequence family. .... Though, that said, there's an overlap in time, because the Wikipedia page is prepared in a userspace at the same time the RNA Biology article is being prepared. In this case, I promoted the Wiki page out of my userspace before review, thinking reviewers would want to see it there rather than in my userspace. To respect Wikipedia's rules about original research, we should probably be careful in the future to delay that promotion 'til after the paper appears.
*** *** This article would be much more clear and accurate if it more aptly changed "submit a Wikipedia page" to "submit a Wikipedia-ready page". *** *** Here comes the wet blanket. You scientists, I'm sure, will have a merry time on Wikipedia, so long as your scope of study remains restricted to things like nuclear RNAs found in nematodes. Because these subjects won't capture the attention of the teenaged and still-in-college administrators who lord over content in more popular areas like music, video games, and politicians, you'll imagine Wikipedia to be a delightful environment. Thus far, the SmY article is capturing about 3.85 page views per day (http://stats.grok.se/en/200812/SmY). Compare this to the article about Nematode, getting 1,486 views per day; or compare Anal sex, getting over 16,000 page views daily. *** *** You have no earthly idea how volatile and disruptive participation in Wikipedia can be to a professional person's life, if you venture outside the safe, nobody-cares-about confines of ribonucleic acid. *** *** P.S. I've authored about 30 Wikipedia articles from scratch. I have found that those that get more page views decay more quickly into non-professional content. I've also chaired a study of the 100 Wikipedia articles about the hundred U.S. Senators. We found that in the fourth quarter of 2007, those 100 articles contained deliberately false or libelous content about 6.8% of the time. (http://www.mywikibiz.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study)
Like Gregory Kohs, I doubt whether the Wikipedia articles started under this initiative can continue to live on in a world free of vandalism, as implied by Sean Eddy's comment. Thus, I would suggest to have a closer look at other, and more scholarly inclined, wiki environments which do not share the vandalism problems. These would include Citizendium but also Scholarpedia, Wikigenes and possibly a number of emerging alternatives.
Apart from the issue of "no original research" consensus policy on Wikipedia as well as the problem of vandalism the adding of scientific information in Wikipedia may face another problem: Notability. Some months ago I started Wikipedia articles about individual single nucleotide polymorphisms, see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rs6313. For the ordinary encyclopedian this may seem as an obscure topic, and indeed other Wikipedians questioned the notability of these articles, i.e., they called for a deletion. (see Discussion on Wikipedia). However, the articles have so far survived for several months. My first article on the bioinformatics Web-site SNPepia was on the other hand deleted according to the notability criterion, though it now survives after reconstruction with more information added. Recently, I have asked how wikipedians would welcome Wikipedia articles for individual scientific peer-reviewed articles (For an example see my sandbox area). I imagined that such articles would present summaries of the research in the scientific articles that would allow researchers and the public free access to the scientific information that otherwise would be hidden behind publisher's fee. I also imagined that such articles could put the research in context, linking and explaining research updates. Finally, the most interesting point I imagined would be to add the quantitative results contained in the scientific article to the so-called Wikipedia templates. That would allow scripts to automatically harvest the quantitive information and build meta-analysis upon them. Of the four other Wikipedians that joined the discussion all were negative. (see Wikipedia discussion
The above comment has long URLs that may be difficult to read. They links are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rs6313 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Molecular_and_Cellular_Biology/Archive_1&oldid=258531059#SNPs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fnielsen/Sandbox/Right_Temporoparietal_Cortex_Activation_during_Visuo-proprioceptive_Conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)&oldid=258529459#Articles_for_individual_scientific_articles
Over the past two years, I and some of my students at Michigan State University have carried out an analysis of the coverage, quality and stability of the scientific articles on the English Wikipedia. We've analyzed hundreds of randomly sampled articles from the basic sciences, and have had roughly 100 articles reviewed by tenured professors expert in the field. Our data, being written up for publication, do not support Mr. Kohs' hypothesis that the RNA articles will degenerate into vandalism-riddled nonsense. On the contrary, we found that the developed articles (the so-called Featured, A-level and Good Articles) are stable and of reliably good quality. I presented our preliminary findings at a conference in July. I applaud Dr. Bateman and his colleagues for their initiative, which seems a promising method for outreach, connecting the scientific world with the public that usually pays for the research. We all hope for "broader impact", and this initiative seems likely to be effective.
Bill Wedemeyer's investigation is interesting indeed. A talk he gave on this at Wikimania 2008 is available via http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6820636297786439610 .
I am the current director of the Molecular and Cellular Biology project at Wikipedia. We see this initiative as an interesting experiment to be judged by its results, which I hope will be a set of general overviews of the increasingly-important field of non-coding RNAs. Our project is also eager to pursue other collaborations with organizations that have innovative ideas about how to use the Wiki approach to publishing to bring accurate and up-to-date information to the general public.
I personally think this is inappropriate. In my humble opinion, any encyclopedia (including Wikipedia) should aim to summarize widely accepted beliefs in a field... much like a textbook. I would argue that many if not most articles published in peer-reviewed journals end up getting ignored or, worse, refuted as time goes by. The only criteria for publication in most peer-reviewed journals is technical soundness, oftentimes interpretations of results are WAY off and get completely altered as time goes by. I'm not arguing for restricting access to information (indeed I think NIH/NSF-funded publications should be public) but that information belongs in the literature among experts and anything else constitutes an abuse of a public information resource. I think we as a scientific community should wait until we've reached consensus before spamming the world with our pet theories. Unless a result is indisputable or an obvious breakthrough that is of general interest already, I think inclusion in Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia) should wait for a few years until the results have been tested by a little time. I just think journal articles are basically scientific communications and until the rest of the community has had a chance to consider and respond to the communication it shouldn't be presented to the public as fact, which is basically what posting to Wikipedia represents. For what it's worth I've written/edited many scientific articles and I think Wiki getting spammed with piddling results will be a MUCH bigger problem than vandalism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Roadnottaken)
How close you get to the findings of current scientific research depends on which article you are talking about. You are right that the article on "RNA" should be written like a good general textbook and only discuss the basics that we all agree on. "Non-coding RNA" can go into more detail on this specialised topic, and might mention some current research, but still be based on material taken from reviews and textbooks. Finally, the article on "RNase MRP" could summarise the state of current research on this particular non-coding RNA and largely use journal articles as references. The articles in Wikipedia therefore form a chain leading from the most general introductions to the most specific and technical - the amount of primary publications it is appropriate to reference depends on where in this chain you are contributing.
As a past editor of Wikipedia, I am all for having the scientists who do cutting edge work add appropriate data on what they are doing. However, I also must agree with those who have raised concerns about Notability. --- The key to the idea of having rearchers add to Wikipedia (or any similar project) is realizing that a good wiki-article is one that summarizes an area of research rather than detailing a given project. In that vein, it is appropriate for new research being presented in a prestigous journal like Nature to be referenced in an appropriate article (or articles) on the topic. In fact, new and exciting findings often make in into Wikipedia within a matter of hours of their release. So an article on a new type of RNA within a known class may not be appropriate, but its being breifly described in the article of that RNA class most likely is. --- Beyond that, the idea of having scientists create summaries of their work that are accessible and comprehensible to a larger segment of the general population than the scientific article and its abstract would be is an excellent idea. However, I suggest that those summaries be maintained by Nature itself. I would also point out that the MetaWiki software on which Wikiepdia is founded is freely available, and can be used by Nature to create a wiki on it articles or even one on such articles in general as well as the reaserch areas that are covered by it. BTW - Such a wiki existing under the control of Nature (or of a coalition of Nature and other comparable journals) could well do much to get around the issues that scientists often have with working in Wikipedia itself.
An annotation to the above-mentioned video of Bill Wedemeyer's Wikimania 2008 presentation is now available at http://ways.org/en/blogs/2008/dec/28/video_lecture_quality_of_the_science_articles_on_the_english_wikipedia .
I think the lot of commments would have been the actual peer review for the article. That is what makes this work a distinguished one from others.
Inspired by this discussion, I wrote an essay about wikis in scholarly communication, summing up the current situation as far as I could. It is at http://ways.org/en/blogs/2008/dec/28/the_journal_scope_in_focus_putting_scholarly_communication_in_context .
A related discussion on the reuse of contents from peer-reviewed scientific papers in public wikis can be found at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/item/toc.html .