User talk:OpenScientist/Open grant writing/Encyclopaedia of original research

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Grant writing vs. Encyclopedia project
Daniel, I'm having trouble sorting out what parts of this page is about "writing project proposals in the open", and what parts are about the "encyclopedia of original research". Also, what is the current status? Are you still in the process of writing a project proposal, or are you actually working on the project. I'd assume that you are in the process of trying to get some preliminary work together as proof-of-concept, in order to make the proposal stronger. Is that correct? So, if I just want to go and find out about/contribute to the encyclopedia project, where do I go? I would suggest that you or someone try to disentangle these two concepts, and create two separate pages here. Klortho 00:10, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I hope that these edits answer your questions. If not, please keep asking. Thanks! --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:55, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Criticism regarding the ability to control quality in a wiki format
I floated this idea at a meeting, to some people affiliated with PMC, and I was a little taken aback at how quickly they shot the idea down. One person even said that this would be a blow to the open-access cause -- as a bad example of what could go wrong if open access goes too far. The concern, of course, is the same thing you hear about Wikipedia a lot, that editors and vandals will make all kinds of changes, and the quality of the most current versions of each of the articles will deteriorate over time. That, as soon as its on a wiki, it is no longer peer-reviewed, and could not / should not be trusted. I think that the concern is a very valid one, and even if not, it is certainly one that you will hear a lot. So I'd like to ask, do you have plans for how to curate the edits, in such a way as to control quality? Any other ways that you would address this argument? Klortho 00:11, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The basic problem I see with this line of argumentation is that it more or less equates "wiki" and "[the English] Wikipedia" and then transfers to the former concerns about the latter, without further thought about their applicability. Bringing content onto a wiki - even a MediaWiki site - does not mean at all that anyone will necessarily be able to edit most (or even any) of that content. In fact, many wiki engines, including MediaWiki, come with options for a (sometimes very fine-grained) control over the user rights, e.g. whether they can edit or even read pages in a particular namespace (example scenario), or whether the edits they made are visible to the public (i.e. to users not logged in) or not (more on that). Also, the Wikipedias' approaches to fighting article deterioration are not uniform, and those used by the English Wikipedia (robots and many editors fighting vandalism, very few areas with some sort of institutionalized peer review in the scholarly sense) are not compulsory either: while some of their robots could certainly be used in scholarly contexts as well, the "many eyes" principle will rarely be applicable to this extent, due to the relatively low traffic to scholarly sites, and users will expect peer review to be at least regular across all fields represented in the encyclopaedia.


 * Many scholarly wikis have both very low rates of vandalism and site-wide peer review: take a look at Scholarpedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Quantiki or NMR Wiki. While this is in part due to the low traffic they receive (which reduces the probability of spammers and vandals finding them attractive), the site's policies certainly contribute to that as well (an overview is here). Of the existing models mentioned therein, the ones that are closest to what we expect to be implemented at the Encyclopaedia of original research are those of the Encyclopedia of Earth (which, by the way, has long been collaborating actively with external content providers, similar to the role of PMC in our project) and of Scholarpedia. Also of interest to us is the Git way of handling commit rights. Both Git and Scholarpedia come close to the notion of "curation", as does the MediaWiki extension FlaggedRevs, which allows for a collaborative approach to it. In the long term, we also plan to couple user accounts (at least those used for curating) on our project with ORCID, which should further reduce the potential for article deterioration and might instead help develop a transparent reputation system, as alluded to here.


 * I would be interested in joining further discussions with your colleagues. Please let me know if further information or clarification is needed. Cheers, --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 01:15, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Concrete steps?
Hi, this project sounds wonderful. Have any concrete implementation plans been made? The "Description of Work" in the proposal PDF is blank, and the earlier http://species-id.net/wiki/Draft:Encyclopaedia_of_original_research#Tasks are a view from outer space -- "coding" is a task. :-)

I have skimmed the blog posts and don't remember seeing concrete implementation plans, though science3point0.com is not responding now, so I can't check at the moment. Also, http://www.science3point0.com/coaspedia/ a couple days ago was responding but with an error, so it was not possible to check out what the article calls a prototype.

Possibly the above would make the following questions superfluous, but I'll ask them anyway:
 * I'm guessing part of the plan is to use a new Semantic MediaWiki instance as the base of the repository. Is my guess right?
 * I'm not sure where git fits in the plan, but I'm guessing it does somehow. How?
 * I love the idea of reusing -- I think importing and wiki-formatting -- swathes of existing OA literature. But I'm not sure how such ties into the rest of the project, eg "living reviews". How? Maybe one way to attempt to ask this concretely is this: what drives a requirement to import literature into a repository, rather than just citing it (and of course occasionally copying databases and figures and text as needed for reviews or other views offered by the system?
 * Is there a particular field or subfield or subsubfield EOR hopes to build a community around early?

Thanks! Mike Linksvayer 01:01, 17 December 2011 (UTC)