Wikis and Science 2.0

Here is some interesting reading pertaining to wiki, with particular emphasis on their relation to science:

• Declan Butler "Science in the web age: Joint efforts", Nature 438 pp. 548-549 1 December (2005)

"Yet scientists are largely being left behind in this second revolution, as they are proving slow to adopt many of the latest technologies that could help them communicate online more rapidly and collaboratively than they do now."

• Martin Griffiths "Talking physics in the social Web", Physics World 20 January pp. 24-28 (2007)
• Dennis M. Wilkinson, Bernardo A. Huberman "Assessing the Value of Coooperation in Wikipedia", arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0702140
• Philip Ball "The more, the wikier", Nature news 27 February 2007
• Brandon Keim "WikiMedia", Nature Medicine 13 pp. 231-233 (2007)

"Uneasy with information websites policed by people with little expertise, scientists are creating their own online encyclopedias"

• Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams "The New Science of Sharing", BusinessWeek March 2 (2007)

"...the same technological and demographic forces that are turning the Web into a massive collaborative work space are helping to transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. Yes, the Web was, in fact, invented as a way for scientists to share information. But advances in storage, bandwidth, software, and computing power are pushing collaboration to the next level. Call it Science 2.0."

and

"Leading scientific observers already expect more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years of inquiry combined. As the pace of science quickens, there will be less value in stashing new scientific ideas, methods, and results in subscription-only journals and databases, and more value in wide-open collaborative-knowledge platforms that are refreshed with each new discovery. These changes will enhance the ability of scientists to find, retrieve, sort, evaluate, and filter the wealth of human knowledge, and, of course, to continue to enlarge and improve it."

• Chris Williams "Scientists shun Web 2.0", The Register 11th March (2007)

"Science publishers' efforts to have the research community sup the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid have failed, and scientists have given a resounding thumbs down to a gamut of crowd-tapping initiatives, showgoers at SXSW heard on Saturday.

A panel of science web publishers said scientists had consistently shunned wikis, tagging, and social networks, and have even proven reticent to leave comments on web pages."