July 22 at 1:49 pm
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John Lam, j1m, Yaroslav Nikolaev and 3 other people liked this
"Imagine putting the Feynman Lectures on Physics up for public editing on a wiki (Feynmanpedia). Would they get better or worse?... there’s a useful notion of a “set point”, a quality level that an article written by [a wiki] community will converge to.." - Michael Nielsen
But then imagine that you can't log in to the Feynman wiki unless you have at least three papers in arXiv: surely the set point will be higher now? In other words, by gating the community, perhaps you can manipulate the set point. - Bill Hooker
That's a great idea, Bill, and there would be some prestige value to being able to edit, but you're left with the problem of who decides the criteria. - Mr. Gunn
While it's not quite on par with Feynman, I've considered putting the introduction to my PhD thesis up as a wiki, with an idea the others could expand it, keep it up to date and maybe even correct any errors ... ultimately hoping that the quality "set point" could be raised, or at least maintained. I think in reality the subject (mitochondrial protein import) is probably too small for anyone other than spammers/trolls/vandals to actually edit it ... - Andrew Perry
and adding a qualification hurdle would make the 1 % Rule more like a "1% of 1% rule" ... still, maybe I should think about doing it anyway ... there's really nothing to lose ... - Andrew Perry
Andrew, I think that's a great idea. Every thesis intro is essentially a "basics of X" -- if there were some way to collect them, the result would become an Encyclopaedic Introduction to Every Scholarly Subject Ever. And as a wiki, it could be kept up to date, and the choice of editors is actually very simple in this case: authors of subsequent, related theses. - Bill Hooker
(Curse the FF chr limit!) F'rinstance, yours will certainly not be the last thesis on mitochondrial proteins, or even on import, so the supply of qualified and motivated editors is endless. The more I think about this the more I like it. - Bill Hooker
But we still struggle to find editors. For instance the reviews section on openwetware (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Re...) is pretty moribund. I would worry about qualification though as it reduces your pool. Surely the aim is to try and set something up so that the community is self selecting? Exactly how you do that I don't know of course. - Cameron Neylon
Nice idea. Now if only I can find an electronic copy of my thesis. - j1m