Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.
Mememoir is a completely new development and as of now, its only deployment is in the form of the WikiGenes wiki. Both Mememoir and Wikigenes, a database of literature about genetic information, were created by Robert Hoffmann, a fellow at Society in Science in Switzerland and a visiting scientist at MIT.
For scientists in academia, publications are the lifeblood of their careers. Having published in a wiki is not going to persuade a tenure track committee anytime soon, but the systems that Mememoir puts in place might just make those contributions stand out a bit more. Besides attribution, Mememoir also gives its users the ability to rates authors and their contributions.
The developers are still looking at their options for possibly open-sourcing the code behind Mememoir. As Robert Hoffmann pointed out to us, the project will look at its options at a later time and is mostly focused on running the Wikigenes project for now.
The information in WikiGenes itself was based on iHop, another project by Hoffman (and not the infamous chain of pancake houses). The idea behind iHop is that information about a single gene can often be dispersed over hundreds of different academic papers, which makes finding and synthesizing all this data extremely hard. IHop used algorithms to parse all this information and bring it together in one database, which was then used to seed WikiGenes.
According to Hoffmann, the idea behind WikiGenes is that it will combat this dispersal of information in the first place, as scientists can enter their research results into the database directly.
WikiTrust, which rates authors on Wikipedia according to an algorithm is trying to do something similar for all of the Wikipedia, but Mememoir takes this to a more personal level. Both systems are, of course, potentially fraught with problems, but it will be interesting to see if scientists will warm up to the wiki model.
We would really like to see Hoffmann and his team open up the code to Mememoir, as the wiki itself is a highly capable piece of code that looks flexible enough to power any kind of wiki - academic or not. In testing it, it turned out one of the easiest to use wikis we have seen so far and it could surely benefit a lot of different projects in the long run. If you would like to see it in action, the project has create a short screen-cast that you can see here.
Comments
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I'm glad someone is tackling this authorship issue in wikis. That's one of the biggest concern that faculty members at my institution bring up against wikis.
I wrote a report on Wikis in Higher Education (http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/wiki/) that is mostly focused on teaching and learning, but if faculty would use wikis for research, it would seem more obvious to use them for teaching too.
Posted by: Mathieu Plourde
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September 5, 2008 12:29 PM
This is a great project. First step should be asking scientists to enter their search results that are in press. Sometimes it takes months or even a year to learn about new studies. Academic journals are slow and there are not a lot of conferences. Academic databases only cover published studies. So, sometimes it takes months or even a year to learn about new studies. This wiki format can fasten this process.
Posted by: Kerem Ozkan
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September 5, 2008 12:46 PM
I know a few academics that’ll be getting this link. This is above and beyond my pay grade, but seeing academia jump into the Wiki world with both feet should make things on the web more interesting in general. Maybe they'll even end up getting excited about net neutrality.... the ones that weren't already, I mean.
Posted by: Baz Anderson | September 5, 2008 1:57 PM
Wikis in the sciences are not completely new. Topsan, EColiHub, WikiProteins, are active wiki-based communities. That said, the approach to authorship taken by WikiGenes does make it one of the more interesting Wiki projects that has come up.
One also needs to look at this in the context of other open science efforts that have been under way for the past few years. The key is getting community participation and moving away from the traditional systems of publication and reward that are really stifling science today (cause they were written for a different era).
Posted by: Deepak | September 7, 2008 12:30 AM
The Burhnam Institute and NIH have http://www.topsan.org, which is a wiki dedicated to collaboration around protein structures. 700,000 protein structures and counting. Data is pulled from multiple data sources including a couple industry standardized databases. Take a look at a sample protein page: http://www.topsan.org/Proteins/JCSG/3byq notice the care given to authorship.
There was a recent conference on new communication and collaboration at CALIT2. Take a look: http://www.viddler.com/explore/MindTouch/videos/39/
Posted by: Aaron Fulkerson | September 8, 2008 8:38 PM