The twin of imechanica in biology and bio-engineering is from MIT !!

Ages ago, (beginning) of april, I posted

• PROPOSALS FOR IMECHANICA

And I am sure many other discussions exist before, including

• Is it possible to find a way to more categorization of information in Imechanica?

But Zhigang knows that, in the next generation of imechanica, while our community expands, we need some sort of wikipedia capability.  Of course, one can argue that for that function there is already wikipedia itself. 

Also, probably as long as imechanica were small, it could NOT have the strength to write more than few review papers, if even.  But apparently the imechanica community is not enough even to write in wikipedia itself. I need to study wikipedia more to tell you the distribution of articles, but I have the impression that they are not for the latest technologies (?), or anyway since they are only volonteers who write, there must be a correlation between volonteering and subjects.

There must be subjects which are very popular and of general interest, and these will be covered. On personal web pages, either is the person himself, or a devoted "fan".  For example, I checked Huajian Gao's wikipedia entry.

It was Markus Buhler to start.  Markus is a very active MIT professor now, formerly student of Huajian --- so my suspect confirmed

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huajian_Gao&action=history

All the later corrections were done by others and were small.

But then remember what are the weakness of wikipedia, they cover easily some subjects, less so others.  For example, when there was the 5 bomb attack in London in 2005, within few second a wikipedia maniac had written a short report (before the journalists had), and within few hours, hundreds of people had contributed to about 14 pages accurate report, matched by none of the existing classically financed journals.

I have to conclude that, as long as the reward for academics is to write papers useful in the  "Citation index" there is not enough energy put in either imechanica or wikipedia. A few proposals to make this easy from one end

1) Talk to isi Thompson to have Imechanica or Wikipedia (or special sections of them) in the citation index --- who is the author however, the complete list of contributors?

2)  insist on h-index first, which stops increased profits by publishers, so that they have to reduce their size (Elsevier alone has 7000 employers), their commercial power, and reduce number of journals. Then, later we are in a position to suggest them to change: for example, sponsor and fund imechanica

3) ask publishers after 2 or even before, to "publish" papers produced by wikipedia or by imechanica in normal journals

4) assuming wikipedia is one system, and imechanica another, find a new one intermediate between them --- or that permits an easy transition from one to the other.  For example, launch initiatives in imechanica that later could be put into wikipedia.  I need to study the Harvard new system, but if Zhigang Suo can explain, Harvard people now can post their papers to the Harvard collection, and later submit to a journal.

5) how can imechanica expand more?  I discussed this, and I have few ideas that I am slowly trying to realize in practise.  The "get-together" at conferences, some marketing, eventually I would suggest Suo to have "sponsors" for the project --- the first I can think of is Elsevier.   I think the commercial "users" should need to pay for posting.   Since Elsevier is a profit organization, when they organize a conference, publish  a journal,  or even  publish a book, they do it for profit.  If we contribute to this, we NEED to get advertissment charges.

This is only a few ideas. The discussion  should continue, in a wikipedia style!

I suggest to continue to "study" scientifically wikipedia, and see patterns and try to criticize,to improve in imechanica.

Finally, let me signal that Elsevier and the other publishers are TRYING hard to innovate in this.  You may have notice that ScienceDirect now has some functionality like "vote" --- our competition with them is only just started.

I am not sure if the US panorama, but in Europe I found 2 large projects connected to Liquidpublication, both in Trento, one with Elsevier in, and one with Springer in.  They are both from the Information Engineering community.

So probably Imechanica was not funded because reviewers in mechanics are not experts of Informatics.  But there are certainly Informatics projects about this also in US?   Or anyway, do you all contribute and follow the development of the LiquidPUB projects?  My collegues (Fabio Casati) have told me they are interested to open a forum on imechanica, if you like...

mike

I see you would like to see review papers first into imechanica or wikipedia.

You may be right.

I also suggested the ISI thompson citation index system, and the present impact factor classification, is hard to cancel in a second, at least UNTIL we don't have an equivalent and serious and generally agreed system to rank quality.

Anyway, I agree we need to move step by step.

In telephones, wiki-like collaborative efforts have worked: skype.  This expanded from 100.000 to 100.000 millions in 2 years!  And was sold to Ebay for 2US$ billions!

In research, we need to think about what will come first. Research, papers, or review papers.  I don't know.

From NSF call for proposals 2007 I read

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07558/nsf07558.htm

Initial engineering-focused VOs (EVOs) have demonstrated the potential
for this approach.  Examples of EVOs involving significant engineering
communities are the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research (now called the WATERS network), the National Nanofabrication Users Network, and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology and its nanoHUB.org portal. 

For you to prove you are rigth we need to start from review papers, simply you have to demonstrate that you are capable to convince enough people to do it!  I would keep thinking.

There is a wiki section of Open New Ware

http://openwetware.org/wiki/Materials

Is it going far?  Maybe they are just starting.  There is around any other project using WIKI except wikipedia itself?

And what about my other ideas to use imechanica as a place to start wiki entries later to be posted, or perhaps to be sent as paper to normal journals of the Harvard collection?  Maybe I should write 1 idea per post, or people don't respond to 10!

Rousing Success
In principle, says PLoS ONE's
Surridge, scientists should find the transition to Web 2.0 perfectly
natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists
have built up their knowledge about the world by "crowd-sourcing" the
contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge
through open debate. "Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science
works, it's not whether the transition will happen but how fast," he
says.

The OpenWetWare project at MIT is an early success.
Launched in the spring of 2005 by graduate students working for MIT
biological engineers Drew Endy and Thomas Knight, who collaborate on
synthetic biology, the project was originally seen as just a better way
to keep the two labs' Web sites up to date. OpenWetWare is a wiki--a
collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone who has access to
it; it even uses the same software that underlies the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia. Students happily started posting pages
introducing themselves and their research, without having to wait for a
Webmaster to do it for them.

But then, users discovered that
the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning
about lab techniques: manipulating and analyzing DNA, getting cell
cultures to grow. “A lot of the 'how-to' gets passed around as lore in
biology labs, and never makes it into the protocol manuals," says Jason
Kelly, a graduate student of Endy's who now sits on the OpenWetWare
steering committee. "But we didn't have that." Most of the students
came from a background in engineering; theirs was a young lab with
almost no mentors. So whenever a student or postdoc managed to stumble
through a new protocol, he or she would write it all down on a wiki
page before the lessons were forgotten. Others would then add whatever
new tricks they had learned. This was not altruism, notes
steering-committee member Reshma Shetty. "The information was actually
useful to me." But by helping herself, she adds, "that information also
became available around the world."

Indeed, Kelly points out,
"Most of our new users came to us because they'd been searching Google
for information on a protocol, found it posted on our site, and said
'Hey!' As more and more labs got on, it became pretty apparent that
there were lots of other interesting things they could do."

Classes,
for example. Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a
professor, users began to create dynamically evolving class sites where
they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and
even write collaborative essays. "And all stayed on the site, where it
made the class better for next year," says Shetty, who has created an
OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites.

.. you my system to find out things is certainly NOT google search.

 I use google search very seldom these days.

I read widely in the good literature, nature, newspaper, general topics in economics not only in my specialized field.  I have "google reader" and "google alert" to many topics of interest.  These are much more powerful than simple Google

For example, this OpenWetWare I found in a reference to a Scientific American article, which I also posted, Science2.0.

So I suggest you do the same, keep reading broadly.

Main Page
Wikimania 2008 Alexandria :: Change the shape of wisdom

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Alexandria, Egypt • July 17–19

Welcome to the official website for Wikimania 2008! Alexandria will be hosting Wikimania 2008 this Summer in the prestigious new Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina).

What is Wikimania?

Wikimania is a regular conference for all Wikimedians who contribute to one of the many Wikimedia Foundation projects. Past conferences have been held in popular cities around the world such as Frankfurt, Germany (Wikimania 2005 website), Boston, USA (Wikimania 2006 website) and Taipei, Taiwan (Wikimania 2007 website). (more...)

Wikimania 2008 planning

General details

• Registration is now open!
• Sign up now for Transportation assistance from the airport!
• The schedule of the conference is being planned
• Team
• Contact us
• Preliminary program is available. Please leave comments here.

Pictures

• Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Library of Alexandria)
• Team members and volunteers
• (all galleries)

Want to help us?

• List of advertisements that you can place on your website or personal blog!
• If you blog about Wikimania, tag with "wikimania2008".
• You can talk with other people about Wikimania on IRC.

Coordination

• Wikimania Committees structure
• Preparation Meetings on IRC
  • Next meeting: June 15, 1800 UTC – Program committee
  • Last meeting: 2008-05-17 13:00 UTC – Program committee

From Previous Wikimanias

Taipei, Taiwan (2007) • Boston, USA (2006) • Frankfurt, Germany (2005)

Alex Schenck: "Raise your hand here if you have edited Wikipedia"
Larry Pieniazek: "Does that include vandalizing?"

(See another)

Retrieved from "http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page"

Category: Main Page

Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken

From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip
Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable
versions without making the article actually stable. We can get rid of
protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do
this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as
not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals immediately see the
results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious.

Everyone meant something different by stable versions, so we called it
flagged revisions. This gives reader feedback on the quality of the
articles. Currently, you can make users by default see the most recent
flagged revision of an article. It enforces the four-eye principle.

Development of Stable Versions: It is the idea that the article is
finished. The concept is in printed encyclopedias and Nupedia. Ideas
early in Meta. Discussed since the beginning. Magnus Manski wrote a
tool to rate articles - FA, Good, A, B, Start, Stub. We now have
patrolled edits, active on Wikipedia.

In June 2006, we started. We asked Jimbo: “What’s up with stable
versions?” Jimbo said: “You’re right, let’s just do it.” We agreed on
basic parameters: No voting and 2. Keep it simple. He asked the board
if they would object. They said they wouldn’t. We hired a contractor to
implement stable versions. Erik Moeller had become a board member and
quality was one of his topics. We found Jorg Baach, he did the coding.
It was put on the SVN under flagged revisions, which stuck. Wikimedia
France gave 1,000 euro – the first international wiki. People started
working on it – mailing list wikiquality. Open beta in Feb 2008. Found
bugs. Now it is stable and on the German Wikipedia.

People flag and edit or they don’t. You don’t vote on it, you just
make sure the people who flag are trustworthy. One flag is enough to
get it approved.

Ongoing problems:
• Too few developers
• No process for giving useful input
• Developers not present in content creation
• Not enough competence in design/usability
• Not enough leadership structure in local projects

Flagged Revisions
Two flags: sighed and quality. Editors can flag something as sighed,
reviewers can flag as quality. If desired, IPs see by default the last
sighted version instead of the current version. Can do it per wiki or
per page. Templates and Images are in this. If you flag an article, the
stable revision incorporates the template and images as they were then.
If an IP changes a template, that change will not be visible until
someone flags the template. How to incorporate comments in this system?
We were told not to think about it.

Sighed Versions: These are versions that are checked by an editor
for vandalism. Basic trust – automatic procedure for granting rights,
and any admin can give it. Misconception is that they are only about
vandalism. They are about forcing the four-eye principle. An edit has
to be checked. You guarantee a basic quality for readers: someone
trustable looked at it. Any edit that is done is logged in the system.
If an IP corrects a spelling a mistake, hordes of vandal fighters will
look at it now, but all that needs to look at it is one trusted vandal
fighter. Now, people concentrate on IPs, but what if you just created
an account? They won’t have the sighted privilege.

You can use a box to check the article. Can search for pages without
any sighted version, or pages where newer unsighted revisions are
waiting. You see the results of your change, but if you come back an
hour later, you will see the sighted version. Other people will see the
sighted version. The vandal sees the results of his vandalism, but no
one else will. Other people will see that there are new unsighted
versions and can see them, but will not see it on the main article.
With Magnus’s tool, you can get intersections with categories. These
are all the unsighted edits waiting in mathematics. It would take me
half an hour to look through all the math unsighted revisions.

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it