From ilyas at MIT.EDU Wed Feb 8 16:45:16 2006 From: ilyas at MIT.EDU (Ilya Sytchev) Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:45:16 -0500 Subject: [OWW-Discuss] How to Encourage Contributions Message-ID: <43EA666C.4010206@mit.edu> I got this link from a discussion on Semantic web for life sciences mailing list about a "gene function wiki" (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2006Feb/0052.html): http://eric.jain.name/2006/02/08/how-to-encourage-contributions/ Ilya From martin_jambon at emailuser.net Wed Feb 8 18:32:57 2006 From: martin_jambon at emailuser.net (Martin Jambon) Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 15:32:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [OWW-Discuss] How to Encourage Contributions In-Reply-To: <43EA666C.4010206@mit.edu> References: <43EA666C.4010206@mit.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Ilya Sytchev wrote: > I got this link from a discussion on Semantic web for life sciences > mailing list about a "gene function wiki" > (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2006Feb/0052.html): > > http://eric.jain.name/2006/02/08/how-to-encourage-contributions/ I have the same feeling as the author when he says: "Somehow I suspect that contributing to public databases like UniProt wont become common practice until this is something that you can proudly mention in your CV" For any wiki which is related to work, I believe most people will expect a reward other than the respect of the community. Also, many researchers are not very interested in teaching, so making knowledge public is not something which motivates them strongly. I also believe that Wikipedia is such a success because it is very general, so you can always find people who find it fun. But asking every researcher to put his/her results in a public wiki, let's say in addition to traditional papers, is what we need but is not yet realistic. I am curious to know other people's experience, but a little less than one year ago, nobody in my lab ever contributed a single line to Wikipedia, and as of today, only one contributed fixing a few typos to Wikiomics - and that's because we are in the same office! Wikiomics is the bioinformatics wiki that I started in November, and our group has about 20 people, all bioinformatics specialists. It's not that they are not able to contribute, it's just that they don't see the point: they are all stressful postdocs, worried about their career, and any work which does not leave a trace in their CV is not worthy. That said, the only thing we need is to find a robust way of estimating the quantity, quality and usefulness of the contributions of people to wikis in a way that can be trusted by employers. Something like impact factors, but for people :-) Any ideas? Martin -- Martin Jambon, PhD http://martin.jambon.free.fr Visit http://wikiomics.org, the Bioinformatics Howto Wiki From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Feb 9 01:32:13 2006 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 01:32:13 -0500 Subject: [OWW-Discuss] How to Encourage Contributions In-Reply-To: References: <43EA666C.4010206@mit.edu> Message-ID: <7c085c480602082232p550aeb2t504bad8cd29c794d@mail.gmail.com> sorry for the length of this.... So I think that researchers will consider using wikis for a few reasons 1) It improves the quality of their research thus leading to publishing more and higher quality peer-reviewed papers 2) It serves as a means of career development in parallel to publishing peer reviewed papers (e.g. the person-impact factor gets developed, see below). 3) They want to be heard / educate others / gain respect of community So i'll go in order of easiest to talk about. (3) can be looked at as either altruism ("I want to educate others about my field, spread knowledge, etc") or as a means of networking -- particularly if someone a researcher is trying to impress is active in a particular wiki community. I wouldn't discount this, though I agree it's probably not substantial enough to drive people to contribute heavily. However, to be honest, in most of the wiki communities out there right now there are not a lot of "heavy-hitters" actively contributing or perusing the recent edits so its hard to say if this will be more important in the future... "wiki-community respect" will likely be a much bigger factor when it helps people get a job. I think there are a couple ways (1) could provide sufficient incentive for people to contribute: a) If the wiki is the method of collaboration for a group of researchers. we are starting to see this happen a bit on OWW. We have a few groups who use the space to actively discuss research directions, because it is more convenient to do it on the wiki then to email / conference call / or even meet in some cases. Some examples: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Alpha_Project The synthetic biology community does this actively, here are a couple examples: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Synthetic_Biology:Abstraction_hierarchy http://syntheticbiology.org/Semantic_web_ontology.html b) Feedback / publicity - by posting details of your project you are presumably more likely to gain collaborations or helpful feedback on your work. A number of students on OWW are posting details of research in progress, and there have even been cases of this having a postiive effect. Personally, I had someone at the ICSB conference mention that they had seen my OWW page and it had encouraged them to check out my poster. The biggest increase in feedback is often from people who already know the big picture of what you're doing (e.g. lab mates, local contacts) but are now privy to the experimental details. If researchers think this will improve their work and their likelihood of publishing a successful paper, then that should lead to increased contribution to the wiki. Lastly, (2) -- the idea of "people impact factor." I agree that science would benefit dramatically from another currency, other than the author list of a peer-reviewed article. The "nothing counts but peer-reviewed authorship" model not only discourages alternate methods of information dissemination (wikis), but also prevents non-traditional collaborations. e.g. If I'm being quite self-interested, i don't have a great reason to collaborate with you if I'm not likely to end up on the authorlist of your paper. There's no ScienceBucks that you can give me that have value less than Authorship but greater than zero on my CV. However, once you create these ScienceBucks you allow people to fill all sorts of great niches, for instance I could just generate data on a system (say I'm expert at running some complicated machine) and post it out there for someone else to interpret/model/analyze. Anyone who uses it sends a few scienceBucks my way and eventually I get recognized for providing quality data without being an author. There are likely better examples, but I think this is a big deal. Anyway, I think wiki's are not dead if we can't get ScienceBucks (though it would help), we just need to focus on providing examples of how using the wiki improves research and keep building vibrant wiki-communities -- should be easy! :) jason On 2/8/06, Martin Jambon wrote: > > On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Ilya Sytchev wrote: > > > I got this link from a discussion on Semantic web for life sciences > > mailing list about a "gene function wiki" > > (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2006Feb/0052.html > ): > > > > http://eric.jain.name/2006/02/08/how-to-encourage-contributions/ > > I have the same feeling as the author when he says: > > "Somehow I suspect that contributing to public databases like UniProt > wont become common practice until this is something that you can > proudly mention in your CV" > > > For any wiki which is related to work, I believe most people will expect a > > reward other than the respect of the community. Also, many researchers are > not very interested in teaching, so making knowledge public is not > something which motivates them strongly. I also believe that Wikipedia is > such a success because it is very general, so you can always find people > who find it fun. But asking every researcher to put his/her results in a > public wiki, let's say in addition to traditional papers, is what we need > but is not yet realistic. I am curious to know other people's experience, > but a little less than one year ago, nobody in my lab ever contributed a > single line to Wikipedia, and as of today, only one contributed fixing a > few typos to Wikiomics - and that's because we are in the same office! > Wikiomics is the bioinformatics wiki that I started in November, and our > group has about 20 people, all bioinformatics specialists. It's not that > they are not able to contribute, it's just that they don't see the point: > they are all stressful postdocs, worried about their career, and any work > which does not leave a trace in their CV is not worthy. > > That said, the only thing we need is to find a robust way of estimating > the quantity, quality and usefulness of the contributions of people to > wikis in a way that can be trusted by employers. Something like impact > factors, but for people :-) > Any ideas? > > > Martin > > -- > Martin Jambon, PhD > http://martin.jambon.free.fr > > Visit http://wikiomics.org , the Bioinformatics Howto Wiki > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Discussion Mailing List > discuss at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-discuss > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-discuss/attachments/20060209/9cd15e33/attachment.htm