[OWW-Discuss] How to Encourage Contributions

[Martin Jambon]

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