[OWW-Discuss] How to Encourage Contributions

Thu Feb 9 01:32:13 EST 2006

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 <martin_jambon at emailuser.net > 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
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