[OWW-Discuss] Hello list! (I'm new)

[Julius Lucks]

Hi Dan,

In addition to what Reshma said:

Many thanks for your generous feedback!  We would like to encourage as much
feedback as possible from OWW users to help guide the steering committee.

I also like the chatting feature, but I have yet to meet up with
> anyone online at the same time as me. Is this client an interface to
> an IRC backend? i.e. do you have an IRC server that I can connect to
> with a different client? There are a group of us who hang out in
> irc://irc.freenode.net/#bioinformatics and I imagine some who would
> love to join the conversation.
>

This is a great point and something we will look into.  If you can think of
any ways that we might advertise the chatting feature more so more users use
it, that would be great.  One of my main interests is to figure out how OWW
can bring people together more, and I think the chatting feature is one
place that we can do that.


>
> The main question about the system that I have is this, I was
> wondering why the registration of OpenWetWare is so restrictive - How
> come you don't allow freer editing of pages and content? Perhaps you
> benefit from having more control over your users and more 'restricted'
> content, however, the success of Wikipedia suggests that 'the more the
> better'. I know registration is only a few clicks, along with a slight
> delay, but that will put a lot of people off. Perhaps you think it is
> better to exclude such 'casual' users, but I don't think it is good
> policy. I would like to see more 'open' access to all the features of
> the site.


Interesting thoughts.  Basically it boils down to the target audience of OWW
which is more along the lines of professional scientists and students of
science rather than people casually interested in science.  Of course anyone
is welcome to read and re-use the content of OWW, but we require
registration so that we have a solid provenance link between content and who
wrote it.  This is because the information on OWW is primarily scientific in
nature - protocols, experimental plans, experimental data, etc.  We take
this very seriously because we want the integrity of the data and associated
discussion on OWW to be as high as possible.  We are even considering trying
to promote OWW contributions as cite-able material in which the current
scientific value system mandates a name to be associated with the content.

We also have a slightly different article model than wikipedia - rather than
having one page per topic, we really have one page per person per topic.
That is, multiple researchers working on the same topic will have different
views on the topic that should all be equally represented.  It makes things
different enough that we have to consider that when we talk about how OWW is
structured.


>
>
> I am still exploring the content of the site - there is a lot to look
> at, and for a newbie like me, a lot to take in! It is really great to
> find such a mature project like this, and I am very much enjoying
> moving around the site and finding new content.


How are you finding stuff on the site? Internal search engine? Google?
Following Links? Recent Changes? - We would really appreciate feedback in
this area so that we can improve.

Thanks again,

Julius
OWW Outreach Chair

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