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

[Dan Bolser]

On 09/02/2008, Julius Lucks <julius at younglucks.com> wrote:
> 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.

Not really sure... The new technology is sure to help. Actually we are
trying to boost the number of users on
irc://irc.freenode.net/#bioinformatics - but it hasn't been very
effective so far! (generally we have just been spamming the above link
around). Oh - that reminds me, anyone curious to just 'check in' on
#bioinformatics can do so here;

http://www.acm.jhu.edu/cgi-irc/irc.cgi?chan=%23bioinformatics


That interface isn't a very user friendly 'long term' solution, but
its good if you just want to  stick your head in and say hi.


> > 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.

I see this point.

On this topic, I was wondering if you have investigated the idea of
community rating features? This is something that I have been
considering for the 'Introductome', but don't know really if its a
good idea or how to do it. Its kind of in the domain of 'scientific
literature reform', but you can imagine a system whereby authors write
/ rate pages, and author specific ratings 'flow' through this network
to determine some overall domain specific 'impact' of an article.


> 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.

Great idea.


> 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.

That is good. Is this documented somewhere? Do you have policy that
sets up this kind of article structure clearly? For example, for a
given topic, I would like to see how many authors have contributed an
article.


> > 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.

Following links / Reading 'help pages'. Generally the more 'overviews'
the better IMHO.

I find that Recent Changes is useful to see if a site is 'live', but
it isn't very informative overall. I like the Dynamic Page List
extension, which lets people know when new articles / edits have
occurred in a specific category, which is much more useful than an
overall site 'recent changes'. I believe Semantic MediaWiki is
designed to be a non-messy version of DPL.



> Thanks again,

Thanks for the nice reply!

Dan.


>
> Julius
> OWW Outreach Chair
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Julius_B._Lucks
> --------------------------------------------------------------------


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