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The Next Big Step For Wikidata: Forming a Hub For Researchers
The ed17 writes Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. ... This proposal is significant because no other open collaborative project ... can connect the free databases in the world across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. ...the project will be capable of providing a unique open service: for the first time, that will allow both citizens and professional scientists from any research or language community to integrate their databases into an open global structure, to publicly annotate, verify, criticize and improve the quality of available data, to define its limits, to contribute to the evolution of its ontology, and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.
Folks, Wikipedia is a starting place, but its ever-changing content contributed by whoever is not acceptable for academic references. This has been discussed before.
No one references Encyclopedia Britannica in their Masters Thesis...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I wish them good luck to them for the EU grant procedure. The procedures are such a maze that usually EU grant experts are required.
wikipedia started out as a web site where volunteers could edit articles, before entry into the nupedia website. nupedia is now dead. wikipedia has been engaging in bigger fund raising drives, and has more paid employees. Now it is trying to do more stuff to justify those more employees, just like when wikipedia spent a bunch of money trying to develop better wikipedia page editing software. I bet the heads of wikipedia now have bigger salaries.
I would just like the number of humans maintaining wikipedia to be small once again, and not try to do anything else.
Haters gonna hate. That doesnt mean their not stupid though. Get a grip. Wikipedia is an invaluable reference.
I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea... It would rip the guts right out of repeatability, and confidence that "this" is what $RESEARCHER found.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I agree. Just last week I was interviewing for an engineering job with a Nascar team, and all they could talk about was fuel data this, weight data that, etc. I told them that's not how I roll. I'm writing my congresscritter right now to stop this despicable behavior.
I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea...
When I first heard about wikipedia and the theory driving it I thought it was a terribly bad idea at the time... but ya know, I find it really useful. It's got lots of problems but on balance it's s lot more useful than problematic.
We've identified many deep problems with scientific research on this very forum, and to my knowledge little progress has been made over the last decade.
Can't we at least *try* different solutions?
Where is it written(*) that the old ways are the best?
(*) The script to Skyfall of course. I got that from Wikiquotes.
I and a co-author pitched this notion in 2006. We had pitched it as a smaller element of a "research match-maker" idea. And, man, were the academics violently opposed. No one saw value in the work and most felt either directly threatened or otherwise unsure how to objectively gauge the value of the contribution with author name and affiliation removed. It was depressing.
Most of the commenters here did not even bother to catch that difference. RTFA, folks.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The main problem with scientific data is retention. Often the results are kept, but the data that led to the results is long lost. Even 5 years later, it's hard to find the data. There is a reason for this: there's a lot! Regardless of what their database size, most particle physics experiments can fill it in less than a day. It's not technologically feasible to gather the information into one system, at our current level of technology.
While wikipedia has editing and flame wars problems, this project would end with similar problems surrounding deletion. What do you keep? How do you know where the break throughs will be made: the ones that make revisiting old experiments and data necessary? One cannot predict the path inspiration will take. Who decides what gets deleted: an editor, an admin, by public vote? This is what will cause the project to fail out of the starting gate. In the event they do succeed, what happens when their funding runs out? We've already established that the main problem is from too much data for practical backup... that only leaves the inevitable fall into oblivion.
In closing, I do offer a ray of hope: the time is fast approaching when we will reach the prerequisite technological level. Take a look at the work HP is currently doing: http://www.engadget.com/2010/0... This technology, at the optimal level, (I crunched some numbers, and it definitely would not be the case with the first iteration) can store all the world's data, and then some, on a device the size of a garbage can. At that point deletion, and all the problems outlined above, become nullified. Until we reach that level, this is a pipe dream, doomed to fail in a quagmire of politics.
This is what the Texas Digital Library aims to do. Though it's not quite one big wiki, it actually is a push to archive and collaborate using various data types and formats.
Is this kind of like the research database that Jordi can access (and update) with his tablet on star trek?