Institute For The Future

"Collaborative research, Wikipedia or elsewhere"

There is a post at the Machine Learning (Theory) blog which discusses online collaborative research and how the right system could take the lead with well-designed mechanisms for credit and controversy.  There was a previous post on this blog December 2005 that noticed the progress year over year of the Machine Learning page at Wikipedia, suggesting a possible future:

Wikipedia becomes better to the point where it is a completelycomprehensive listing of current research in machine learning. At somepoint, we-the-community realize this and begin to emphasize (andcredit) information placed in wikipedia.

The more recent post at MLT lists necessary ingredients for an online collaboration system for scientific research, highlighting dicussion, credit, and disagreement mechanisms.

There does exist a discussion framework on Wikipedia/MLpedia, but thepresentation format marginalizes discussion, placed on a separate pageand generally not viewed by most observers. The discussion, in fact,should be an integral part of the presentation.
...
Wikipedia intentionally anonymizes contributors in the presentation,because recognizing them might invite the wrong sort of contributor.Incentives done well, however, are one of the things creating [community buy-in]. Oneof the existing constraints within academia is that the basic unit ofcredit is coauthorship on a peer-reviewed paper. Given this constraint,it would be very handy if a system could automatically translate asubset of an online site into a paper, with authorship automaticallysummarized.

A comment by Aaron Hertzmann suggests how online collaboration could make life easier for people doing research.  He breaks down the function of a discussion page for papers new and old:

With more recent papers, we want to have discussion in order tounderstand the work and its significance, and to hear what other peoplethink of the paper. Often, the most interesting aspects come out laterin discussions with colleagues, and its a matter of luck as to whetherthese discussions happen (and whether you happen to be present). Witholder papers, its really useful to find out the history and signficanceof the paper — the oral tradition associated with the paper — which isotherwise not written down. The authors (or other implementers) often

have hindsights about the work which are not written in the paper.

Also related and good to read: (via BoingBoing) Clay Shirky's recent remarks on experts, Wikipedia and Larry Sanger's Citizendium.