Hi all,
I've been following this discussion with interest. Please let me add some
comments inline, complementing Dario's answer.
----- Mensaje original ----
De: Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>
Para: aforte(a)gatech.edu; Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Enviado: vie,18 marzo, 2011 17:30
Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Proposal: build a wiki literature review
wiki-style (was: Re: Wikipedia literature review - include or exclude conference
articles)
I was glad to see this thread on wikiresearch-l as I have been recently
discussing a similar proposal with other members of the Wikimedia Research
Committee.
To make a long story short: I see major problems about *maintaining* a shared
reference pool (along with a lit review system) on wiki pages, no matter how
standard the format we may come up with to do so.
There are excellent free and standards-based services out there designed
precisely to allow groups of researchers to collaboratively import, maintain and
annotate scholarly references.
Zotero is one of them, others are: CiteULike, Bibsonomy, Mendeley, Connotea. My
feeling is that the majority of people on this list are already using one of
these services to maintain their individual reference library.
===========
This has been a frequent request, as well as a very old discussion (at least, I
can trace it back to WikiSym 2007, and continuing in the Workshop on
Interdisciplinary Research on Wikipedia, a.k.a. WIRW, in WikiSym 2008).
In fact, after our discussion in Porto we proposed to create a Wikiresearch
Portal (we initially tried to call it a planet, which was a very bad idea....).
I think we finally deleted the domain and removed the virtual machine from our
servers at Libresoft a few months ago, after years of inactivity.
I think Jakob Voss was the first (or one of the first) providing a comprehensive
compilation of research literature related to Wikipedia, including tags to
categorize content and keyword search. I remember I got many references from
Jakob's repo when I was starting to work in my dissertation, and it was quite
useful. It is no longer available, AFAIK, and I'm not sure if all that info was
migrated to newer repositories.
After that, I can remember that there was a French? university that also offered
a searchable compilation of Wikipedia research papers. Unfortunately, I think I
lost the link, and I cannot find it any more.
For the last session of Wikipedia research in Wikimania 2010, I worked with
Benjamin Mako and Jodi Schneider to filter out available references. The initial
pool exceeded 3,000 references, so you can imagine this is a really daunting
task (that's why we stressed the disclaimer that it wasn't a comprehensive or
complete review).
Mako and Jodi introduced me to AcaWiki. I think the idea is very good, and it
also reminds me of similar initiatives in other areas (like PLoS ONE:
http://www.plosone.org/home.action). However, I think the number of references
reviewed there is still low.
A very positive point with AcaWiki is that it is free licensed. Zotero would be
a good alternative, but I had to uninstall it from my Firefox, since it was
taking ages to start the browser. There are plans for a standalone version, and
also to improve the UI. The rest of web services are good for maintaining
compilations (though each one has its own caveats) but usually bad for direct
exchange of metadata (you always need to use intermediate formats like BibTex to
migrate your info). Mendeley has thrilling features, but I learned that it is
proprietary (from the EULA of the standalone version), and honestly I'm not sure
if they will start to charge for the service at some point, or modify their API
or service agreement (just see what's happening with Twitter).
===========
The reason why these services are superior to a wiki page is that they can both
produce human-readable reference lists as well as export references in any
possible format one may need for writing (JSON, XML, BibTeX, JabRef etc). They
all have provisions for posting reviews, tags, notes etc., aggregate these
annotations from several users (unless they are private) and export them.
If we were to keep our shared reference pool hosted on any of these services we
could still:
* embed or republish a list of references elsewhere (e.g. in a wiki)
* make sure the list of references in the wiki is kept up-to-date via the
external service
* allow people to access bibliographic metadata in a format suitable for writing
and in an environment they are already familiar with
* allow people to write reviews and annotations both on the wiki and via the
external service itself
If we think there is added value in hosting reviews on a wiki, what needs to be
implemented is a connector between MediaWiki and any of these services (they all
have open APIs).
Such a connector would presumably:
* pull bibliographic metadata from the external service
* define a unique ID for each publication (based on a DOI when available)
* create a wiki page per publication using the unique ID as a title and
populating it with the imported metadata
* retrieve live user annotations and comments from the external service
* allow to host further comments and annotations on the wiki via the article
page
It would be sad to see a lot of effort put into creating yet another static
wiki-based bibliography just to see it become obsolete because no one is
actively maintaining it or because the output it produces is in a format that
does not allow it to be easily queried, reused or republished.
Dario
======
I can confirm that the #1 complain I get from colleagues when I point them to
the static Wikiresearch bibliography pages in meta is: "it is not easily
searchable" (by keywords, content, year, author, etc.). If we plan to have
annotations or reviews, in addition to this, I believe a standard wiki (such as
MediaWiki) is simply not the way to go (disclaimer: despite I'm a great fan and
advocate of wikis, and I like many features in MediaWiki).
So, my suggestions are:
1. Use a platform allowing extensive search capabilities (perhaps semantic
wikis, but I haven't tested many of them, yet). In this case, I do think that
new NoSQL alternatives might be in place to search through text in reviews.
2. Understand multiple formats to introduce new refereneces (including importing
from major existing compilations, and web content like CiteULike).
3. Include feature to rate papers according to different criteria (number of
positive reviews, number of citations, or combinations of several search
conditions).
Of course, I'd be very glad to help with this initiative if it is finally
launched (once again).
Best,
Felipe.
======
On 18 Mar 2011, at 15:09, Andrea Forte wrote:
Somehow I lost this thread - this is great, Finn, I
agree that a
shared bibliographic resource need not be restricted to conferences,
journals, etc, although specific meta-reviews might be.
The main obstacle for this problem of reviewing WP lit seems to be
agreeing on a common method for assembling our disparate efforts into
something bigger. In another thread I echoed Reid's ideas about using
a wiki to accomplish this, a mediawiki instance would be ideal.
Andrea
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 10:37 AM, Finn Aarup Nielsen <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote:
1. Create a public Mediawiki instance.
2. Decide on a relatively standardized format of reviewing each paper
(metadata formats, an infobox, how to write reviews of each, etc.)
3. Upload your existing Zotero database into this new wiki (I would be
happy to write a script to do this).
4. Proceed with paper readings, with the goal that every single paper is
looked at by human eyes.
5. Use this content to produce one or more review articles.
There has been some talk of a wiki for papers - also on this list as far
as I remember. There is Bibdex (
http://www.bibdex.com/), AcaWiki
(
http://acawiki.org) and I have the "Brede Wiki"
(
http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/). The AcaWiki use Semantic Mediawiki
(AFAIK) and I use MediaWiki templates. You can see an example here:
http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/Putting_Wikipedia_to_the_test:_a_case_study
There is an infobox with citation information and sections on "related
studies" and "critique".
It is a question though whether such more general targeted wikis are
appropriate for composing a collaborative paper.
I have also begun a small Wikipedia review that I upload to our server
yesterday:
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/6012/pdf/imm6012.pdf
I think I will never be able to do an exhaustive review of all papers, but
my idea was to give an overview of as many aspect as possible. I think
that some research published outside journals and conferences are
interesting, e.g., surveys and some of the statistics performed by Erik
Zachte. I don't think that Pew's survey has be peer-reviewed, so
"just"
including journal and conference papers is in my opinion not quite
enough to give a complete picture.
/Finn
___________________________________________________________________
Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark
Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging
http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/
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--
:: Andrea Forte
:: Assistant Professor
:: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
::
http://www.andreaforte.net
--
:: Andrea Forte
:: Assistant Professor
:: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
::
http://www.andreaforte.net
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