--- charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote: Well, assuming this was the right way to go to begin with (as opposed to soem kind of trust metric heuristic) the synthesis of academic and public energy would come from simply giving academics some measure of status - a science gateway for example. Note that this is something that would be disastrous if applied to non-science articles. Anything in the social sciences should be regarded as just below the cutting point, etc. Ultimately the idea is something meritocratic and not just credentialist; something open and yet somewhat heirarchical; something integrated with the same data, and not segregated. sv. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote: I don't think all academics would be opposed to collaborating, especially on syntheses. Academia values narrow experts in coming up with original research, but there's a widespread feeling, at least in some of the sciences, that more summarization/review would be nice, if done well. Indeed I'm aware of at least one wiki set up for that purpose. In this particular case it's to summarize current work on reinforcement learning, and set up by Satinder Singh (who is fairly well-known in the academic RL community): http://neuromancer.eecs.umich.edu/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/WebHome -Mark