The magazine RNA biology<http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/rnabiology>announced that they are requiring researchers publishing research on families of RNA molecules in the journal to write a Wikipedia<http://wikipedia.org/>article summarising their findings. The notion is that the paper in the magazine is original research and the Wikipedia article that will also be peer reviewed <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review>, will be a summary. There are several problems: - Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with different subject linked by hyperlinks. It is not a collection of summaries of scientific articles. This means that information that is relevant in one research paper is likely to find a home in many Wikipedia articles. This makes a traditional peer review, where the review takes place before publication, problematic if not impossible. - The proposed Wikipedia article is a summary of a scientific paper. Scientific papers do not provide a neutral point of view<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV>and they should not be neutral. For Wikipedia NPOV is essential and people get banned for pushing their point of view. - The subject matter is so specialised that a typical Wikipedia admin will not be able to judge it. This allows for a lot of misunderstandings and conflict. - Writing a scientific article and writing a Wikipedia article requires different skills. Wikipedia serves the general public and its articles should reflect this. A different vocabulary, a different style of writing is required. I think there is a need for more discussion before this actually starts happening. Thanks, GerardM NB the article<http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081216/full/news.2008.1312.html&… proposes this is a paid for article in Nature, there is also a press release <http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Info/Press/2008/081217.shtml> about this.