BMJ, the publishers of the *British Medical Journal* and other top-tier
biomedical journals, have kindly recruited the best minds they can get to
review the en.Wikipedia's article, "Parkinson's disease".
We began the review by passing the article, in a Word document, from one
reviewer to the next by email. Each made proposed changes to the article
text and left comments in the document, using Word's "Review" and
"Track
changes" features.
At that point we needed to start a discussion, and Word isn't ideal for
that. So I pasted the relevant paragraphs from the Word document into the
left column of a wiki table, and the reviewers' comments into the right
column, where the discussion could happen. [1] I manually applied
background colours to distinguish deletions from additions in the left
column, using <span style="background:#xxxxxx">.
That discussion has now begun but one of the many things I've learned
during all this is, the top researchers and theorists spend a lot of time
in the air (travelling to conferences, lectures, meetings), and it is then,
free from the demands of job and family, when they do their reviewing.
So, I have pasted that wiki table into Word and have made it available to
the reviewers here: [2]. Now they can download a copy before they get on a
flight, and email it back to me with their comments when they're online
again, and I'll transcribe their comments into the wiki table for
discussion.
This may be as simple as it gets but I just thought I'd put this before
you, in case you may have thoughts on a better technical approach for next
time. (BMJ have offered to do more of these.) I'm finding the construction
of the wiki table tedious (particularly highlighting the deletions and
additions) though I'm getting faster, and transcribing offline comments
from the Word document into the wiki table will be a small chore. The wiki
table pastes easily into Word with highlighting and formatting intact, but
not vice versa. (I've also asked at Village pump (technical).)
Any thoughts on making this easier or smarter would be much appreciated.
Anthony Cole
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anthonyhcole/sandbox
2.
https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=C1FF29217E209194!2141&ithint=…