Derek Moore wrote:

Tehehe, me too, actually! I was pretty impressed for wikitech-l when Sheldon appeared. You's a pseudo-celebrity amongst radicals, Sheldon.

Great! Does that mean I get groupies? ;)

Wikipedia is a natural place for me to show up. For one thing, I've always been a bit of a computer hacker. (I founded the computer club at my high school and got suspended from school once for hacking into a university computer so I could learn COBOL.) Also, my last book with John Stauber was titled "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future." We did a lot of writing and thinking about the scientific method and the influence of funding on research outcomes, and also about the nature and limitations of academic peer review. I recently adapted part of "Trust Us" for a medical journal, and when they asked me to offer solutions for some of the problems that we posed, the best answers I could come up with were: (1) better standards of disclosure regarding funding and other possible conflicts of interest related to published research; and (2) maintaining and expanding an "information commons" in which research results are treated as public property and kept freely available to everyone. One of the big problems for the integrity of research these days is that corporate-sponsored research tends to produce proprietary knowledge, which inhibits full publication of data, methodology and other information. Companies have good reasons from their point of view for not wanting to release discoveries that they have paid for and from which they hope to profit. However, there have been cases where companies have deliberately suppressed data showing that their products are unsafe or ineffective. Even where this sort of misconduct isn't occurring, restrictions on proprietary information present a barrier to full vetting and sharing of research results.

Believe it or not, I actually thought I was coming up with a new idea when I first used the term "information commons." I was familiar with the concept of open source software, but I hadn't really given the concept much attention other than to think it might be nice if the same approach could be adapted to things other than computer software. Then last month I attended a conference in Amsterdam where I heard about Wikipedia for the first time and thought, "Damn! These people are already doing it!"