*I venture to suggest that ... the general development of the human race to be well and effectually completed when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, at a low rate of charge, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places. ... This is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised[2]
Wikipedia encapsulates this (Open) vision perfectly!
How does a (molecular) Scientist adopt this vision? [3]
Through Teaching activities
A teaching podcast
* I teach organic chemistry and molecular modelling at Imperial College London.
All my teaching (and a fair few research) lectures are expressed as (Open) Podcasts, which take the form of
An audio recording of a 50 minute presentation
the timeline of which is annotated with 25-40 slides
accompanying the timeline are hyperlinks to online information:
which can be a relevant Wikipedia page, where the students find context
3D models, where the students find interactivity
DOI citations,[4] where the students find the original articles.
Each lecture can have about 80 such links, of which ~30 may be to Wikipedia
The Wikipedia article on Lapis Lazuli contained no explanation at the molecular level for the vivid blue colour. I have the (trusted) expertise to provide such, and did so on my blog, which the Wikipedia article now points to.
As a consumer, Wikipedia is a frequent first port of call for relevant citations (conventional bibliographic searches may be overwhelming).
How can one increase (molecular) trust and provenance in Wikipedia?
Structured information allows external trusted agencies to then curate the content
ChemSpider, part of the Royal Society of Chemistry outreach activities
ChemAxon, a provider of cheminformatics toolkits to the chemical industries.
CommonChemistry, ~8000 molecules, operated by the Chemical Abstracts organisation, one curator the World's chemical information, in conjunction with the Wikipedia Chemical Project
CheMoBot This bot is used to monitor changes to infoboxes in mainspace. This has the effect of maintaining a trusted core of molecular information, and where changes/additions to this information are carefully monitored by these trusted agencies.
The Scientific future of Wikipedia
File:Meandrina meandrites (Maze Coral).jpgMeandrina meandrites (Maze Coral) This talk contains several examples of transcluding items in Wikipedia, whereby content (of ~10 million files) from Wikimedia Commons can be absorbed into a different document. Whenever the Wikicommons document is updated, so to is the local document. This of course raises interesting issues about exactly who has authored any resulting document, not to mention pedagogic implications.
In the spirit of the InterNet, one can also set up an InterWiki, which means local (e.g. Scientific) Wiki's can incorporate Wikipedia documents.
This is an extension to the conventional concept, whereby data is stored with associated semantic meanings, which allows extraordinarily rich queries to be constructed and logical semantic (holistic) connections to be discovered.[5] Entire documents can be created (and automatically updated) by logical transclusion. It is (IMHO) the most powerful implementation yet of the Semantic Web.
I venture to suggest that Robert Hooke[6] (and Samuel Butler) would have approved of the evolution of the Scientific Journal towards a Semantic Wikipedia![7]
↑H. S. Rzepa, "Semantic wiki as a model for an intelligent chemistry journal", Abstracts of Papers, 233rd ACS National Meeting, Chicago, IL, United States, March 25-29, 2007.
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