A slight shift in topic: I wonder how secure such specialised types of wiki
content are from vandalisaton or errors introduced by improper use.
Generally, wikis can counter such threats through the power of the 'thousand
eyes' of the readers, who can quickly jump in and correct obvious errors.
This will probably not work with large amounts of non-textual data, such as
amino acid sequences or molecular weights. It is rather unlikely that a user
of the system will have a look at a sequence and think 'oh, there is a
tryptophan in position 332, let's revert that back to leucine'.
Of course, this threat also exists in semantic wikis, altough they might be
better protected (consistency checking, less redundancy of content, easier
maintenance).
Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
DERI Galway, Ireland // Semantic Web Company, Austria
Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITK_%28gene%29. It's actually
mostly highly structured text, with numerous stable publication
identifiers (DOIs and PubMed ids). OK, so it's not marked up in RDF/XML,
etc., but in order to exploit the long tail you actually have to have a
tail in the first place. I suggest that it's a classic case of a choice
between a simple system with lots of users and just enough functionality
to be usable, or a more elaborate system lots of functionality, but with
fewer users. I have a lot of sympathy with the later, but my money is on
the former.
Regards
Rod
On 10 Jul 2008, at 18:03, Bryan Bishop wrote:
On Thursday 10 July 2008, Roderic Page <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Actually, they do mention http://www.wikiprofessional.org/portal/ as
a note added in proof, and I think the main point of their paper
was the ability to make use of the large, already existing community
that edits Wikipedia, rather than, say, create a new domain-specific
Wiki with a much smaller pool of potential editors. It's
fundamentally about the long tail, and how to exploit it.
So, if you're going to place it on Wikipedia you're going to fall victim
to the already existing problems with the lack of semantics, yes? There
is of course the templating functionality but I recall this being
somewhat of a hack for structured data storage and extraction. The main
concern with plaintext-on-Wikipedia is that it's not an effective way
to truly exploit the long tail, since you're going to end up with this
massive plaintext disaster that will require human collating (redundant
work- just get it right the first time). I should go read the genewiki
announcement anyway though :-).
- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
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Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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http://iphylo.blogspot.com
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
