User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/COASP 2010/Wikis as platforms for OA publishing

Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one — the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper. — John Wilbanks. Illustration: papers and wikispace.

• Wikis can be used, in principle, for any aspect of scholarly communication, as detailed in this comparison of wiki- and paper-based communication systems and the related blog post.

• Examples exist for all steps of the research cycle, except successful applications to major funders (see this overview for some attempts)

• Benchmark: English Wikipedia

Top 10 Reasons Why Academics Should Edit Wikipedia