Author: Michael Nielsen

Imagine putting the Feynman Lectures on Physics up for public editing on a wiki (Feynmanpedia). Would they get better or worse?

My immediate gut instinct is “worse”. However, when I posed this question to a colleague I greatly respect he asked me pointedly if I’d actually tried it. It’s a good question. There’s no doubt that with some wiki communities, perhaps most, the Feynman Lectures would rapidly deteriorate in quality. But maybe with the right community they’d improve.

For many wiki communities there’s a useful notion of a “set point”, a quality level that an article written by that community will converge to over time. For a poorly written article, most edits will tend to improve the article, and only a few will make it worse; thus, the article will improve over time. However, for a superb article, many of the edits, even well-intended ones, will make the article worse, and so the article will get worse over time. The set point is the quality level at which edits improving and worsening the article balance each other out.

For Wikipedia the level of the set point is moderately high. I’m pretty sure that if one took a section out of the Feynman lectures and put it up on Wikipedia, it would get worse. On the other hand, if the community started with a blank page on physics, it’d demonstrably get a lot better.

For other wiki communities the set point is different. I’m a fan of the TV show Lost, and there is an amazing fan-created wiki about the show called Lostpedia. The set point of Lostpedia is quite a bit higher than the Wikipedia set point.

The idea of a wiki set point is obviously imprecise. Indeed, any idea that deals with quality judgements and community action necessarily will be. The caveats that need to be applied include: the set point will be different for different articles; even for a given article it will vary over time as contributors change; what does it mean to speak about the quality of an article, anyway; surely it makes more sense to talk about a set quality range, rather than a single point; and so on.

Despite these caveats, I think the set point is a useful way of thinking about wikis, and stimulates many useful questions. What types of wiki community or wiki design increase the set point? What types decrease it? How high can the set point go? How could we design the wiki software and community so that the set point is above the level achievable by any single human being?

“Quantum cryptography not yet perfectly secure, researchers say” is the title of this piece in Australian IT News, based on a recent paper in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. This old post seems quite relevant.

The invention of the scientific journal in the 17th and 18th centuries helped create an institution that incentivizes scientists to share their knowledge with the entire world. But scientific journals were a child of the paper-and-ink media of their time. Scientific papers represent only a tiny fraction of the useful knowledge that scientists have to share with the world:

Enabled by a new media form, the internet, the last few years have seen a modest expansion in the range of knowledge that can be published and recognized by the scientific community:

The most obvious examples of this expansion are things like video and data.

However, there are many other types of useful knowledge that scientists have, and could potentially share with the world. Examples include questions, ideas, leads, folklore knowledge, notebooks, opinions of other work, workflows, simple explanations of basic concepts, and so on.

Each of these types of knowledge can be the basis for new online tools that further expand the range of what can be published by scientists:

It’s fun to think about what tools would best serve the needs associated with each type of knowledge. This is already starting to happen with tools and ideas like open notebook science, the science exchange, SciRate, and the Open Wetware wiki.

Some people will object that this kind of expansion is not desirable, that the last thing scientists need is an expansion in the range of information they deal with. Surely we are already overburdened?

Underlying this apparent problem is an opportunity to develop tools to assist scientists in finding relevant information, and to ensure that what they publish — their questions, ideas, and so on — is seen by those people who will most benefit. Ideally, the result will be not only a great expansion in the range of what is published, but also a great improvement in the quality of information that we encounter.

(This is, incidentally, a good argument in favour of strong open access, namely, that building high-quality information-finding tools will require open access to the entire scientific literature. In a gated web, Google Search and similar tools could not function, for they rely on the collective intelligence of the entire community of people publishing on the web. By accepting closed journals, scientists are condemning themselves to relatively low-quality information management tools.)

There are, of course, major cultural barriers to acceptance of these new tools. At present, there are few incentives to make use of new ideas like open notebook science. Why blog your ideas online, when someone else could be working on a paper on the same subject? This isn’t speculation, it’s already happening, and sometimes the blog posts are better – but try telling that to a tenure review committee.

What this means is that in addition to building new tools for each of these kinds of knowledge, we also need to provide ways of incentivizing the use of those tools, so scientists are motivated to move information out of their heads and labs, and onto the network, where it can catalyse new tools and new discoveries. This means measuring the contributions made with those new tools, and working on legitimizing those measures within the scientific community. This will take time, but it can be done. Visionary computer scientist Danny Hillis has pointed out that problems which seem impossible over two years are often trivial over fifty – I suspect this is how we’ll look back at the current changes going on in how science is done.

• Jewish Currents: Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments
  • An account of the Milgram “Obedience to Authority” experiment from one of the subjects.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

• Geeking with Greg: Finding the location of interests and objects from search logs
  • “The most dramatic example… in the paper was estimating the location of a hurricane over time by the queries for the name of the hurricane.”
• Info/Law: Payless and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
  • Adidas apparently owns the trademark on striped shoes, at least according to one judge. (And to the tune of $305 million.)

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

• Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software: Can There be a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab?

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

• EconLog: How to Be Mr. Popular When You’re Old
• Michael Geist on Copyright in Canada
  • Excellent short summary of key issues.
• Crooked Timber: Is there a general skill of “management”?
• Uncertain Principles: Scientists Don’t Have to Do Everything Themselves
• Dani Rodrik’s weblog: American political economics in one picture
• Hive Mind Bee Blog: Swarm! Swarm! Swarm!
  • How beehives reproduce. It seems to really make sense to talk about the hive reproducing, as much as it does an individual bee.
• Colony Collapse Disorder – Wikipedia
  • Bee Hives are suddenly collapsing, and no-one knows why.
• Peter Rohde: PageRank in academic publishing
• Peer to Patent, Community Patent Review
  • Crowdsourcing patent review.
• Malware authors turn to EULAs to protect their work
  • What next, the Mafia?
• A Minimal Toolset for Positional Diamond Mechanosynthesis
  • Proposes a universal toolset for building stuff in carbon, all analysed using density functional theory, and claiming reliable function at 80 Kelvin. By Freitas and Merkle.
• Not Even Wrong: Creutz On Rooting
  • A fascinating case study in the power referees have.
• How to Start A Flash Mob – Instructables
• …My heart’s in Accra: Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia
  • Breaking the barriers of the cloistered social worlds we live in, and what this has got to do with the rest of the world. Hard to summarize, but superb.
• Encyclopedia Britannica Now Partially Free
  • Interesting business model. Basically, qualifying bloggers can get free access, and a form of one-off linking that lets their readers view a small part of the site. It seems like too little, too late, but who knows.
• AI Success Stories « Apperceptual
  • Great list, with dozens of links.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

• Matt Prager on the writer’s strike
  • Absolutely fascinating account of two legal fantasies that dominate life in Hollywood. Prager claims these are the reason for the writer’s strike.
• MediaWiki API
  • API for Wikipedia.
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody
  • Superb essay, read it. “Let’s say … people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing…that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.”
• A Blog Around The Clock : Seasonal Affective Disorder – The Basics
• PageRank for Ranking Journals « Synthèse
  • Nice summary of various approaches.
• Knowledge sharing
  • A review of the literature, coming from the World Bank.
• Liquidpub – Trac
  • Open source meets science proposal.
• Raganwald: Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth
• Bruce Sterling Interview: Life, the Internet and Everything
• Kevin Kelly: McLuhan, Web 2.0 Master
• Blind scientist: How to improve scientific software?

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.