Hi all,
This is the second email following up on our meeting at ENC 2008 in
Asilomar. We covered five topics, each of which will be the subject
in a separate email. Here is the summary of Evgeny Fadeev's working
group on Wikis, "Wiki for the NMR Community."
Evgeny's summary is pasted below, and his keynote/powerpoint
presentation will be available as a pdf on the AMMRL website shortly.
Enjoy!
- Josh
***
From Evgeny Fadeev (University of California, Irvine):
Past AMMRL meeting had touched several important issues in the
practice of NMR: manual writing (for software and instrumentation),
pulse sequence depositions, educating spectroscopists about efficient
sample preparation methods. A web-based community information
repository of some sort could help resolve all of those issues and
even go much further.
On such a repository scientists could advertise results of their
research on particular topic pages, companies can explain advantages
of their products and explain how to use them (however this form of
advertising should probably be free of charge, more on that below).
Anyone could upload documents, images, store reference information,
bibliography, etc and make use of handy specialized calculator tools.
Running a little bit ahead – in addition to accessing the main
repository system interested individuals could get a personal online
journal (blog).
One such system – Wiki – was the subject of my presentation. Also
I’ve shown some examples from NMRWiki.org – the website that I’ve
been managing since November 2007.
Wiki is just another website that can be built by many people. Wiki’s
can be built quickly because editing overhead is very small – click
“edit”, type in your story, then click “save” – not much harder then
editing a word document. Furthermore, wiki software can be extended
to serve very specific purposes – e.g. drawing pulse sequences, etc.
Content presentation in wiki is free-format, which is very nice too.
Wiki is very resilient to vandalism and robotic spam postings. In
practice, manual (non-automated) malicious postings are extremely
rare and can be weeded out individually (I’ve done it twice).
Probably examples of two interesting wikis are appropriate:
http://openwetware.org – wiki focussing on biochemistry, maintained
by MIT students.
http://maple.rsvs.ulaval.ca/mediawiki/ - Lague Lab Wiki at Laval
University, Canada
Perhaps a relevant reading could be a post about NMRWiki on Stan’s
NMR e-magazine.
http://www.ebyte.it/stan/blog.html#08Apr02
and an answer that I’ve put up on my own very new blog:
http://nmrwiki.org/blogs/Evgeny_Fadeev/
Now I will summarize findings of our discussion group, which included
Jane Strouse, Michael Fey,
Donna Baldisseri, Eric Paulson, Stephen McKenna, Aleksan Shahkhatuni
and at least two other people whose names I unfortunately was unable
to remember (my sincere apologies).
We have identified four potential issue areas: (1) “versioning
complexity” for the manuals, (2) what if someone posts incorrect
information (misinformation) – how can that identified, (3) will
writing tutorials for operation of proprietary instrumentation and
publishing them online infringe copyrights, (4) how to promote a wiki?
Issue #1 is quite technical and there sure can and will be a
technical solution (on NMRWiki by May 1, 2008)
Issue #2 is a common problem to all forms of publishing. Journals use
“peer review” system. Mediawiki – leading wiki software writer is in
fact planning to embed review system in the future versions. When –
they don’t tell. For now each wiki page has a discussion area.
Finally if someone notices a faulty entry – he or she might as well
just fix it. In the long run – there will be normal peer review in
the wiki too. The technology is still evolving. NMRWiki uses “Real
Name” policy so it will be easy to know who edited text.
Issue #3 – good question. The bottom line is that copyright
infringement anywhere including wikis is prohibited, however “fair
use” is allowed by US and other countries Copyright Legislation. What
are vendors going to do with dozens if not hundreds of client-created
manuals already posted on the web, and are they really infringing
copyrights and lead to revenue losses? If I create a really well
explained walkthrough of how to lock and shim and how to solve less
usual problems that sometimes occur in the process – will that really
infringe vendor’s copyright? I think that creating tutorials easily
constitutes “fair use” (it should be kept in mind that such tutorials
would be heavily based on writer’s experience not as much on the
original system manual).
Issue #4 – most importantly appropriate content publishing license
should be used – site owner cannot claim copyright on the content and
the whole operation must be in non-profit mode, that is no paid
advertising, no banners, etc. NMRWiki offers free content download.
Now you can get a free personal online journal (blog) on NMRWiki. The
website should host handy utility tools (e.g. specific calculators,
some will appear soon on NMRWiki). In the future for NMRWiki I am
planning to allow some other people co-administer the site as one
more way to make this wiki a truly community-managed resource.
****
Josh Kurutz, Ph.D.
Technical Director, Biomolecular NMR Facility
University of Chicago
Gordon Center for Integrative Science, room W123C
929 E. 57th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: (773) 834-9805
Spectrometer Room: (773) 702-4052
Cell: (773) 315-5732
Fax: (208) 978-2599
nmr.bsd.uchicago.edu
homepage.mac.com/jkurutz
Received on Wed Apr 16 2008 - 04:50:20 MST