Re: 'Gene WIki' announced

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 <r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk> 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
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University of Glasgow
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http://iphylo.blogspot.com
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2008 17:32:19 UTC