Re: 'Gene WIki' announced

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 <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
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
> AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com
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>
> http://iphylo.blogspot.com
> http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2008 18:59:24 UTC