Additional shares shrook12/29/2023 The power of the wiki model, however, is that anyone can insert what they feel is important into an entry. The purpose of wikipedia and other similar endeavors revolves around the involvement of an interested community in collecting and collating knowledge. We have all come to be familiar with wikipedia, either using it as a resource or seeing its penetration into the lives of undergraduates. The Times presents a compelling image of rapid assimilation and analysis of knowledge using two types of tools. In the end, it’s going to take some willing individuals out there to take up the challenge, but I think it’s more than possible, and is already happening in some quarters. While having peer reviewed journals as the ultimate arbiter of scientific advance is certainly necessary – there has to be some adjudicated system of quality control of new work – is this really the only way that ideas can take shape and grow within the scientific community? Furthermore, with the flood of literature out there (and let’s be frank for a moment, who out there reads every new article that comes across their desk – not just the title or abstract, but the whole thing), how can we as scientists make the best usage of the tools of the information age to advance our knowledge and allow our creativity to confront the emerging environmental problems of our age? I’d like to explore two avenues that are discussed in the Times article that could be particularly useful to the scientific community, and explore not only their implications, but also lay out some ideas for their implementation. Taken together, I think they raise some interesting questions, comments, and ideas about whether we are currently engaging in discussion, debate, and synthesis of knowledge as a scientific community. I was struck between the parity between the ongoing discussion on this blog about the usage of blogs in academia and Sunday’s New York Times article on how the intelligence community is using blogs and wikis for information synthesis, and a recent post at evolgen asking if there were any ecologists in the blogosphere.
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