Open thread, Sep. 12 - Sep. 18, 2016

MrMind

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

Even just converting science into a Wikipedia-like format would be useful for the sake of open access. Imagine if all citations in a paper were a hyperlink away, and the abstract would display if you hovered your mouse over the link.

YES! YES! YES! And this could be done pretty much automatically. Also, links in the reverse direction: "who cited this paper?" with abstracts in tooltips.

But there is much more that could be done in the hypothetical Science Wiki. For example, imagine that the reverse citations that disagree with the original paper would appear in a different color or with a different icon, so you could immediately check "who disagree with this paper?". That would already require some human work (unfortunately, with all the problems that follow, such as edit wars and editor corruption). Or imagine having a "Talk page" for each of these papers. Imagine people trying to write better third-party abstracts: more accessible, less buzzwords, adding some context from later research. Imagine people trying to write a simpler version of the more popular papers...

The science could be made more accessible and popular.

One of my first thoughts was glosses.

If I recall, in the early middle ages, one of the main ways by which philosophy and proto-science advanced was through the extensive use of glosses. (as adapted from biblical glosses) Contemporary thinkers would all write commentaries on various works of Aristotle. At first, these were confined to the margins of the manuscripts being copied, but later they were published separately.

Since Aristotle had a fairly comprehensive philosophy, this meant reading all the glosses on a particular work of his brought you up to spee... (read more)

0[anonymous]10y

Innovation in science may undermine the efficacy of science if science is a process.

3Douglas_Knight10y

Citeseer was originally supposed to serve a similar purpose by automatically extracting the excerpts where the paper was cited, so that the human could judge whether they were positive or negative. But it seems to have been abandoned after the advent of google scholar, or maybe before.