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

MrMind

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.

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.

Depends how much storage space you are willing to buy.

One of my fantasies is a Raspberry Pi that automatically downloads all Wikipedia updates each month or so, to keep a local copy. The ultimate version of this would do the same for every new academic article available on Sci-Hub.

Sci-Hub is the largest collection of scientific papers on the planet, and has over 58 million academic papers. If they average 100 kB a piece, that's only 5.8 TB. If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash, but you could in theory download all available academic papers.

Someone may even have already done something like this, and put the script on GitHub or somewhere. (I haven't looked.)

(Also, nice username. :) )

EDIT: It turns out there's a custom built app for downloading and viewing Wikipedia in various languages. It's available on PCs, Android phones, and there's already a version made specially for the Pi: http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html

I wonder how difficult it would be to translate all of Sci-Hub into a wiki format that the app could add and read. You'd probably have to modify the app slightly, in order to divide up all the Sci-Hub articles among multiple hard drives. It might make the in-app search feature take forever, for instance. And obviously it wouldn't work for the Android app, since there's not enough space on a MicroSD card. (Although, maybe a smaller version could be made, containing only the top 32GB of journal articles with the most citations, plus all review articles.)

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. (The XOWA app does this for Wikipedia links.)

For Wikipedia, I've been reasonably satisfied with Kiwix for software, and their updated-every-month-or-three copies of Wikipedia, and the related Wikimedia foundation sites, at http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages .

If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash

Unfortunately, I don't have "decent cash" to shell out. I've seem some setups at /r/DataHoarder that I would be extremely happy to ever own, but don't expect to until typical HDs are an order of magnitude or two bigger than today's. By which ... (read more)

5Viliam10y

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.