The first conference devoted to scientific uses of Wikipedia has just finished; there was lots of fascinating stuff but here I concentrate on one report that I thought was especially interesting. To introduce it, I need first to introduce WikiData. This is part of the WikiMedia ecosystem, and one of the newest. The basic concept is really simple.
With the basic structure set out, I will now describe what I heard today.
You can see from this that allowing a citation to have such properties can potentially revolutionise the way a scientific article can be constructed. When a citation is invoked, the context the authors wish that citation to have can be added. Contrast this with the context-free way in which articles currently cite other articles. And as with anything in WikiData, instances can be counted, the context in which instances occur can be identified and statistics accumulated.
The way it might work is not so much that any interested reader (a human) would browse through WikiData. Instead it is something that a machine (software) might invoke. In Wikipedia for example, one can transclude or subsume into the article an item from Wikidata. This could be a citation, which you could transclude with one or more associated properties. In chemistry at the moment, the most prominent objects that are constructed from such Wikidata transclusions are ChemBoxes, or tables of properties of molecules as items (Q52426). This is done dynamically at the time of reading the Wikipedia article and so you can imagine that such transclusions can respond as the values of properties are updated/corrected/extended. Unfortunately I do not (yet) know of a good example of all of this which can be linked to here. If any do come to light, I will try to remember to add them here.
As often happens, the concepts above are not entirely new; many were already present in a variation of the Wiki called the Semantic MediaWiki and experiments in chemistry were tried as early as 2007.‡ But WikiData is far easier to use and in symbiosis with a conventional Wiki it might just start to fly now.
The implications of all of this for the way in which a scientific article might work are deep from many different perspectives. I do wonder whether all this data-rich context in which a scientific article or narrative might be couched will be welcomed by either publishers or indeed authors. Perhaps the emotions that humans have but which machines do not will in fact dominate. But it does appear to have the potential for a sea-change in how scientists exchange information.
†The number of itemised molecules recently reached 100 million, and there are a few thousand (>? <?) well defined properties that can be associated with molecules. So the whole of known molecular chemistry is actually not that different in scale from the current Wikidata.
‡Semantic wiki as a model for an intelligent chemistry journal, Rzepa, Henry S. Abstracts of Papers, 233rd ACS National Meeting, Chicago, IL, United States, March 25-29, 2007, CINF-053. Abstract and talk.
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Many thanks. Enjoyed it very much and will be waiting for more...