On Friday 27 July 2007 06:10, Anastassis Perrakis wrote: > Being a small contributor to the Greek Wiki, which has far less > subscribers than the English one, > I can see that the dynamics do not work well. People can sneak in > loads of crap, that are unlikely to be read > and corrected by an expert, due to the smaller number of contributors.
The dynamics of over-restriction are in some cases worse. Consider this google search: "volume triclinic cell". Note the relevant equation on the top hit (http://webmineral.com/help/CellDimensions.shtml) page. I sent three emails to the maintainer of that page to correct the equation, but they never got it right and in the end simply ignored me. Previously this equation was just-plain-wrong, but now the parentheses aren't balanced. Were that a wiki, I would have fixed it up in three seconds.* From the wikipedia article on wikis: "Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them." I think that if you ignored this philosophy, you probably wouldn't want to call it a wiki and instead call it something else entirely. For a crystallography wiki, I'd be surprised if registration that requires a valid institutional email address verified by an auto-responder, some vital stats like first and last names, and a CAPTCHA wouldn't be sufficient to thwart most vandalism. The pymol wiki was a bit on the restrictive side when I registered as I was required to send an email to the maintainer. Now it appears that they have moved to an automated CAPTCHA. Given its excellent and reliable content, it appears that it could serve as a model. James *Apologies to those who run that particular site, but your incorrect equation is a liability to everyone who tries to use it--I did try real hard to help. -- James Stroud UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics Box 951570 Los Angeles, CA 90095 http://www.jamesstroud.com
