User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Integrating wikis with scientific workflows/Take-home message

Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one — the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper.

(John Wilbanks)

• Wikis are being used regularly for every step of the research cycle, except for funding. The reasons for this are cultural, not technical.
• They are also increasingly used in non-research workflows auxiliary to the research cycle, especially for education, less so for administration.

• Outlook: real-time collaborative editing, not just of text, and a federation of community wikis linked by open standards