Our recent article about WikiPathways in PLOS Biology has received an overwhelming response (mostly positive). Alex has already listed most of the responses
Most responses are positive, but some (understandably) express concern that WikiPathways is now one of the many new scientific wiki’s springing into existence. People are worried that all these different wiki’s will be terribly confusing and none will achieve critical mass without some sort of convergence. But I’m positive. Clearly, WikiPathways is an experiment, as we explain in Big Data: WikiOmics. All these wiki’s are experiments, no doubt some will fail but others will be succesful and make a real contribution to the march of progress.
The title of that article reminded me of something. There really used to be a site called WikiOmics, a wiki devoted to bioinformatics. It was a very interesting project, but I haven’t heard from them in a while. It turns out that the content of this wiki has now been folded into the hugely succesful and popular OpenWetWare.
As you can see the convergence is already happening.
Great observations, Martijn. Thanks for making the connection.