I sincerely doubt if "the best and the brightest young scientists … use Wikipedia", and if they did they wouldn't remain "the best and the brightest" for very long.

For up-to-the-wiki-picosecond information on Wikipediot Culture, you may visit The Wikipedia Review.

Jon Awbrey, 05 Oct 2008 EDT 7:48 PM

Bora,

From what you say, I would guess that you are familiar with a small corner of Wikipedia, one that is fortunate enough to be watched over by a pre-established community of people who are competent in the pertinent fields. I have known a few such wiki-paradises in Wikipedia, but I have learned that they are very fragile and ephemeral to the max. No part of Wikipedia is safe when some economic, industrial, or political interest group discovers an interest in it. When that happens, you will discover to your dismay that the Wikipedia Way of doing things affords none of the protections against information warping that have taken centuries to evolve in the Real World.

Jon Awbrey, 06 Oct 2008 EDT 3:54 PM

I saw you mention some aspects of the problems with Wikipedia, but I did not see anything approaching a full appreciation of their character and intransigence.

But perhaps I can distill the remainder of my reflections down to this single piece of advice:

Any scientific resource worth creating in one social intellectual technical environment (SITE) is worth distributing through a number of different SITEs, ones that observe a variety of different protocols. This provides the resource with a measure of redundancy and robustness in case some of the SITEs crash for whatever reasons.

But you probably already knew that …

Many Regards,

Jon Awbrey, 08 Oct 2008 EDT 10:08 AM