NeuroWiki: call for participation
What is NeuroWiki?
NeuroWiki is a wiki discussion forum about neuroscience research, especially theoretical, computational, and cognitive neuroscience. Neuroscience is an exploding field and it’s hard to keep track of. NeuroWiki will provide short, collaboratively written summaries of current research trends and ideas, with links to related papers and researchers — this will aid neuroscientists in keeping up with areas outside their specialty, and will allow researchers to learn about things related to their work that they would not have heard of otherwise. However, the best part of NeuroWiki will be the discussions spawned by these topics.
Like PLoS, NeuroWiki content will be “open content”, freely available for reuse in other projects.
What isn’t NeuroWiki?
NeuroWiki is not an encyclopaedia. Encyclopaedias collect settled knowledge; NeuroWiki is a living conversation about current research trends and ideas, including such non-encyclopaedic topics as “lists of papers you should read”, debates about controversial theories, new and unproved theories, notes from talks that participants have attended, and off-the-cuff brainstorming. If you want a collaborative encyclopaedia, see WikiPedia or Scholarpedia.
NeuroWiki is not a weblog. A weblog is a set of posts ordered by date that broadcasts interesting news to an audience. Weblogs are good for spreading awareness of interesting information, especially news. They are not good at sustaining slow, ongoing discussions, or at collaboratively involving a large community in the creation of content. Neurodudes is an example of a weblog.
NeuroWiki is not an email list. On an email list, old discussions go into the list archives, which are infrequently re-read later on. There are no “archives” on NeuroWiki; every topic is “active”. Old discussions on a wiki are collaboratively edited to make them more readable for new participants. In addition, wikis are good at collecting information over time; information such as a collaboratively maintained list of papers about a particular topic.
NeuroWiki is not a journal. NeuroWiki is a conversation, containing pointers to research results as well as informal discussion. It is not itself the place to publish your new results.
What is the call for participation?
NeuroWiki is an open, collaborative project, and we are looking for neuroscientists (students included) who want to participate. We are looking for people to help write a few short summaries of topics that they know about, people to help plan and steer the project, people to be editors, as well as people who are just interested in discussing neuroscience online. If you might be interested, email bshanks at ucsd dot edu; or, if you are familiar with wiki, then simply mosey on over to http://purl.net/net/neurowiki and create a homepage for yourself.
Please circulate this CFP to anyone whom you believe would be a good fit for the project.