WikiAbstracts is the idea of collaborating abstracting scientific articles in a public Wiki. WikiAbstracts could be part of a Wikimedia University. WikiAbstracts does not try to do new research nor subsuming multiple articles (WikiReviews). WikiAbstracting could also be done to translate articles. Since translation does require the authors permission and abstracting does not WikiAbstracting is possibly the better choice. By the way: abstracting Wikipedia articles does not make sense that much because a good article should not require it.

edit