WikiScientists

[ français - English ]

WikiScience is a proposal for a research-level science wiki.

The idea is to open a centralised, common place for researchers as to allow them to take notes of general interest in a practical, swift and accessible way (like a super-notepad).

This is not stricto sensu an encyclopedia project, but rather a draft for an active, "living" research. Differences with Wikipedia are mainly:

• The level of the articles would suit research needs. It is very likely that introductory articles will arise for researchers of a related yet distinct subject, but that would not be intended for the layman.
• Original research would not be forbidden. Of course, crackpots would be excluded.

The project is open to all sorts of high-level fields. Subjects will be classified so that information is structured and not lost, for instance through the use of portals; however, the aim is to encourage interdisciplaniraty. For instance, a scientist working in the field of autonomous robotics should be able to use this site to get himself some general knowledge, at the level of the state of the art, in related fields like cognotive psychology or biology.

Main inteneded information:

• Biographical lists
• Article critiques
• New ideas (possibly to be confined to a user page subspace; however, contributing mainly personal subspace pages would be regarded as valuable contribution)
• trends
• State of the art
• Notable people (hopefully joining the project themselves with the time...)
• dates of conferences, submission deadlines (organised into synthetic lists as to make it easy to know where to publish)
• Howtos:
  • Howto write a paper.
  • talk to a professor
  • ask the right questions...
• News, etc.

The wiki would probably be in English only, not in order to favour such of such country, but to ensure that information would remain accessible to the largest possible community (The idea is not "Bloody Iraq-invading USAyans could just learn another language for a change", but "why should a Japanese collegue learn French to interact with me, while he's already making efforts to keep up with what's interesting for me ?"). The project is intented for scientists, a domain in which English is the lingua franca; hence, it is unlikely that non-English-speaking people would be excluded by this measure.