[Proteopedia] Hydrogen and Water (Proteopedia)

[Dan Bolser]

On 24/11/2008, Eric Martz <emartz at microbio.umass.edu> wrote:
> Dear Dan,
>
> Thank you very much for the improvements that you made at
> http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Hydrogen_in_macromolecular_models
>
> I very much like your opening summary. I'll try to follow your example on
> that.
>
> Also thanks for cleaning up my table and titling it. I have not yet
> learned how to use wikitext for tables. I am still considering
> expanding the table, in which case I may need colspans or rowspans.
> I'm not sure if that can be done with the wikitext table markup.

Yes you can do that, but its not trivial to learn the wiki table
syntax (I wouldn't know colspans of the top of my head). If you want
to try to learn, see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

Otherwise I would just put back the HTML version if you know what you
are doing with that. My preference is to use wikitext over HTML
wherever possible, but there is nothing wrong with using HTML
especially when its easier to read / write.


> I am not comfortable putting my Content Attribution section in
> Discussion, so I have moved it back to the main article (and cleaned
> it up a bit). I have contributed a number of other pages where I have
> similar Content Attribution sections. In Proteopedia, we started a
> "Content Donator" policy when we began incorporating material written
> by others into articles.
> http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Proteopedia_Page_Contributors_and_Editors
>
> This is particularly crucial when we incorporate material, with
> permission, yet the original author's name does not appear in the
> automatically generated User list under "Page Contributors and
> Editors". For example, we have permission to incorporate content from
> the vast library of Kinemages authored in large part by Jane and
> David Richardson. When I began adapting large blocks of documentation
> from Protein Explorer into Proteopedia, I was much more comfortable
> doing so with Content Attribution statements crediting my original work.
>
> Please note that Proteopedia's policies on attribution are quite
> different from those of Wikipedia, not only in "content attribution",
> but also in listing the real full names of all "Page Contributors and
> Editors". We are forging new ground here, I think, in constructing a
> wiki with a more professional tone than Wikipedia. Our goals include
> to give clear credit as well as responsibility.

Yes, I understand this. However, I still think its wrong. Please don't
take this as a criticism, everybody make mistakes, and I think that is
precisely what this is. It's totally reasonable to rethink attribution
in a Wiki context, but I think if you put up barriers to contribution
you end up damaging the project in the long run. I agree that its very
important to identify and credit the appropriate contributors, but
putting that in the text of the wiki page is confusing. I think it puts
people off editing pages.

Fair attribution is the idea behind who gets on a paper and which
papers get cited - its part of the foundation of the scientific
community. In these cases, I think *citation* would be the most
appropriate form of attribution - citing the appropriate author of the
appropriate web page or resource. The discussion page is therefore,
IMHO, the ideal place to additionally describe the detailed provenance
of the page.

I think if people want to contribute directly to PP, its reasonable to
ask them to create an account and log in to do that. In this way the
system keeps track of who has contributed what, and perhaps in future
such effort can be formally recognized within the kind of system that
MW implements and given the specific policy of PP.



> While I'm talking about policies, I'll invite everyone to revisit
> http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Proteopedia:Policy

I'll certainly take this opportunity to re-read the policy. Its very
interesting to think about how science, scientists and the scientific
community can work in the context of Wiki technologies (i.e. how can
scientists get honest recognition for honest work within a wider
framework of scientific collaboration). My belief is that any solution
should not compromise the freedom of the individual to contribute,
weather that be physical barriers or just subtle dissuasion.


This is clearly an area for further debate, so please don't take the
above for an angry tirade. Its just the state of my current thinking
which I have put forward for discussion.


All the best,
Dan.


> Sincerely, -Eric
>
> At 11/24/08, Dan Bolser wrote:
>>Cheers Eric.
>>
>>I made a few small edits on that page, and tried to add an 'opening
>>summary' like on most Wikipedia pages. Most noteably I moved the
>>'Content Attribution' section to the discussion page with the note
>>"Attribution is handled differently in the Wiki system than in the
>>text on which this article was based". Discussion on that is welcome.
>>
>>Dan.
>
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