Depends how much storage space you are willing to buy.
One of my fantasies is a Raspberry Pi that automatically downloads all Wikipedia updates each month or so, to keep a local copy. The ultimate version of this would do the same for every new academic article available on Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub is the largest collection of scientific papers on the planet, and has over 58 million academic papers. If they average 100 kB a piece, that’s only 5.8 TB. If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash, but you could in theory download all available academic papers.
Someone may even have already done something like this, and put the script on GitHub or somewhere. (I haven’t looked.)
(Also, nice username. :) )
EDIT: It turns out there’s a custom built app for downloading and viewing Wikipedia in various languages. It’s available on PCs, Android phones, and there’s already a version made specially for the Pi: http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html
I wonder how difficult it would be to translate all of Sci-Hub into a wiki format that the app could add and read. You’d probably have to modify the app slightly, in order to divide up all the Sci-Hub articles among multiple hard drives. It might make the in-app search feature take forever, for instance. And obviously it wouldn’t work for the Android app, since there’s not enough space on a MicroSD card. (Although, maybe a smaller version could be made, containing only the top 32GB of journal articles with the most citations, plus all review articles.)
Even just converting science into a Wikipedia-like format would be useful for the sake of open access. Imagine if all citations in a paper were a hyperlink away, and the abstract would display if you hovered your mouse over the link. (The XOWA app does this for Wikipedia links.)
Even just converting science into a Wikipedia-like format would be useful for the sake of open access. Imagine if all citations in a paper were a hyperlink away, and the abstract would display if you hovered your mouse over the link.
YES! YES! YES! And this could be done pretty much automatically. Also, links in the reverse direction: “who cited this paper?” with abstracts in tooltips.
But there is much more that could be done in the hypothetical Science Wiki. For example, imagine that the reverse citations that disagree with the original paper would appear in a different color or with a different icon, so you could immediately check “who disagree with this paper?”. That would already require some human work (unfortunately, with all the problems that follow, such as edit wars and editor corruption). Or imagine having a “Talk page” for each of these papers. Imagine people trying to write better third-party abstracts: more accessible, less buzzwords, adding some context from later research. Imagine people trying to write a simpler version of the more popular papers...
The science could be made more accessible and popular.
If I recall, in the early middle ages, one of the main ways by which philosophy and proto-science advanced was through the extensive use of glosses. (as adapted from biblical glosses) Contemporary thinkers would all write commentaries on various works of Aristotle. At first, these were confined to the margins of the manuscripts being copied, but later they were published separately.
Since Aristotle had a fairly comprehensive philosophy, this meant reading all the glosses on a particular work of his brought you up to speed with the current state of knowledge on that topic. This had the effect of creating domains of knowledge, and scholarly specialization first nucleated around individual texts.
I say this, because one of the main problems with science today is just that there is so much of it. This makes it difficult to have interdisciplinary#Interactions) exchange of knowledge and meaningful communication and coordination.
Having a search engine like Google Scholar helps enormously, but it can be difficult to sift through a body of knowledge if you don’t already know all the right keywords to search for. The existence of review articles also helps summarize, but it’s still a somewhat clumsy solution. Why not replace the review article with a wiki?
It would be nice to have everything arranged formally and hierarchically, by field, sub-field, and then by topic within that sub field. Each level could have their own publicly editable summary, if there was enough human effort to maintain it. Imagine all that also ordered by citation index, and with links to all relevant news articles, blogs, and reddit threads commenting on each article.
Read a tabloid headline starting with “Scientists Say...”? Go directly to the wiki, and check what other scientists and the internet think of the research quality, background context, reputability, etc. Maybe even have a prediction market on whether the findings will replicate.
A huge part of the scientific discourse is no longer happening in the journal articles themselves, but this could capture it all in one place.
Citeseer was originally supposed to serve a similar purpose by automatically extracting the excerpts where the paper was cited, so that the human could judge whether they were positive or negative. But it seems to have been abandoned after the advent of google scholar, or maybe before.
For Wikipedia, I’ve been reasonably satisfied with Kiwix for software, and their updated-every-month-or-three copies of Wikipedia, and the related Wikimedia foundation sites, at http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages .
If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash
Unfortunately, I don’t have “decent cash” to shell out. I’ve seem some setups at /r/DataHoarder that I would be extremely happy to ever own, but don’t expect to until typical HDs are an order of magnitude or two bigger than today’s. By which time I expect people will have come up with brand-new forms of data to fill the things with. :)
(Also, nice username. :) )
It’s not just a nom-de-net, it’s a way of life. :)
Depends how much storage space you are willing to buy.
One of my fantasies is a Raspberry Pi that automatically downloads all Wikipedia updates each month or so, to keep a local copy. The ultimate version of this would do the same for every new academic article available on Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub is the largest collection of scientific papers on the planet, and has over 58 million academic papers. If they average 100 kB a piece, that’s only 5.8 TB. If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash, but you could in theory download all available academic papers.
Someone may even have already done something like this, and put the script on GitHub or somewhere. (I haven’t looked.)
(Also, nice username. :) )
EDIT: It turns out there’s a custom built app for downloading and viewing Wikipedia in various languages. It’s available on PCs, Android phones, and there’s already a version made specially for the Pi: http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html
I wonder how difficult it would be to translate all of Sci-Hub into a wiki format that the app could add and read. You’d probably have to modify the app slightly, in order to divide up all the Sci-Hub articles among multiple hard drives. It might make the in-app search feature take forever, for instance. And obviously it wouldn’t work for the Android app, since there’s not enough space on a MicroSD card. (Although, maybe a smaller version could be made, containing only the top 32GB of journal articles with the most citations, plus all review articles.)
Even just converting science into a Wikipedia-like format would be useful for the sake of open access. Imagine if all citations in a paper were a hyperlink away, and the abstract would display if you hovered your mouse over the link. (The XOWA app does this for Wikipedia links.)
YES! YES! YES! And this could be done pretty much automatically. Also, links in the reverse direction: “who cited this paper?” with abstracts in tooltips.
But there is much more that could be done in the hypothetical Science Wiki. For example, imagine that the reverse citations that disagree with the original paper would appear in a different color or with a different icon, so you could immediately check “who disagree with this paper?”. That would already require some human work (unfortunately, with all the problems that follow, such as edit wars and editor corruption). Or imagine having a “Talk page” for each of these papers. Imagine people trying to write better third-party abstracts: more accessible, less buzzwords, adding some context from later research. Imagine people trying to write a simpler version of the more popular papers...
The science could be made more accessible and popular.
One of my first thoughts was glosses.
If I recall, in the early middle ages, one of the main ways by which philosophy and proto-science advanced was through the extensive use of glosses. (as adapted from biblical glosses) Contemporary thinkers would all write commentaries on various works of Aristotle. At first, these were confined to the margins of the manuscripts being copied, but later they were published separately.
Since Aristotle had a fairly comprehensive philosophy, this meant reading all the glosses on a particular work of his brought you up to speed with the current state of knowledge on that topic. This had the effect of creating domains of knowledge, and scholarly specialization first nucleated around individual texts.
I say this, because one of the main problems with science today is just that there is so much of it. This makes it difficult to have interdisciplinary#Interactions) exchange of knowledge and meaningful communication and coordination.
Having a search engine like Google Scholar helps enormously, but it can be difficult to sift through a body of knowledge if you don’t already know all the right keywords to search for. The existence of review articles also helps summarize, but it’s still a somewhat clumsy solution. Why not replace the review article with a wiki?
It would be nice to have everything arranged formally and hierarchically, by field, sub-field, and then by topic within that sub field. Each level could have their own publicly editable summary, if there was enough human effort to maintain it. Imagine all that also ordered by citation index, and with links to all relevant news articles, blogs, and reddit threads commenting on each article.
Read a tabloid headline starting with “Scientists Say...”? Go directly to the wiki, and check what other scientists and the internet think of the research quality, background context, reputability, etc. Maybe even have a prediction market on whether the findings will replicate.
A huge part of the scientific discourse is no longer happening in the journal articles themselves, but this could capture it all in one place.
Citeseer was originally supposed to serve a similar purpose by automatically extracting the excerpts where the paper was cited, so that the human could judge whether they were positive or negative. But it seems to have been abandoned after the advent of google scholar, or maybe before.
Innovation in science may undermine the efficacy of science if science is a process.
For Wikipedia, I’ve been reasonably satisfied with Kiwix for software, and their updated-every-month-or-three copies of Wikipedia, and the related Wikimedia foundation sites, at http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages .
Unfortunately, I don’t have “decent cash” to shell out. I’ve seem some setups at /r/DataHoarder that I would be extremely happy to ever own, but don’t expect to until typical HDs are an order of magnitude or two bigger than today’s. By which time I expect people will have come up with brand-new forms of data to fill the things with. :)
It’s not just a nom-de-net, it’s a way of life. :)