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.
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.