Permafrost in wikis
As with many subjects, information about permafrost is spread across numerous online and offline sources which differ in reliability, comprehensibility, accessibility, up-to-dateness and integration with other sources. While textbooks and research articles fare well on the first point, they are often not at hand when needed, and they may be considerably out of date. News sites, mailing lists, fora and blogs usually contain very topical information with uncertain reliability and little context. This post is on permafrost coverage in wikis, which are somewhere in between these two rough categories.
Wikis can excel in providing context that is up to date, accessible and integrated with all sorts of sources, but generally suffer the crucial weakness of low reliability. In recent years, a number of approaches have been proposed to address this problem, and some of them will be briefly presented here.
Several Wikipedias have regularly updated entries on permafrost but none of them seems to be written in a consistent narrative, and since everyone can edit them, they are all vulnerable to both blunt and subtle vandalism or simply inexperience with the topic. All Wikipedias have recently changed their licenses from GFDL to CC-BY-SA 3.0, which permits reuse.
The currently most comprehensive public wiki entry on permafrost is Permafrost in the Arctic at the Encyclopedia of Earth, a specialized encyclopedia written by experts under their real names (often on the basis of materials provided by partner organizations, in this case the International Arctic Science Committee), with no role for participation of the public. It is licensed CC-BY-SA 2.5 and was last updated on October 11, 2007.
Another expert platform with real names - Scholarpedia - is expanding from a computational neuroscience core and does not yet have an article on permafrost, though a public election for its author has been initiated, allowing anyone to voice their opinion (weighted by previous activity on the site) on who would be best qualified to write that piece. Authoring an article is by invitation only, but any registered user can update or correct existing entries, subject to approval by the article's curator. Scholarpedia offers authors to choose from several licenses, and most opt to disallow reuse.
A hybrid of public and expert participation is Citizendium: anyone registered under their real name can start and contribute to any draft on any topic, while experts (in Citizendium parlance: "editors") can approve (or reapprove) a draft, which results in a copy of it being turned into a stable version (i.e. it can only be edited by sysops), while another copy always remains editable. A stub article on permafrost has been created (last update two months ago), and anyone can join in to make it better. For researchers involved with teaching, furthermore, it may be of interest that Citizendium has an initiative (called Eduzendium) that provides for wiki articles to be written for course credit. Citizendium content is also licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.
There are numerous other wikis on scientific topics from lab notebooks to partial differential equations to biological species to the cosmos but I am not aware of further ones which cover permafrost or related articles.
- Daniel Mietchen's blog
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The good point for further development is to integrate our PYRN to wikipedia or any other "wiki". It could be and it should be a source for advertising. Once you read the article or stub on permafrost - the link below must show PYRN at least once. Who will do the educative work on permafrost in the net, especially for those who can use it - mostly our generation. Or we can do a permafrost dictionary FROSTIONARY with all the pictures we have. Why does the photo gallery is just gallery? There could be the all-features-of-permafrost portal here for those who need it. And this is the point of financing. I know that russian government granted some funds for the educative web-sites. They must have be in Russian for sure and be a part of some other projects, but at the same time - the product of those projects.
We travel freakingly far and unusual places to travel. Our Pyrn-gallery could be tagged for use Panoramio.
I don't know - do we have limits for content on the site? How many persons may have personal web-pagesful of it here?
Frostionary certainly merits another thought but my experience with specialized wikis is that they rarely get the user base necessary for stable operation and that they are necessarily limited in the amount of context they provide: The North Pole is relevant to many things permafrost, but a North Pole entry based on a permafrost perspective is bound to be rather empty, so why not combine the Frostionary efforts with other, already ongoing efforts in wikis with a broader scope?
As for perusing the PYRN Gallery, I am all for it but think it could be more useful if we had versions with higher resolutions available (like at flickr).
Hi Gleb and Daniel,
Gleb, those are all excellent thoughts. I encourage you to contact the PYRN Executive Committee with your ideas. The young and web-savvy permafrost community should play a prominent role in building permafrost resources, whether they be wikis, glossaries, along with image galleries, etc. So the answer to all of your questions is "yes!" PYRN should have a Wikipedia entry, just like the International Permafrost Association does. PYRN should take a lead in building educational resources. PYRN should build glossaries making use of the extensive photographs from its members' field work and other projects. Indeed, PYRN should be the web portal for permafrost science and research.
But doing all of those things requires energetic people with motivation and ideas. So Gleb and Daniel, I say to you -- do it! Maybe others will follow your lead and also participate. That's the whole point of PYRN, to bring together the young permafrost community in one (albeit virtual cyber) place to foster such ideas and projects.
Cheers,
Oliver
I also fully support that the PYRN community takes the lead in educating the public on permafrost (the field that we chose to study, because...). I agree that smaller wikis are more laborious than generating and updating e.g. Wikipedia article. There is also more visibility in Wikipedia for the PYRN link under each article, which definitely would benefit PYRN. E.g. the 'permafrost' article is rather weak right now. Many other phenomena and processes are missing entirely. That is were journalists often get their first info on a theme. But what they don't know about they cannot report about.
I also like the gallery idea. How about using the International Permafrost Glossary as a base for key words connected to a PYRN-based web gallery. Search 'ice wedge' and you get the 10 best photos with photograph, location, and date. Search 'palsa' and you get a nice assemblage of palsa photos.
Like Gleb already said: There might also be funding money in such efforts. I was contacted by a guy some months ago who was trying to establish a thesis database for all kind of fields in a NSF-sponsored education/outreach project. Yes, they got grant money for the same thing we did by ourselves. He stumbled over our PYRN-Bib and was amazed about how many entries there are and how many people did actually contribute and asked questions on how to make his efforts similar succesful.