Depending on who you ask wikis are either the distilled divinity collected from humanity or the online equivalent of mob violence. By definition, wikis are simply a tool by which multiple users can build and edit webpages on a website, but in their application they have promise to be much more. Since 2005, OpenWetWare has served as a hub for all manner of biological information. It is a reference source containing information on materials, protocols for biological experiments, schematics, and experimental results. There are nearly 7000 users from all over the globe, most of them research scientists, editing 13,000+ pages of content. OpenWetWare has the potential to become the more reliable, biologically minded cousin to Wikipedia and I’m very impressed with it.

In the traditional model of scientific progress, researchers share information through two channels: published research and discussions at conferences. Six to twelve months could pass before one scientist learns about the discoveries made by another. OpenWetWare is a precursor to Science 2.0, a new paradigm wherein research learns some of the lessons of open source computer programming. By sharing information quickly online, scientists could reduce the duplication of work, create a quicker dialogue between teams, and develop dynamic and productive collaborations. In other words, the democratic dissemination of information would increase the efficiency of the scientific community, accelerating the rate at which the world benefits from their discoveries.
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