How to Encourage Contributions
We are currently exploring various strategies to encourage people to let us know when they find errors or omissions in UniProt, or even to contribute data as they publish their research, rather than waiting for a curator to pick up their results from a publication.
In principal all of this has been possible for a long time: We have feedback forms etc, but people don’t make use of these often (or not as often as we would like…). The most frequent requests are from people who have published a paper and would like us to cite them.
The most effective improvement, in my opinion, may be to allow people to directly attach comments to each database entry, like in a blog (simple, instant gratification etc). These comments could then be reviewed by curators, and integrated into the database, if appropriate.
Having a system where people could add and update data directly, on the other hand, wouldn’t be practical: The amount of training required to enter data in a consistent manner is considerable, and being consistent is essential for large, highly structured data sets like UniProt.
Another approach is to have a hand-picked list of experts who are responsible for certain database entries, according to their area of expertise. These people would be responsible for letting us know if something needs to be updated, though I wonder how many people can be motivated to commit themselves to such a thing.
The critical factor in the end may not just be how easy it is to contribute, but also how much credit can be gained from doing so. Contributors should be listed on each page. Should we go as far as attributing individual facts to contributors? This would allow us to also state who disagrees with something. Should we allow people to rate the contributions of others? This way people could gain reputation through our web site. Somehow I suspect that contributing to public databases like UniProt won’t become common practice until this is something that you can proudly mention in your CV…
February 9th, 2006 at 00:32
You are probably right and beyond the technologies, that we can offer, it is also important to understand the social behavior of a community of research.
Altruism,deferred cooperation or personal interest?
Probably no more that the Human being is, but certainly with the will of a better
sharing of knowledge (a long tradition in science).
But if the contribution to a public database depend, in part, on the personal interest, or a true altruism, of the contributor, it remains the problem of the understanding of the database (its format or structure, the way to contributes, how it could be used) and of its importance for the community.
May be,to contribute, today,this is not simple. Surely, that needs training, and certainly a certain part of work time.
Surely,to build tools that allow to manage in a simple way a complex knowledge could help, and I hope that we can build these.
February 9th, 2006 at 00:43
I have the same feeling when you say:
Somehow I suspect that contributing to public databases like UniProt wont become common practice until this is something that you can proudly mention in your CV”
For any wiki which is related to work, I believe most people will expect a reward which is more material than the respect of their fellow wikists. Also, many researchers are not very interested in teaching, so making knowledge public is not something which motivates them strongly unless it makes them famous. I also believe that Wikipedia is such a success because it is very general, so you can always find people who find it fun. But asking every researcher to put his/her results in a public wiki, let’s say in addition to traditional papers, is what we need but is not yet realistic. I am curious to know other people’s experience, but a little less than one year ago, nobody in my lab ever contributed a single line to Wikipedia, and as of today, only one contributed fixing a few typos to the bioinformatics wiki I started in November 2005 – and that’s because we are in the same office! Our group has about 20 people, all bioinformatics specialists. It’s not that they are not able to contribute, it’s just that they don’t see the point: most of them are postdocs, worried about their career, and any work which does not leave a trace in their CV is not worthy.
That said, the only thing we need is to find a robust way of estimating the quantity, quality and usefulness of the contributions of people to wikis in a way that can be trusted by employers. Something like impact factors, but for people :-)
Any ideas?
June 23rd, 2011 at 06:19
Like the post! Thank you