Whilst Wikipedia has been undoubtedly the standard bearer, the humble Wiki has been one of the most enduring tools for creating and sharing knowledge in the past few decades.

The success of Wikipedia has inspired a number of similar efforts, such as Radiopaedia and the Chemical Probes Wiki.  Indeed, such is the proliferation of Wiki type sites in healthcare, a recent study set out to explore both the breadth of such sites and their success levels.

Many of these ventures struggled for content, with just a handful being regarded as particularly active.  It’s a problem that Scholarpedia hopes to avoid.

Academic wiki

The site, which was inspired by Wikipedia, aims to focus specifically on academic topics, providing the reader with a deep dive into each area.

Each peer-reviewed entry can be edited by any user of the site, with the content openly available to the world at large.  The peer-review element is particularly interesting, as each article is subject to expert curation.

Before any article goes live on the site, the authors must first receive sponsorship to ensure that they are suitably expert in their field to pen the post.  It then undergoes extensive peer-review by at least fellow academics.

Future edits to published pieces are then overseen by the curator of the article, who is usually the premium expert on that topic at the time.  The hope is that pieces that appear on the site will be cited in the same way as articles appearing in academic journals are today.

The team believe that this approach allows the site to support the crossover of ideas from the academic journals to more mainstream sources such as Wikipedia itself.  By using a wiki, they hope to create a dynamic yet authoritative source of knowledge for the world to enjoy.

It’s an interesting approach, and joins other novel projects, such as Cureus, which brands itself as the first crowdsourced and open access medical journal in the world.

As the research mentioned earlier highlights, maintaining activity on community based sites is often very difficult, but I certainly wish the folks at Scholarpedia the best of luck.