The internet has significantly effected the way we do research but it’s capabilities have not yet been fully realized.<\/p>\n
First, let’s acknowledge some known effects.<\/p>\n
Now, let’s look at attempts to go further.<\/p>\n
Now, let’s consider some futures. <\/p>\n
This future is significantly more probable than most people understand. As evidence compare the machine learning page three years ago (yep, it didn’t exist), two years ago<\/a>, one year ago<\/a>, and today<\/a>. That progression strongly suggests that wikipedia:machine learning will continue to grow into a significant information resource.<\/p>\n There are fundamental obstacles to the success of the wikipedia future. <\/p>\n Each of these individual steps clearly yields something better. At the end of these steps, creating a paper is simply the process of creating a webpage or altering an existing webpage. We can imagine doing all of this while keeping the peer-review mechanisms of science intact, so the resulting process is simply better in all ways. It’s easier to author because for most papers much of the “filler” introduction\/motivation\/definition can be reused from previous papers. It’s easier to review, because reviewers can consider the result in context. Much of the difficulty of reviewing is simply due to the author and reviewer not being “on the same page” in how they understand things. An organized topic hierarchy greatly aids this.\n<\/li>\n Which future comes about is dependent on many things—the decisions of community leaders, enabling ‘math-on-the-web’ technologies, etc…, so it is difficult to predict which future and when it will come about. Nevertheless, a potential exists and there are several paths leading towards reaching that potential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The internet has significantly effected the way we do research but it’s capabilities have not yet been fully realized. First, let’s acknowledge some known effects. Self-publishing By default, all researchers in machine learning (and more generally computer science and physics) place their papers online for anyone to download. The exact mechanism differs—physicists tend to use … <\/p>\n\n
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