I love wikis. I love the idea. I love many of the implementations. We use one in my research lab, I use one for my home page, I set a few up for coordination following Hurricane Katrina, and so on. The internal lab wiki has saved me hours and countless hours of having to re-explain something. It’s saved Rob from having to set up some other sort of distribution of software. Now that I’m using access control lists, it provides and easy way for the lab to make files and information readily available to select people, and to the world. It’s a fantastic collaboration tool, whose power is perhaps epitomized by the king of wikis, Wikipedia. Last week, I decided that there was a nice big hole in the Internets where something should be.
A wiki for the entire field of cardiac electrophysiology. And here it is:
It’s in its infancy now, but I intend to populate it further. It will truly take off when enough people watch it, update it, point their students at it, make it their homepage, tell their friends, post conference notes, list blogs, share research data, and use it to keep abreast of the field.
The age of person-generated content is at hand. (As opposed to organization-generated content, I suppose)