This is the third report of the ‘Publishing on OpenWetWare’ series. In brief, I am writing an article on OWW from start to finish: initial writing -> collecting comments -> publishing on arXiv.org -> presenting at a conference. For other articles, see one, and two. In this report, I’ll share my experiences in gathering comments from the community.

The Setup

The first draft of ‘Python - All A Scientist Needs’ can be seen here. After finishing the draft, I posted a link at the top of the page asking anyone who wanted to comment to leave a comment on the talk page. I also sent emails to 6 friends, giving them a link to the OWW page, and asking them to either email me comments, or to type them directly in the wiki page. In addition, the second report in this series (two) invited anyone who wanted to comment on the paper to leave a comment on the wiki, or a comment on the blog post.

All the comments received can be seen on the talk page.

Results

I received a total of 2 comments and criticisms, and 2 notes of encouragement. Neither set of the criticisms were that critical, and every note I received was very positive. All of these responses were from the email solicitations. The breakdown of the method of delivery is as follows:

• 3 comments by email. (One of these was typed in manually into the talk page by myself.)
• 1 comment from the wiki talk page. (In this case I actually forced my friend to get an OWW account to do this.)
• 0 comments from the blog post (about the article itself).

This is all despite the 4,163 times (as of this writing) that the article has been viewed.

Conclusions

Something is wrong with the way OWW is thinking about users contributing to the wiki. This experiment seems to demonstrate that users are hesitant to edit pages - even talk pages - even when they are explicitly asked to. Over 4,000 page hits is an awful lot for at least some of those to not leave comments.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I would sure like to find out. If anyone has any ideas, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this blog post, or the talk page for the article.

On the other hand, this 4,000 number could reflect a lot of non-OWW users accessing the page. (Googling ‘Python Scientist’ gives the page as the 8th result as of this writing.) I have no way of knowing how many of those people might have wanted to leave a comment, but couldn’t because they are not OWW users. (To avoid spam, I only put a link to emailing me through OWW, not explicitly through my email address. However, there are links to the blog posts which allow public comments, but those are presumably found only by the most diligent readers.)

The main reason why OWW does not allow anonymous comments is that science is not anonymous, and OWW in the end is a resource for professional-quality scientific material. OWW might consider opening up to blog-like comments however, where authors of the page can accept or reject anonymous comments as they appear. It might allow for a lot more community participation, and it would be nice for the authors to know how people viewed their material.

If you have any thoughts/questions/opinions, once again, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this blog post, or the talk page for the article.