Talk:Mathematical biology/Signed Articles/Biology's next microscope: Mathematics

The {{subpages}} template is designed to be used within article clusters and their related pages.
However, it cannot function on sub-subpage talk pages..Please continue discussion at Talk:Mathematical biology, or return to the Biology's next microscope: Mathematics subsubpage. See: "About this article:" at beginning of article

A test case for wiki-style scholarly interaction

On the occasion of this article appearing at CZ, I wish to raise a few issues related to it in a wider context, and I simply post them here, as I do not know of a better place (I do not find the forum suitable):

• I think this article could make for a good test case in terms of assessing the potential of wikis for scholarly interaction, as advocated by initiatives like OpenWetWare and especially at a time when the Original Research Policy at CZ is being discussed, while others have started to collect arguments why traditional journal-style publications should be abandoned altogether. We're not there yet, though, and I certainly view PLoS Biology amongst the most progressive journals currently around (that's why I plan to present CZ and Biology Week there, see here - readers of these lines are welcome to join in).
• Back to the article, I wonder how to treat such a large-scale citation. One way would be to put it onto a subpage (e.g. Mathematical biology) and leave it as it is, perhaps allowing for reformatting to CZ style. Another option could be to colour-code the original phrasing differently than subsequent edits here at CZ, at least as an option to the page viewer. With time, the article could then evolve from a representation of the state of the art into one of the history of the state of the art in the subject it covers. In principle, this could be done to many other articles, licensing permitting.
• Even though "Group editing encouraged" should be considered the default of wiki type environments like this one, I welcome Tony explicitly stating it again on this month's Write-a-thon page in relation to this article, since many of the articles here are edited by very few people (at least before suggested approval), much similar to scholarly traditions. Yet a wiki like this has a wider potential! I am thus glad to see initiatives like Workgroup Weeks or London Research Day which encourage collaborative editing, and I would like to see it more often in Eduzendium, too (e.g. by means of {{EZarticle-open-auto}}, which I will try in a summer school course later this year).

Daniel Mietchen 04:50, 5 June 2008 (CDT)

Title

I'll be interested to see how the experiment goes, and as usual I greatly appreciate Tony's initiative. The one problem I can immediately identify is that the title does not seem to be the title of an encyclopedia article. Hence, it seems to me the article must be either retitled or moved.

Like some journal articles, it uses a metaphor, whereas we want our encyclopedia article titles to be literal, straightforward, and identify a general topic of interest. For example, a more appropriate title for us (entirely off the top of my head, and having only lightly skimmed the article) might be: the intersection of mathematics and biology.

If the source article was the first time in a published article that someone compared mathematics to a microscope in this way, I'm not sure that we should be buying into the metaphor lock, stock, and barrel the way the article does. But that is a question I would leave to the biologists. For all I know, the metaphor is obviously apt and innocuous.

Of course, if the article were made a signed article, this particular problem would be finessed. --Larry Sanger 14:16, 5 June 2008 (CDT)

Templates to keep different sets of references separate?

After starting to wikify the original references, I am wondering about ways to keep the original references separate from ones (and footnotes) added here at CZ. Of course one could think of copying ref to ref2 and reflist to reflist2 and then calling the two sets separately but I suspect the issue has come up earlier and has a known solution other than that. -- Daniel Mietchen 03:37, 6 June 2008 (CDT)

Also, would it be possible to display in the text the author names instead of the numbers that point to the references? -- Daniel Mietchen 05:32, 6 June 2008 (CDT)