Member-only story
Case study: A crowdsourced online encyclopedia for scientific journal articles
Let’s make science education better with collaborative notes.
Back in summer of 2018 when I was still an aspiring neuroscientist, I attended a summer program at the University of Washington in Seattle. The first week was devoted to learning everything coding and data related. The second week was a hackathon — time reserved for building new tools and packages that would help us do better science.
The pain points in doing science
Thinking about what I could contribute to the scientific community, I thought about my biggest challenges in doing science. Reading. It’s not that I hate reading but reading scientific journal articles can be difficult and lonely. Journal articles are dense, often superfluous, and packed with data & ideas. Unfortunately, you have very little access to what other people think. If you are lucky, maybe you’ll do a journal club where half the attendees haven’t read the paper or you’ll see some chat about it on academic Twitter until it’s quickly displaced by other new papers.
Back in high school when I was stuck reading books or papers for classes, Wikipedia and SparkNotes were my saving grace. SparkNotes had amazing summaries that really helped a casual reader like me better understand a book to its entirety. Wikipedia proved the power of crowdsourced knowledge where people collaborate and correct each other to explain even the most complex theories and concepts in a digestible manner.
I thought it would be great to have something like this for academic papers. The idea was simple: Create a platform where people can share and collaborate summaries of scientific articles.
The features
Paperwiki required two key features: 1) search for a science article, and 2) create or edit notes attached to that article.
