Scientific Advances via Wiki

Are we on the cusp of revolutionizing the scientific method, or merely speeding up the scientific process?

Either way, this is a fascinating post by Carl Zimmer on how scientists used a wiki to collaborate in real time on the swine flu virus and then publish their results a little more than a month later in the journal Nature. The best part: everyone can read the paper, since it was published under a creative commons license.

Given all the hoopla and heady pedictions for Twitter these days, it’s easy to forget the potential of wikis. U.S. spooks realized this a few years ago.

As Zimmer points out, the wiki-enabled swine flu paper

is an anxiety-triggering read.

Yes, but I’m less anxious just knowing that this important new swine flu information is getting out there in advance of the next pandemic wave.