PLoS Computational Biology has embarked on a fascinating experiment in scientific publication to Wikipedia: Topic pages. That's a peer-reviewed article published in PLoS Computational Biology designed to be directly incorporated into Wikipedia. Unlike a conventional research paper, a topic paper is designed to comprehensively cover one specific topic. The first ever topic paper was about Circular permutation in proteins, a Wikipedia article which was significantly improved by the changes.
In one elegant step, this ties together Wikipedia and scientific credit: once your topic paper is published, you get the credit due to you, while Wikipedia is greatly improved by your contribution. It also ties together Wikipedia and journal publishing: one of the big problems in taxonomic informatics is tracking the bleeding edge as new species are discovered and named. By writing the articles in a wiki before submitting it for publication, the process of going from scientific paper to Wikipedia article can be simplified and sped up. Finally, by framing the goal of the paper as a "topic paper" rather than as a research question, the content is already in an encyclopedic tone and subject incompatible with a typical, hypothesis-based research paper.
Will we perhaps someday see taxonomic topic pages in which the cutting edge hypotheses about a clade's phylogenetic tree are presented, ready for inclusion into an encyclopedia? Or perhaps taxonomic review topic papers, with the most comprehensive knowledge assembled about a species or clade, summarized by experts, ready to be incorporated into the most widely used encyclopedia on the internet? I do hope so. Daniel Mietchen, the Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science, is already interested in taxonomic treatments, and I can't wait to see what he -- and the PLoS and OKFN teams -- come up with next.
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