Abstract of presentation given by Ralph Schroeder and myself at the 2009 biennial conference of the Association for History, Philosophy and Social Science of Biology, Brisbane, Australia.

Community-driven efforts at collaborative knowledge production have recently taken off (Olson, Zimmerman and Bos 2008). The success of Wikipedia is only the most widely known example. More recently still, biologists have taken up Wiki-type tools. One reason is that there is a data deluge (Borgman 2007), especially in the life sciences. The paper will examine a number of case studies drawn from a range of different efforts, such as myExperiment, GeneWiki, BioModels.net, and OpenWetware. The main focus of this research is community dynamics: who contributes? Are there small cores of contributors and large peripheries of occasional contributors (as has been found for Wikipedia)? What are the trade-offs between centralized control versus self-curation in community-driven efforts? Are there disagreements about the quality, formats, and means of classifying and representing the data? These issues have become critical, as Leonelli (2007) has shown in her study of the TAIR database.The paper will review the variety of current collaborative online efforts under way in order to identify the various factors that influence their different trajectories, focusing particularly on the role of gatekeepers and the patterns of contributions over time. The paper will also make comparisons with community-driven discovery and databases in other fields, for example literature (PynchonWiki) and volunteer computing efforts as in climate change (Climateprediction.net). The conclusion will discuss the outlook for this way of doing science. To what extent do these tools represent a paradigm shift in biology, or is this ‘old wine in new bottles’?