> Writing an article is easy for a few people to do Writing a bad article is easy. And pervasive in science education. I'm suggesting there's a level of excel

> Writing an article is easy for a few people to do Writing a bad article is easy. And pervasive in science education. I'm suggesting there's a level of excellence, at which even a small fragment of an article, for any audience, takes a surprisingly large gathering of expertise. So large as to be implausible with current social/technical/incentive infrastructure. And I'm speculating that it's an interesting level of excellence, with benefits that might justify the investment. Or at least the discussion of the possibility. > write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it I'm unsure how to describe why I don't buy this. Imagine a draft newspaper article, which says "Foos do qux". The fact-checker objects, "But some foos don't do qux". The reporter "fixes" the draft with "Most foos do qux". The newspaper fact-checker says "yes, that's great", and it goes to press. Then someone who actually understands foos, points out to a colleague, that the entire focus on qux was misguided, confusing, and engenders misconceptions, and that indeed, the very concepts of foo and qux are badly flawed. "It's news media - what do you expect?" the colleague responds. So there's a concept that you can wordsmith you way out of getting something badly wrong. You've likely seen some process where two parties have profoundly different concepts, but instead of discussing concepts, are engaged in text tweaking. But what if, in excellent content, even high-level organization is sensitive to expertise-intensive details? "Ok, for the foundational concept, we have proposals for atoms, a different definition of atoms, molecules with atoms as a degenerate case, atoms in molecules, nuclei, electron energy, electron clouds, configuration spaces, trajectory spaces, ... . Let's explore the correctness, accessibility and fruitfulness of each foundation." What if you can't even write a draft title, let alone structure a presentation, until after a massive collaborative process among educators, research scientists, and creative catalysts? > the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute An MIT project to create cell-biology VR content approached the need for expertise by pulling in researchers for interviews about their areas. But there was a reoccurring difficulty... getting the researchers to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. So I offer the hopeful possibility, that a project with just-the-right sweet-spot shape, might accomplish things that seem impossibly difficult, when seen less clearly. > open source books I'm sympathetic to OER. But in the context of transformative improvement... Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. It's not clear to me that a reasonably scaled OER effort can move that needle. Years ago, NSF almost decided to create a national science education wiki, analogous in scale to wikipedia. That might have had critical mass for transformative change. But they didn't.