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By Root 315 0

is the qwiki (short for “quantum wiki”), set up in 2005 by John Stockton, then a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Unlike Wikipedia, which aims at a general audience, the qwiki was aimed at professional scientists working in the field of quantum computing. Stockton’s goal for the qwiki was to provide a single, centralized reference describing all the latest research in quantum computing and related areas, a sort of rapidly evolving, constantly updated super-textbook. But the qwiki had the potential to go far beyond a textbook: it would be infinitely extensible and modifiable, capable of conveying material ranging from simple introductions of key concepts all the way up to detailed explanations of the latest research results and pointers to unsolved problems at the research frontier. It could include animations and interactive simulations to illustrate key concepts of quantum computing, as well as source materials so other people could further improve those animations and simulations. It could become a locus for Polymath-style collaboration, with theoreticians gathering to attack the deepest theoretical problems of quantum computation, in a new kind of wiki-science. Or experimentalists could gather to share best practices, all the subtle, hard-to-describe details of experiments that often remain tacit knowledge, making it difficult to reproduce results from one laboratory to the next. Even if this vision was only partially realized, the impact on the field of quantum computing would be extraordinary.

The launch of the qwiki was at a workshop I happened to attend, held at Caltech in 2005. ch caused quite a buzz. In conversation during breaks at the workshop, I heard some people express optimism that the qwiki might do for the specialist knowledge of quantum computing what Wikipedia and Google have done for general knowledge. Unfortunately, that optimism didn’t translate into a willingness by those people to contribute. Instead, they hoped someone else would take the lead. After all, why contribute to the qwiki when you could be doing something more useful to your own career, like writing a paper or a grant? Why share your latest and best ideas on the qwiki, when that would only help your competitors? And why contribute to the qwiki when it was still in its beginning stages, and it wasn’t yet clear whether it would flourish? The only part of the qwiki that really thrived was the “Researcher pages,” vanity pages where individual scientists could add descriptions of themselves and their work. Many scientists were happy to spend an hour or two (and, in some cases, more) fleshing out these vanity pages. But few were willing to spend even ten minutes adding material to other parts of the qwiki. It just wasn’t a priority. The result is that today, six years after its launch, the qwiki has failed. Only a few pages of the qwiki are updated with any regularity. Spammers roam the site, adding links to shady products. Nearly all the scientific content on the site was put there by Stockton himself, by people working in the same lab, or by Stockton’s successor as maintainer of the qwiki, Stanford University graduate student Anthony Miller. This failure wasn’t due to any lack of enthusiasm or capability on Stockton’s or Miller’s part. They worked hard, adding great quantities of excellent material to the qwiki, and encouraging others to help out. Unfortunately, although many scientists believed such a site had the potential to be a tremendous resource, few were willing to contribute content.

The mindset behind the failure of the qwiki is similar to the mindset I described in the opening chapter of this book, the mindset that makes scientists reluctant to share their data, or to contribute to Wikipedia. At the root of the problem is the monomaniacal intensity that ambitious scientists must bring to the pursuit of scientific publications and grants. For young scientists, especially, this is an intensity borne of the fierce competition for scientific jobs. For example, each year 1,300 people earn physics PhDs