A WIKI APPROACH FOR SCIENTIFIC COMPUTER CODE? This article in the Guardian calls for publication of the computer code for scientific articles. It is surprising to me (actually, I am appalled) that this is not already done as a matter of course. We live in an age of Firefox and wikipedia. The article cites a study of a sample of scientific computer code which “showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.” The article points out that while commercial scientific software is often of poor quality, “scientific software developed in our universities and research institutes is often produced by scientists with no training in software engineering and with no quality mechanisms in place and so, no doubt, the occurrence of errors will be even higher.”
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Proponents of open source software (such as Firefox) argue that by having more eyeballs on the code there are far fewer bugs. It’s one thing I agree with the free software zealots on.