Origin and objectives of SenWiki

SenWiki is an interactive website set up by Suzy Shipman and Sid Thomas with financial support from the Leverhulme Trust. Initially it will bring together a collection of text and images on the general subject of senescence based on research carried out at Aberystwyth and elsewhere over several decades. This will be the foundation of a wide-ranging information resource for, and contributed by, the international senescence community. A downloadable copy of a poster introducing SenWiki can be obtained here.

Why senescence?

Search for plant senescence in Google Scholar and you’ll get back 60000 results. It is timely to try to pull this large body of knowledge together into an accessible and updatable structure. This becomes more important as senescence is realised to be at the centre of environmental and agricultural responses to the political and economic challenges of the age – climate change, food supply, renewable materials and energy. SenWiki seeks to be an archive of, and portal to, the spectrum of published senescence and related research.

Why Wiki?

A wiki is a website the reader can update, comment on and interact with. Wikis are important elements in the so-called Web 2.0 model - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.

A wiki is an online forum where differences of opinion and interpretation can be aired and debated. This is timely in the field of senescence where there are sharply contrasting views – see, for example, H Thomas et al. (2003) J Exp Bot 54:1127-1132; WG van Doorn, E Woltering (2004) J Exp Bot 55:2147-2153.

How is SenWiki organised?

At present SenWiki is structured in 15 sections, each of which is anticipated to comprise up to 40 individual pages. Click on SenWiki for a full table of contents and a summary of which sections currently have content.

What next?

The pages of SenWiki have been supplied with content, initially based on a series of reviews and other publications of various aspects of senescence published by Sid Thomas and colleagues over the past decade or so. We invite the senescence community to join with this effort, providing content, comment, editorial input and feedback on improving the wiki's usefulness.