Science as entertainment: tags and consensus

One last thought prompted by Clay Sharkey's essay before I head off for a cup of tea.

The massive number of web users collectively 'deciding' if books are probably entertainment is one thing. What kind of creative connections, conclusions or meaning would come out of the fire if this could somehow be applied to science?

I remember something that struck me almost 20 years ago now when working on a contract for the then Nature Conservancy Council with my (hero) boss Ken Gregory. We were tasked with short-listing sites based on their scientific interest to the geomorphology of rivers. I devised a system for selection with a view to making the process transparent and (in theory at least) replicable and adaptable. One particular site came up through this process that produced some discussion about whether it should be included or not.

The essence of our discussion was that this site had been important to the subject, but the research carried out there was old and both the research and the researcher had fallen out of favour. In other words, the science had moved on, according to the collective consensus of the field. And so what was or was not of scientific interest had also changed. Science and scientists are as much part of society as movie fans or wine drinkers. And a lot of what is regarded as 'fact' is subject to the same social factors, even if there are significant differences (another story there).

What impact could or will tagging and monitoring have on how science as a world operates?

How will peer-review as a process be affected by the changes in publication that blogs and wikis are driving? Can, should and will anyone be able to review what particular scientists are saying all over the place, rather than having to rely on the peer-review journals? This is happening in debates in wider society, but what's happening 'inside' science communities?

I think there are fundamental issues here that I'd be interested in talking about. Anyone interested in that?

By the way, in the end we dropped the site out of the selection, and I added a postscript to my description of the selection process to include the relevance of 'current', 'consensus' in fluvial geomorphology as a factor.