Hypothesis for alerting authors of writing errors in discussion posts

Doing open science, especially via Thinklab, requires writing lots of content. Given the fast pace, it's easy to make errors or typos. Yet, we would like our content to be part of permanent scientific record and hence adhere to a high literary standard.

Oftentimes readers will pick up on errors. Replying to a comment to point out typos or miswordings isn't ideal, because it distracts from topical discussion. A service called Hypothesis, which allows annotations of any webpage, may be a solution.

I first heard of Hypothesis when @caseygreene mentioned it here and on twitter. The service is gaining adoption in academia [1].

I gave Hypothesis a try on @pouyakhankhanian's recent post. His post was a doozy — 2763 words (16645 characters) on his curation of our indication catalog — and I anticipate it to become one of the most influential comments of our project. I annotated writing errors that Pouya was then able to fix by editing his post. I emailed Pouya to alert him of my annotations, but perhaps Thinklab could auto-notify authors of annotated content down the road.

You can annotate with Hypothesis by going to https://via.hypothes.is/ + URL where URL is the page you would like to annotate.

To comment on my experience:
I found Hypothesis to be relatively easy to use; the interface was quite intuitive. It took only moments to identify the mistakes. It was not just limited to typographic errors, but there were two sentences that were missing several words. It was certainly better for the readability of the discussion thread to make the corrections to the original post, rather than give minor corrections as a response to a response on the thread.

Sounds like a great solution guys. At some point in the future we should be able to setup automatic notifications of Hypothesis annotations.