Like Brim, I am another of the primary contributors to the wikibooks radonc textbook. A bit more disclosure, I am finishing my first year as radonc resident, although I did have another life prior to doing this. Here is my couple of cents about the site ...
As I am studying, I am putting the info up on the website. That way, it's available to me from anywhere, at any time. I find it helpful as a fast *reference* due to the hierarchical, hyperlinked nature; couple clicks take me where I want to go, and if needed, directly to PubMed. I specifically emphasize the reference aspect, as a refresher of things I already know (or should know but forgot as is often the case - like "what was the recurrence rate after whole breast boost again?"), rather than the textbook aspect of learning new material. That I get from textbooks, UpToDate and review articles.
The other reason for participating for me is the altruistic aspect - since I am gathering "study" notes anyway, others might as well benefit from it too. As such, I think residents are the ideal contributors, since they are in an active knowledge-acquisition mode. Once out of residency, I find we aren't as good at keeping current, and for many it boils down to perusing the Red Journal occasionally, and then going to ASTRO once a year.
I envision building this site primarily for the reference role. As Brim points out, the wikis are nice in their potential to be truly uptodate. When one of the authors adds something, I go look at it (one of the features of registering), and then it's just very easy to pull the original paper via PubMed. The other benefit is the potential depth of coverage, since there is no restriction on the level of detail. As an example, the trigeminal neuralgia "chapter" has pretty much every single paper published on TN as of about 6 months ago, since I was doing a bit of research in TN.
The social engineering aspect is fascinating to me. I am very curious about what will happen long term. If we grow weary of updating it, and nobody helps, it will just die. Or, it may become a true community reference source, with discussion pages serving to "editorialize" content. Or, it can get completely overrun by vandals. For now, the content has been whatever the authors deemed interesting at the time, not necessarily whatever happen to be the "seminal" studies. As I am studying, I am making more of a systematic effort at it (see for example the medulloblastoma page or the DCIS page), but clearly few authors cannot reasonably cover everything.
At any rate, it's thus far been a fun, rewarding, and really-useful-for-studying process
I too would encourage you to at least edit the glaring errors you happen to find, or let one of us know.
