Proposing EncyclopediaCC said: Few people will be willing to step through an article, one sentence at a time, evaluating the observational content of each sentence. I tend to think that people preparing articles will break out the observations. It's good form in a scientific paper to describe the instrumentation and the data that were collected, and then, in a different section, to discuss the interpretation thereof. So what I'm saying is that those sections that deal just with the data collection would appear in the Observations folder. The advantage will be that you won't have to read through each individual article to get to the data -- they'll be in their own folder, organized per topic. And people will be able to discuss the validity of the data collection methods as an independent topic.
Having thought things over a bit since last night, I think we need to do both: Compose an Encyclopedia of Observations and Write and Collect Papers. Your Observations Folders shouldn't be too hard to collect into an Encyclopedia. And the Theories about the Observations could be referenced in the Observations Folders. Right? So the Papers could be organized under Observations.
Papers
So I guess you're saying each Paper would have an Observations section and a Theory section. The Observations will likely cover several specific topics, so each Observation may need a Topic Title along with the specific Observation. That way the Titles can help organize the Observations into the Encyclopedia.
Your Site
Your site then could be used for:
1. productive Scientific Discussion (in threads and the chat room in the Teams and Topics section, I guess)
2. Collaboration to write Science Papers (in the Blogs, Teams & Topics section, I guess)
3. Collaboration to compose an Encyclopedia of Observations (in the Teams section, I think)
Encyclopedia Collaboration
I think the Encyclopedia writing could draw a lot of collaborators, i.e. new members, who would like to edit Entries, like people do on Wikipedia. But it would be more fun on your site, because it'd be fair to everyone, letting everyone's theories be listed in the Reference section and anyone would be able to critique anyone's theories where they're posted on your site.
- I'd like to get started right away to compile a list of Topics for the Encyclopedia, starting with Astronomy etc. I see Wikipedia has an Outline of Astronomy at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_astronomy, so that may help.