Joanne Cohn has on occasion dashed off an e-mail saying that so-and-so got an interview at such-and-such an institution. “I would just feel like it. Some people are information junkies and help pass information around,” says Cohn, a member of the astronomy research staff at the University of California, Berkeley, who, with her husband, UC Berkeley astronomer Martin White, last year launched a new astronomy jobs rumor mill—the first as a wiki, a format that allows anyone to edit entries.

Web-based jobs rumor mills saw their start in theoretical particle physics in 1994. John Terning and Michael Dugan were postdocs at Boston University when, frustrated with the job market—Dugan had been a postdoc for 10 years—they started keeping tabs online of current academic job searches in their field. “We would talk to our friends at MIT and Harvard,” says Terning. “We had a good idea of who was being interviewed...

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