This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Sulayman K. Sowe; Koji Zettsu

Wiki technologies have proven to be versatile and successful in aiding collaborative authoring of web content. Multitude of users can collaboratively add, edit, and revise wiki pages on the fly, with ease. This functionality makes wikis ideal platforms to support research communities to curate data. However, without appropriate customization and a model to support data curation and collaborative editing of pages, wikis will fall sort in providing the functionalities needed to support collaborative work. In this paper, we present the architecture and design of a wiki platform, as well as a model that allow scientific communities, especially disaster response scientists, collaborative edit and append data to their wiki pages. Our experience in the implementation of the platform on Mediawiki demonstrates how wiki technologies can be used to support open collaboration, and how the dynamics of the FLOSS development process, its user and developer communities are increasingly informing our understanding about supporting collaboration and coordination in wiki environments. We conclude with best-practice guidelines for platform designers, and managers of systems that encourage collaborative authoring of web content.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.