All posts by Dirk Riehle

The First Five Years of WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

General, Proceedings, WikiSym 2005, WikiSym 2006, WikiSym 2007, WikiSym 2008, WikiSym 2009

In the run-up to WikiSym 2010, our sixth WikiSym, we shortly wanted to look back at our five years of successful prior WikiSym history, 2005-2009. To this end, here are links to papers, proceedings, and the event wikis. All proceedings have been archived in the ACM digital library for permanent availability to scholars and practitioners alike. Every year, we deliberately showcased a different wiki engine to celebrate the diversity and energy of the wiki community!

Please consider subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed, or follow WikiSym on Twitter, or join the low-traffic wikisym-announce mailing list.

And see you at WikiSym 2010, the international symposium on wikis and open collaboration!

WikiSym Program Announced

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2010

We announced the WikiSym program, please check it out!

WikiSym 2009 Concluded Successfully

Announcement, Proceedings, WikiSym 2009

WikiSym 2009 concluded successfully today after three days full of research and experience reports, workshops and tutorials, invited talks and keynotes, and, of course, open space.

The proceedings as one record of the conference are available on the event wiki as well as the ACM Digital Library. To that official record, the WikiSym 2009 event wiki adds much more information. There you can find workshop results, open space notes, general commentary, and more. In addition, Martin Cleaver has been streaming on ustream.tv.

A WikiSym first was the best research paper award. It went to paper 104, “rv you’re dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History” by Michael D. Ekstrand, and John T. Riedl (University of Minnesota) (USA).

The organizing committee would like to thank everyone who helped, which includes the participants. That’s because in the wiki world it is all of us who make an event successful, and not any particular person. If you think this is a funny statement, please come and join us at WikiSym 2010, which we will provide more information about shortly.

WikiSym Monday Morning Announcements

Announcement, WikiSym 2009

A couple of announcements for Monday and Tuesday of WikiSym 2009!

  • Open space starts 10:15am for 15min to open the day
  • Open space continues through Tuesday all day!
  • Please come Tuesday evening to open space to close the conference!
  • If you haven’t picked up your T-shirt, please do so today over lunch in open space
  • Please consider meeting a Disney social software expert on Wednesday after WikiSym!

For meeting Disney, please talk to Felipe Ortega for more information. Thanks to Camille Rose for making this happen!

WikiSym Sunday Evening Meeting Point

Announcement, WikiSym 2009

Here is one option to meet for dinner and hang out with other WikiSym folks: We will meet at the entrance steps to Cirque du Soleil in Downtown Disney tonight, Sunday, at 7pm. Buses from the hotel leave about every 20min so at the bus stop, make some WikiSym noises! Once we meet at the meeting point, we’ll be waiting for about 10-15min while figuring out where to go. The final destination, e.g. a restaurant, will be tweeted using the #wikisym hashtag so watch that channel! (And stay near someone with a working U.S. cell phone to catch the information if you didn’t make it to the meeting place in time.)

WikiSym 2009 Early Registration Deadline Approaching Fast!

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2009

It is less than two weeks now until the September 17th early registration deadline for WikiSym 2009, which will give you reduced fees and guaranteed participation!

Check out the WikiSym 2009 program full of research and experience talks, open space collaboration, tutorials and workshops, panels, demos, etc. You’ll get to see and meet the leaders of the field and get the chance to interact on topics of your interest in open space!

If you ready to register, please go ahead and register on the wiki and for the event.

WikiSym 2009 Talk: Wiki for Law Firms

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2009

Author: Urs Egli (Egli Partners Attorneys-at-Law, Zurich, Switzerland) and Peter Sommerlad (HSR Hochschule für Technik, Rapperswil, Switzerland)

Abstract: This practitioner report gives an overview the experiences of a law firm with adopting Wiki Webs for knowledge management and collaboration over the last two years. Wikis created a business advantage for the lawyers through better re-use of their know-how within the firm. In addition, external Wikis for clients created new revenue opportunities and higher client satisfaction. The law firm uses a very simple Wiki implementation that makes it very easy to establish new Wiki instances. For client collaboration the Wiki was secured and extended with a simple user management system.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Talk: An Architecture to Support Intelligent User Interfaces for Wikis by Means of Natural Language Processing

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2009

Authors: Johannes Hoffart and Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych

Abstract: We present an architecture for integrating a set of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques with a wiki platform. This entails support for adding, organizing, and finding content in the wiki. We perform a comprehensive analysis of how NLP techniques can support the user interaction with the wiki, using an intelligent interface to provide suggestions. The architecture is designed to be deployed with any existing wiki platform, especially those used in corporate environments. We implemented a prototype integrating the NLP techniques keyphrase extraction and text segmentation, as well as an improved search engine. The prototype is integrated with two widely used wiki platforms: MediaWiki and TWiki.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Talk: Understanding Learning – the Wiki Way

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2009

Authors: Joachim Kimmerle, Johannes Moskaliuk, and Ulrike Cress (University of Tuebingen) (Germany)

Abstract: Learning “the wiki way”, learning through wikis is a form of self-regulated learning that is independent of formal learning settings and takes place in a community of knowledge. Such a community may work jointly on a digital artifact to create new, innovative and emergent knowledge. We regard wikis as a prototype of tools for community-based learning, and point out five relevant features. We will present the co-evolution model, as introduced by Cress and Kimmerle, that may be understood as a framework to describe learning in the wiki way. This model describes collaborative knowledge building as a co-evolution between cognitive and social systems. To investigate learning the wiki way, we have to consider both individual processes and processes within the wiki, which represent the processes that are going on within a community. This paper presents three empirical studies that investigate learning the wiki way in a laboratory setting. We take a look at participants’ contributions to a wiki indicating processes within the wiki community, and measure the extent of individual learning at the end of the experiment. Our conclusion is that the model of co-evolution has a strong impact on understanding learning the wiki way, may be helpful to designers of learning environments, and serve as framework for further research.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 Registration Opens!

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2009

The registration for WikiSym 2009 is open! Please register first on the wiki and then for the (physical) event, if you want to attend in person.

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The event registration is handled by the OOPSLA registration system. If you are only interested in WikiSym, you can shorten the event registration: Once on page 4 in the process, jump forward to page 14 to checkout.

We have previously published the participation fee schedule. Please note that early (reduced fee) registration ends September 17!

Thanks, and see you in Orlando!