Wiki Research Planet

From WikiSym 2008

List of contributors and interested people

Name --> Suggestions/Collaboration proposals

Peter B Meyer (pbmeyer at econterms.net): I suggest to accumulate together summaries of relevant literature, written by people who think the literature they are summarizing is relevant to description or analysis of wikis.

Gathered together, the summaries can be searched for buzzwords. In a structured wiki, they can be corrected and more can be added with various views and interpretations and languages and technical lingo and a diversity of purposes. (For example reader A wants an abstract that wants the methods described; reader B wants the conclusions only; reader C wants to know what the paper is most cited for; reader D wants to know if uses the language of computer science or psychology or sociology or economics or some particular theory or is in a language other than English.) Gathered together, the pool of summaries is searchable, and a person has time to actually read them unlike trying to read stacks of books and papers in the original.

I volunteer immediately upon my return home to send in some summaries for consideration. The literature is mostly about open source software and processes but is relevant to wikis. It is from a broader pool than the set of wiki-related topics which could be acceptable at wikisym. In a social science context this is really necessary because wikis are better for fast collaboration than other technologies but not totally unique and distinct from others. Reference to earlier examples is really necessary, and there are too many to know except in a summary way. E.g. The Cathedral and the Bazaar ; open source motivations ; formal grammars for markup ; writings of Robles and Lessig and Lakhani and von Hippel and Stallman and Habermas and Castells and Knuth. One has to know this stuff but realistically cannot know it. So we should combine the summaries and commentary of a community to enable discussion.