Wiki Science/Print version

← Introduction | How to start a wiki →

Wiki Science is a collection of information, reflections, guidelines on wikis.

Why do we need a science of wikis?

Wikis are an emergent phenomenon. They have huge potential. There is a lot of discussion of the science of wikis, how they grow and adapt, but it is spread all over hundreds of wikis. This textbook has a clear aim: To observe the development of the wiki phenomenon and to document its processes.

Adding concise information about creating and maintaining wikis has become a little part of the book.

The book itself is a wiki and it is probably the first real test of practicing Wikiresearch.

What ideas feed into the science of wikis

Glossary

A short overview of some famous wikis - or less famous wikis that tend to pop up in this textbook.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a copyleft encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to the standard encyclopedic knowledge, Wikipedia includes almanac and gazetteer-like information as well as current events. The content of Wikipedia is entirely created by its users. No single user owns the content; no article is ever finished. The license known as the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) is intended to ensure that everyone who can accept that license is an owner of the right to use and improve the article.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a sister project to Wikipedia and is part of the Wikimedia foundation, begun on July 10, 2003. The project is a collection of free textbooks with supporting book-based texts, that is being written collaboratively on this website. The site is a WikiWiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any book module right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every Wikibooks module.

Portland Pattern Repository

The Portland Pattern Repository was the first ever Wiki, and is sometimes referred to simply as Wiki (with a capital 'W') or WikiWikiWeb. It was created March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. It is dedicated to pattern languages as they apply to computer programming, with an increasing emphasis on extreme programming. The site's defining phrase is "People, Projects & Patterns".

Other

Other terms used are:

Talk page

A "talk page" is a page meant for discussion of another page. In Wikibooks, the talk page of any page can be accessed by clicking "Discussion".

User page

In many wiki systems each user has his/her own user page. This usually contains elements such as a little bit of information about the user, and usually the pages which he/she is proud to have contributed to.

If you are logged in, you can access your user page by clicking "My page".

Sources

Some of this this article's text is based on [1], [2] and [3].

Budding Effect

Wiki Science

← How to start a wiki | Article evolution →

The budding effect is the phenomenon whereby one wiki produces another wiki, in analogy to a plant producing a bud. A large parent wiki can 'bud' several smaller child wikis, creating a kind of wiki family tree.

Issues involved are license(s) and wiki sociology.

Wiki can bud off slowly, or quickly. They can erupt from a battle on a parent wiki, or they may gradually form as the members of the parent wiki devote themselves to both parent and child. There are many technologies that can support the budding process, from the near link, to the page cluster to name spaces.

Wikimedia sister projects

Wikipedia is a wiki encyclopedia. It has a clearly defined purpose: creating a free encyclopedia. Entries that provide dictionary definitions are disapproved of. Because of this, some of the Wikipedia users founded Wiktionary. In this way, Wikipedia can be seen as the parent of Wiktionary.

Similarly, Wikibooks itself 'budded' off of Wikipedia, out of the need to provide more textbook-like content, where there is more room to leave the encyclopedic path: not as much need for NPOV; original research ...

Languages

The budding effect becomes very clear when looking at the many languages that have their own Wikipedia. Existing articles from, mostly pivotal larger (on Wikipedia) languages like English, French and German are translated into other language Wikipedias. Also, many articles about topics that are more prevalent in less common languages have been translated into English.

Licences

Just like copylefted software that is forked, the use of a copyleft license for a wiki assures that the content can be fed back into the parent wiki.

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

Vibrant User Base

Wiki Science

← Vibrant user base | Self Healing →

It's nice to welcome new users (the "Welcome Ritual" or "Welcome Wagon") [4].

Sometimes a link to a short page of "tips for new users" is included in the initial welcome. (Please don't require new users to read and understand hundreds of pages of arbitrary "This is How We Do Things Here" text before they are allowed to write anything.)

Encourage new users to be bold [5]

In many cultures, there is a tradition of "This Is How We Do Things" that stretches back so far that no one remembers the real reason they choose that particular way.

In wiki cultures, it's simple enough to document various decisions, leaving a place for further discussion, and making it easier to revisit that decision and perhaps choose to start doing things a different way (if a better way is discovered, or if situations change so that the original way is no longer the best).

Article Evolution

Wiki Science

← Article Evolution | How to maintain a Wiki →

Article evolution is the phenomenon whereby an article evolves from a stub - or just a place holder for a future article with little or no information or value. Such a stub is entered by someone who identifies a need for an article, but does not have the time or knowledge to create a full article. With time, people add to, and expand upon that article until it is an actual article. If the original stub was never created then others may not have been inspired or motivated to create the final article. This is similar to the story of "stone soup" - cooperation among scarcity - where, although a "stone soup" would probably not make a good soup, the small start causes everyone else to pitch in and end up creating a delicious soup for all even though no one had all the ingredients.

An example of article evolution

The Jack Paar article at Wikipedia is now quite complete. It highlights his life, career, personality and even has a picture. Not to say the article is complete now - are any articles really ever complete? Visiting the history page you can travel back in time through the edits of the article. Viewing the first entry for you will find simply the single line:

"Jack Harold PaAar (born May 1, 1918) is a U.S. talk show host. He hosted the Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962."

Pretty humble beginnings. Visiting each entry from the history in chronological order provides a evolutionary view of the growth of this article. A paragraph here, a sentence there. Someone adds a photo. Someone else corrects a typographical error. Eventually there is an article that is more than any single contributor could have created.

External links

Evolution of wikis - webpage at a wiki that is all about evolution.
Stone soup - fable relating to the evolution of pages in a wiki.

Self Healing

Wiki Science

← Self Healing | Source Code →

Self healing is the ability of a Wiki to heal quickly after vandalism or other damage.

For a wiki to be successful, it must have a vibrant user base. Assuming this, then the users will be able to repair any damage done to the Wiki.

Terms

Vandals

A "Vandal" (Also called a "WikiTroll" (Not to be confused with a straight up troll), "evil spirit", and other names) is a malicious user who deliberately attempts to ruin a wiki. The "malicious" part is important: vandals are deliberate attackers, whereas newbies who don't know the site but mean well may also inadvertently cause damage.

Common vandalisms are:

Blanking or removing text from pages
Replacement of articles with something they know is less desirable.

Good spirits

A good spirit is a contributor to a Wiki who goes out of their way to make the Wiki a better place. This would include maintaining a large watch list, which they monitor closely, and checking the recent changed articles as well. They look for any article they can help with, keeping an eye for typographical errors, formatting issues and especially for any signs of vandalism.

They are constantly on a the lookout for their opposite, the Evil Spirit. It is a shame that a good spirt must spend so much of their time cleaning up after evil spirits when they could be contributing in so many other productive ways.

A good spirit should not be confused with a typical user who just reads or makes contributions with little concern for the actions of others.

Damage

If an Evil Spirit causes damage to the Wiki in some way, then a Good Spirit can repair the damage. Wikis are self healing if the good spirits outweigh the bad. Wikipedia has many Good Spirits.

A good way of defining how well a Wiki can self-heal is the ratio between users that are good and those who are evil. The ratio of Evil Spirits to Good Spirits can be defined as

$\frac {U_{good}} {U_{evil}}$

where $U g o o d$ is the number of good users, and $U e v i l$ is the number of bad users. $P u s e f u l$ is the amount of useful pages, that is, subtracting all Talk Pages, User Pages, etc.

An optimal self-healing Wiki is one where

$\left( U_{evil}A_{Pdamaged} \right) \le \left( U_{good}A_{Pcontrib} \right)$

$A P d a m a g e d$ and $A P c o n t r i b$ are the average pages damaged and average pages contributed, respectively.

If the above formula does not hold true, your Wiki is overrun with bad pages and Evil Spirits.

Evil Spirit users should be dealt with as swiftly as possible.

One way to deal with Evil Spirits is to ban them. This requires a conscious human being who has admin powers to ban them, which can take hours. Some methods of dealing with vandalism could be restricting the amount of edits that a user can do for a while, possibly augmented with a trust system: having a review on the quality of an edit, which functions as a 'karma' rating where high-rated edits allow the user to be less restricted.

The text in its current form is incomplete.

How to Maintain a Wiki

Wiki Science

← How to maintain a Wiki | Trolls →

People are the most important thing. So maintain a vibrant user base.

Some wikis have one or more pages specifically dedicated to listing actions to take (rather than just discussing some topic). Some things only the wiki maintainer can do:

While other things could be done by anyone:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RefactorByMerging

Sometimes the list isn't maintained on the page itself, but on the BackLinks to that page (using the category system)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PleaseComment

In particular, FAQs work well on Wiki because there is collaboration between people who add questions to the FAQ and people who add answers to the FAQ.

Source Code

Wiki Science

← Source code | Accuracy →

Many wikis discuss programming topics, such as learning a particular programming language, drawing fractals or adding plug-ins to utility software. Specific tips and recommendations ...

Most wikis already support formatting source code in a special way

A few wikis support executing code on the browser's computer (probably only possible with JavaScript or Java; see for instance this code at Wikisource).

A few wikis support executing code on the server (so the code can be just about any language): http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWithProgrammableContent

Licenses

What sort of license governs the source code displayed by your wiki? For example, if you're writing a language tutorial with lots of "toy" programs, you could say "all source code is public domain".

(What sort of license governs the regular text displayed by your wiki? See http://wikilegal.wiki.taoriver.net/ for discussion.)

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

Trolls

Wiki Science

Trolls are anonymous users of internet services characterised by inflammatory messages and criticism. While some users find trolls to be extremely annoying, others view them as an essentialy part of the process that leads towards good content being produced. They are particularly useful for challenging widely-held, but untested beliefs, as anonymous trolls are free to say what others cannot.

How to spot trolls

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

What not to do with trolls

Calling them as such

Trolling is rarely done accidentally. As such, telling someone they're trolling or are a troll isn't not likely to make them reform. Also, if by chance they weren't deliberately trolling, accusing them of trolling could very easily offend them.

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

How to deal with trolls

Trolling is usually responded to two different ways: Preventing access by the troll, and ignoring them.

Engaging with trolls

While the manner of trolls can be infuriating at times, they obviously do still contribute valid points of view and facts at times. Engaging with trolls, particularly on controversial topics, can expose your ideas to harsh criticism. This kind of 'trial by fire' puts your beliefs to the test and only the valid ones will survive it.

Banning\blocking trolls

A 'ban trolls' policy on your wiki is very controversial. While it is thought to control 'bad trolling', it also harms 'good trolling'. Some points to consider:

It may discourage some trolling.
It may help the community to respond to trolling by knowing that it is officially frowned upon.
It may lead to group think - the phenomenon whereby a prevailing consensus view is not open to challenge by other users

The usual penalties for trolling are removing trollish edits, reverting all edits by the troll to a certain area (Such as discussion) or outright blocking the account/IP(s) used in the trolling.

One downside is that an overly strict policy on trolling may result in someone with a slightly abrasive manner being deemed a troll without any better cause.

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

Ignoring trolls

Some people favor a policy of just not responding to trollish comments, sometimes not even to remove them.

This section is a stub.
You can help Wikibooks by expanding it.

Accuracy

Wiki Science/Accuracy

Future of Wiki

Wiki Science

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle

The first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb, was created in 1995 and wiki is thus a relatively young concept. Since 1995 the concept has evolved a lot. Wikipedia, where the concern for both layout and content can said to be a major breakthrough of the wiki concept to a larger public - as well as concerning media attention as the great number people cooperating.

The future of wiki is likely to be increasingly intertwined with the future of the internet. Here are some things that might benefit the future of wikis:

Blog and wiki

A weblog or blog is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage.

Weblogs have some similarities with wikis, in that they may stimulate community interaction, and some allow reader feedback. Weblogs do not generally permit readers to modify existing text, though some exist that do (see blikis, chat rooms).

A merging of blog and wiki technologies can be seen at Bloki.com.

.wiki

A .wiki domain name ..

.. Some dispute this since .net for internet provider companies and .edu are falling out of favor in favor of .com and .org. ..

.. However both .net and .edu are intended to provide information about the provider of information rather than a characteristic of the information itself. Thus arguably the .wiki/.wik Top Level Domain would provide information of far more value to a searcher. Another example might be a .pub TLD for public domain information or the .NFP (not for profit ad free)

A wiki of wiki

http://wikiindex.com

Topical interconnection between wikis

At the present time (October 2004) there is little but stylistic emphasis between different MediaWiki projects. However in the future as the need to present XML stored information in a variety of search and display styles become important, information will become static data and the means of presentation will vary.

Wikitext standard

Development and successful implementation of a wikitext standard including an interwiki link standard and an interwiki identity standard.

Mature software

More mature software environment allowing administrators to easily start a wiki

WYSIWYG?

Standard editing conventions or a more reliable WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)editing environment.

WikiCurricula?

Not to be confused with Wikiversity, a compendium of lesson plans, lesson resources and possibly audio and video collections of lectures, speeches, books, etc. Not limited to traditional academics (as Wikiversity implies), the WikiCurricula could include all schooling from pre-Kindergarten through elementary, secondary, college, technical school, special education, language education, adult education, etc.

Curricula could be searched by age/grade group, language of delivery, subject, additional media (audio, video, slideshow, etc) and other criteria. An exemplary model for consideration might be MIT's Open Courseware Initiative.

The name might not be WikiCurricula (WikiLessonPlans? WikiEducation?), but it is recommended not to be abbreviated to wikicula, which sounds dirty or like a gynecological instrument.

Wiki Life Cycle

An individual wiki may experience something akin to a biological life span or life cyle as suggested in this article on Meatball Wiki:

Wikiresearch

Wiki Science

Wikipedia was started beginning 2001 and can be considered highly successful. It is however not the proper place for original research. Hence the idea of Wikiresearch, a project to do wiki-style scientific research: collaborative and under a free license.

Existing free text projects

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia being written collaboratively by voluntary contributors from all over the world. The site is a wiki, meaning that anyone with an internet connection can edit any article except for a few protected pages [6]. Since 2001 over 260.000 English language articles have been written and over 410.000 articles in other languages [7]. Wikipedia's parent organization is the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida.

All the articles are licensed under the GFDL and the MediaWiki software that the project runs on is released under the GPL. This makes sure the encyclopedia remains free. Anyone could start a mirror or a fork.

Serious and less serious information about the sociology of Wikipedia can be found on the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki.

MediaWiki

Mediawiki has quite some advantages over other Wiki systems [8]. It makes no use of UpperCaseLinks or little icons to indicate the existence of a link; the colors of the links indicate whether it's an external link or an existing or still non-existing article. The edit history has an adequate diff function, which facilitates maintenance and makes eradicating wiki vandalism a snap.

The modular WikiTeX system adds the capability to incorporate rendered TeX objects inside MediaWiki output. GetWiki, which is used by Recyclopedia, is a fork of MediaWiki and adds XML import functionality. The problem is that the modified parts are licensed under a Creative Commons license and cannot be reintegrated into MediaWiki, since the project people want to keep it GPL only.

Some more free collaborative projects

The Mediawiki software is also used for several other collaborative projects with the goal to create free and open information:

Wikimedia projects, all using the GFDL:
- Wikibooks, for textbooks
- Wiktionary, for multi-lingual dictionaries
- Wikisource, for collection of source texts and their translations
- Wikiquote, a collection of proverbs and quotes of famous persons
projects not from Wikimedia:
- Wikitravel, for a travel guide, using the CC-BY-SA licence
- SourceWatch, to collect information about "public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." Using the GFDL.
- Consumerium, to develop free software and infrastructure for "storage, transport and display of product information to consumers and feedback to the producers to enhance the consumer experience, advance product development and to keep this planet as hospitable as possible in the future". This project decided to do most of its research directly on Wikipedia.
- CorpKnowPedia - Charting the corporate landscape.
- designbreak.org – A wiki for creating and collaborating on research and engineering projects
- MetaCollab.net - an open research, meta collaboration (a collaboration on collaboration) with the aim to explore the similarities and differences in the nature, methods and motivations of collaboration across any and every field of human endeavour. Hosted by Wikia.com.
- Wikiresearch, for synthesis of knowledge through collaboration
- Citizendium - A wiki encyclopedia that seeks to create credible articles

No original research

Wikipedia is not the place for original research such as "new" theories.

Wikipedia is not a primary source. Specific factual content is not the question. Wikipedia is a secondary source (one that analyzes, assimilates, evaluates, interprets, and/or synthesizes primary sources) or tertiary source (one that generalizes existing research or secondary sources of a specific subject under consideration). A Wikipedia entry is a report not an essay.

Free software and free information

In comparison to free software the threshold to join a free information project is much lower. There is not a lot of unnatural syntax to learn. Typos and spelling errors won't crash anyone's computer and won't cause loss of valuable data.

It's not important to be an expert to add information to a wiki. Almost any part of human knowledge are welcome in the Wikipedia project - as long as it's written down in an encyclopedic manner. Information about travelling will feel more at home in the Wikitravel project. Course books are warmly welcomed at Wikibooks. Nearly anyone with good will, the ability to type, and Internet access can add some of his or her knowledge.

Projects like Wikipedia share the spirit of free software yet have the advantage of being much more accessible. There are many more people that can correct a spelling error than there are programmers that can fix a bug in even the tiniest software project.

Generally most wiki projects evolve like stone soup. At first there is hardly anything interesting to be seen. Then people come by and think "Ah, I can add some lines here". The Wikipedia project attracted thousands of people thinking like this in only three years' time. Many of these people became regular contributors. Contributors can roughly be divided into three groups: correctors of spelling mistakes and typos, people who add some lines now and then, and content adders.

Already Wikipedia is the biggest freely available encyclopedia on the internet. Considering the exponential growth of the project, it should surpass all other existing encyclopedias within the next decade - both in quantity (100 million articles in 100 languages?) and in quality - already Wikipedia is linked to by many news web sites in the world.

Scientific institutes and the market

Currently there is a trend to move financing of science from the government towards the marketplace. According to the accompanying neoliberal view scientific institutes such as universities or more specialized research institutes are to find more of their financing in the market place, which according to the neoliberal theory would lead to more useful knowledge and products.

Private funding may bias the resulting findings, since members of the institute might lose their income when the results aren't to the funder's liking. Another consequence is that more and more results will only be available to the funders, or to parties willing to pay and use the results under restricted conditions. Results can be in the form of:

software
patents, for example on software,
file formats (such as MP3)
knowledge about organisms, medicine

Since science is built on existing results, institutions that act on the marketplace are often less eager to quickly share results, which thus results in less cooperation. In this regard there are huge differences between different scientific cultures. At one end of the spectrum one can find abstract mathematics, that initially have very few direct applications and at the other end there are applied sciences such as robotics and genetics, where results are of utmost commercial interest.

In mathematics it is normal to publish results with the greatest care for detail. In applied sciences, where institutes tend to be much more competitive, less room is left for cooperation. This often leads to publications that reveal certain aspects of the results, but not a detailed implementation.

Free software

Developers in the 1970s already shared their software in conformity with the principles of free software. In the 1980s companies started imposing restrictions on users with the use of license agreements. In 1983 Richard Stallman started working on the GNU project and introduced the concepts of "free software" and "copyleft", which are specifically devised to give users freedom and to restrain the possibilities for privatization. [9]

These days nearly every scientific institute makes use of free software of some kind. Although typically a free/propriety software combination is used instead of all free software, such as running MATLAB on a GNU/Linux OS. Often there is no urge to move away from the proprietary model to a more collaborative model.

A lot of free software is created by scientists. Sometimes this is paid for the institute they work for, but more often this is done in their spare time. [10]

Publications

For a scientist it is important to publish results. Most renowned journals are owned by large publishers.

Many scientific articles are by publishers who place restrictions on their use. Some articles can be freely accessed online (like on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central); in many physics disciplines, especially in astrophysics, cosmology and high energy, theoretical physics, nearly all articles are made freely available on the arXiv preprint server. But often online access is restricted to paid users. Redistribution is hardly ever possible. Modification or reuse beyond simple quoting is out of the question. [11]

Often publications discuss results obtained with software that is not freely available. In many fields this causes problems with falsifiability of the results. If the software is only roughly described in an article, it is very hard for a reader to repeat the obtained results.

Even inside institutions there is sometimes limited cooperation and mostly competition.

Peer-reviewed publishing in wiki format

There is now a wikicity for peer-reviewed wiki journals.

Wikiresearch - practical

A first experiment of Wikiresearch has already been started in the form of Wiki Science. This is a study of the way Wikis are growing, changing and adapting.

Putting finished articles in Wikiresearch is to be encouraged. Published as well as unfinished articles. Also articles rejected by journals and conferences are interesting; they might contain research slightly too original and if the quality isn't yet what is expected from scientific articles they can be improved at Wikiresearch.

Maintainership and responsibility

The MediaWiki software allows to restore previous versions and see which user (or IP address) changed what. Until now the various Wikipedia projects have experienced relatively little vandalism. Regular users with a login often check what has been changed and by whom, where anonymous edits are regarded with a bit more suspicion.

Certain Wikipedia pages are attractive to vandals, but these pages are also checked very often by regular contributors. So on a busy Wikipedia such as the English version vandalised text tends to stay for at most a couple of minutes and the perpetrator will see that his or her action had only very little impact. This is also the reason it can be a good idea not to protect sensitive pages like Bush at the Wikipedia (see also this article's changelog for an indication of how much vandalism occurs at articles about sensitive topics).

For original research things could be a bit more tricky. Only time and a functional system can tell how much of a problem vandalism will be on a research wiki. The Wiki Science Wikibook, though still a struggling project, is an interesting test case.

Modifiability, authority

One way to do Wikiresearch is to have several main authors or rather authorities. This however goes against the wiki principle and it probably wouldn't lead to the amount of participation that can be attained with a more anarchistic model, where anyone is allowed to edit and add.

The license

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) would be a good choice since it ensures license compatibility with the existing GFDL text corpus. It would be possible to have one wiki with pages that have a different license than the encouraged license, though this should possibly be discouraged since it comes in the way of this compatibility.

If somehow another license is chosen, at least the attribution of the writers should be ensured. This is good for tracing back the original author and is a way to avoid legal plagiarism. For a Creative Commons license this would mean that the Attribution option needs to be picked. Extra options, like ShareAlike or NonCommercial would mean text can't be incorporated in GFDL projects like Wikipedia or Wikibooks. NonDerivative goes against the entire idea of working in wikistyle.

Note that the Debian project considers both the GFDL as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license to be non-free. There are some people (such as Sloyment) who prefer not to use a copylefted license in order to provide the most freedom that is possible. More discussion about licenses to use for wikis is going on on this wiki (FIXME: Host wikilegal.wiki.taoriver.net not found).

Extensions of WikiMedia software

Though the ratio of the feature list and the time spent on MediaWiki by developers is extremely high there are still some possible extensions that would be of great use for a scientific research wiki.

Being able to import and export Dia and OpenOffice.org diagrams or even a more direct way of drawing sketches would be a great way to communicate new ideas.

If there is a need for accompanying source code this code should definitely not be under the GFDL. It is better to use the GPL or any other free software license.

Sciences

Mathematics is the science most adequate for Wikiresearch. Except for conjectures and axioms it is entirely based on strict proofs, that leave little room for opposing viewpoints. Mathematical Wikiresearch could after a specific period simply be copied to Wikipedia, that is, when enough eyes have dimished the possibility of mistakes and errors.

Though experimental sciences shouldn't be excluded. A bit of biological research has already taken place at the article about color blindness (see also the talk page).

For sciences that require experiments with test persons it can be very interesting to use Wikiresearch. Questions, test pictures and test sounds can be placed on the wiki and there will be enough test persons if there is less need for a .. sample of the general population.

Sciences such as history that are usually about defending a specific point of view are less adequate. But for these Wikipedia can be a proper place if there is enough will to keep a neutral point of view.

Another interesting field for Wikiresearch is VLF-reception with the PC.

WikiSci - A Task-Oriented Scientific Communication Initiative

Today's scientific communication is heavily based on papers, which are not efficient to find and digest. WikiSci is an attempt for researchers to organize research efforts in a task-oriented manner, facilitating much better idea exchange. WikiSci is initially associated with sci.* newsgroups as a better Usenet FAQ mechanism.

Social aspects

Language

Since the late 19th century English has become by far the most important language for both scientific and political affairs [12]. This gives people whose mother tongue is English or a related language (Germanic, Indo-European) a big headstart in their higher education.

The Wikipedia project has encyclopedias in over 80 languages [13]. Polyglots are free to translate information from one language into another and this way even very small language communities can work on extending a knowledge base in their own language. Many languages for which no publisher would ever see an opportunity to create an encyclopedia now have growing encyclopedias.

This freedom of translating texts can be fruitful for the extension of human knowledge. Research can be translated from English, or any smaller pivotal language, into other languages and research can be undertaken in any other language and translated into a pivotal language later.

People

Traditionally science and scientific texts state the names of the authors more or less prominently. Wiki projects tend to anonymize texts; on MediaWiki wikis authors are usually only mentioned in the page history. Anyone can make little improvements, although there are usually one or more core authors of a text or article.

Most established scientists probably won't be attracted to working on Wikiresearch. There are however people who will be attracted to doing Wikiresearch: people who haven't finished their studies (yet) - or haven't even started them; people who chose a different career path; or scientists that want to work on fields completely different from what they are known for.

If a research wiki can attract a sufficient number of qualified people the wiki can probably qualify as a system equal to peer review. The difference is that peers aren't chosen among a small group of highly respected people. This can lead to both more original research as well as more charlatanesque works. The expectation is that especially the starting period will be of utmost importance.

Examples

The TrustLet project

External links

The Wiki Symposium is a conference dedicated to wiki research and practice.

Wikiforschung: freie Wissenschaft, freie Publikation, a translation of an earlier version of this text.

Herbert Hrachovec's proposal for the Oekonux: Free Software-style scientific publishing, the "Open Archive Initiative

A system for peer-reviewed academic publishing using MediaWiki.

Sources

Parts of this text are based on the following articles at Wikipedia: No original research.

http://www.firstmonday.dk

Semantic Prosthetic

Wiki Science

Wiki Science/Information Currency

This book appears to contain original research or unverifiable material.
Wikibooks policy requires that all book material here be verifiable. Original research and unsupported claims are not acceptable here. Such material might, however, be suitable at Wikiversity.
If this material is not original research, or if it has been fixed to be properly cited and verifiable, this template may be removed. Please refer to the project reading room for help with this book.

Sefmantic Networks and Personal Experience

Human conscious experience is normally dominated by memory. New sensory experiences are processed in ways that are heavily influenced by past experiences. When sensory stimuli are reduced (sensory deprivation), a human brain is able to continue generating chains of thoughts by making use of existing memories. The ways in which one thought leads to another thought reflects a semantic network that exists within the brain. The behavior of such a semantic network can be described as a content addressable memory system. A new sensory pattern or a thought will "resonate" with existing contents of the memory system leading to activation of relevant memories and the generation of adaptive thoughts and behavioral responses. The semantic memory network is modified by on-going thoughts resulting in new memories. With time, human semantic memory comes to contain an increasing complex representation of the world.

Theory-based Semantics, Language of the Brain

Theory-based semantics states that the binding element of human thought is "theory," which constrains the meaning of concepts, ideas and thought patterns stored within the brain, according to their associative relationships to other concepts and ideas. As a result, concept, idea and thought pattern meanings are declarative and language independent, experienced as a "language of thought."

According to Dr. Richard L. Ballard, theory represents more than 85% of knowledge, withe the who, what, when, where and how much facts of situations and circumstances representing only 15%. Theory is “a priori” (known before the fact). It is the element that gives meaning to concepts, ideas and thought patterns, and the conditional reasoning power required to answer our "How," "Why" and "What if" questions. Learned through enculturation, education, life experience and deep analytical thinking, theory shapes our behavior and the way we understand our world. Well-justified theories such as those proven most successful by science, engineering, business and law are most valuable. Theory is predictive and considers all possibilities. Once it is learned it is used for decades, centuries and millenniums. Most of the core theories that shape our communial social behavior, for example, were conceived 10,000 to 24,000 years ago, passed down through the generations. Much of our financial theories, such as "buy low, sell high," or "the principles of interest," were conceived and put into use by our ancestors millenniums ago. Circumstances and situations may change rapidly, but the underlying theory that gives them meaning, do not.

First proposed by Richard L. Ballard, Ph.D. between 1987-1993, theory-based semantics is the governing principle of theory-based semantic systems which allow semantic software-based machines to reason with the same theories that humans use. Reference Source: "Fundamental Definitions in Knowledge Science & Engineering" by Dr. Richard L. Ballard, 12/2004. Physical Theory of Knowledge and Computation (2006).

Human Language as a Semantic Prosthetic Device

We all live in the same world and we all share a common genetic heritage which determines the basic structure and function of the brain. Humans have evolved in a social environment where there is a high level of reward for knowing what other people are thinking. It has been suggested that this need to know what others know is the major reason for our unique human cognitive strengths. If so, it may be that human languages evolve so as to best serve as tools for allowing people to come to know what other people are thinking. We can think of human language as a cultural artifact, a prosthetic device or a tool that assists humans to survive by enhancing their ability to come to know what other people know. We can describe human language as the original semantic prosthetic.

Wiki as a prosthetic device

Written language is a relatively new invention. Books and other written documents have become useful aids for the cultural transmission of knowledge and they certainly qualify as useful semantic prosthetics. However, traditional books and printed documents have severe limitations as semantic prosthetics: they are limited in perspective, expensive, rare, hard to access, and they easily become out-dated. Electronic forms of communication and knowledge exchange can avoid some of the limitations of printed books. When distributed by the world wide web, electronic documents such as HTML pages can become cheap, easy to copy, and easy to access. A single individual can keep conventional HTML pages up to date, but a quick look at the World Wide Web (WWW) reveals a common problem: too many HTML pages that are abandoned by their single authors and which quickly become irrelevant fossils.

Wiki HTML pages can escape the limitations of narrow perspective imposed by a limited number (usually just one) of authors and also make it easier to keep pages up to date by sharing the work load involved in the update process. While conventional HTML pages can be cheap, another all too common feature of the WWW is the sale of information. Open and free modes of information exchange (like wikis using a free license) can place reasonable limits on the cost of obtaining information. It remains to be seen just how dramatically human communication will be affected by new semantic prostheses like wikis. Empirical observations will be required as part of the scientific study of Wikis as semantic prostheses.

Semantic prosthetic theory and the future of Wiki

Can we make fruitful guesses about the future of wikis as semantic prosthetic devices? I suggest that a theoretical foundation for the science of wiki can be established by formalizing the idea of a semantic network. We can start by thinking about the set of all things that people have known, now know, and will know in the future. We can conceptualize this set of human knowledge as a high-dimensional space, but project all of the high-dimensional structure into a simple 2-dimensional map for "back of the envelop" evaluation of basic ideas.

One important 2-dimensional projection results from mapping each person's total knowledge as a point on a 2D "everything I know" map (or, for short, "knowledge map"). We imagine that at any given time, each individual is located at some point (A) on this map. A prosthetic device like a wiki can speed the rate at which a person moves across the map towards a new desired state of knowledge (B). In building our wikis, we can seek ways to maximize their ability to increase the speed at which people can move around on the "everything I know" map. The formation of new useful semantic memory (movement across the "everything I know" map) depends on a fruitful matching (path 2 in the diagram) between what a person already knows and the format of the information provided by the semantic prosthetic device that is guiding that person to a new state of knowledge (a new location on the knowledge map). For each person the topography of the knowledge map might be different and for most efficient movement to a new state of knowledge there is an optimal path. Without good matching between the learner and the topic to be learned, the learning process is more difficult (path 1 in the diagram).

How can a wiki evolve so as to be able to provide optimal paths? I think there are two basic ways to promote the utility of a wiki as a semantic prosthetic device. First, the people who make the wiki pages have to be thinking about how to most efficiently move a person from point A to point B. This requires an understanding of what it means for a person to be at point A or point B and an understanding of the cognitive landscape around this region of the knowledge map. Second, the people making the wiki pages have to be able to abandon the idea of "one page fits all". Different people are going to arrive at point B from different starting points. Diversity, a multiplicity of approaches to point B need to be made available. This is the positive approach and algorithm for wiki success.

Pulling our ladders up behind us

I think the major problem for optimization of a wiki is that once people reach a certain knowledge state, they tend to forget what it was like before they got there. This problem can be addressed by collaboration between people who are at point A and point B on a knowledge map. Users of a wiki who are using the wiki to get from A to B have to be able to provide feedback to those people who are already at B. By way of this feedback learners can make known the places on a wiki page where they fail to make rapid progress towards their learning goal. At the very least, there needs to be a way for people to mark places on a wiki page where they get confused and need more help. Theoretically, such feedback could take place on "talk" pages that are associated with each content page. However, current wiki talk pages tend to be dominated by arguments between people who are already at point B.

Actual users (those who are learning from the content of the page) need a simple and quick way to mark difficult locations in a page. The standard for ease of use is "point and click." I propose that wiki engineers should develop a system by which wiki readers can be provided with a small pallet of "feedback markups" where they can simply click on an icon and "stick" it on the page where they have a problem or want to make a comment. Ideally, each page could have a transparent "markup" overlay that would display the user feedback icons and could be used to quickly visually identify problem locations on a page.

The "stop", "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" icons would just be dragged onto the page and dropped. When the "add a comment" icon is dropped, a comment window would open allowing the user to add a comment for that particular location in the page. An example of a wiki page with this user markup overlay is shown below.

Information Currency

Case Study 1

The following report details the beginnings of the Book of Metal wiki—a wiki dedicated to documenting the metal music genre. This report and wiki began as a computer-mediated project at university. The wiki is not currently live, but it is the author’s hope that the wiki will flourish when it goes live later this year.

An argument for a metal wiki

This wiki grew out of a computer-mediated communication class where students were tasked with using a computer technology to facilitate or improve communication. Naturally, the author wished to combine his interest in metal with an innovative communication technology. A wiki appeared to be the logical information sharing solution for a worldwide community consisting of many diverse but related sub-genres.

Community Adoption

The Internet is home to many massive projects aimed at documenting, and reviewing metal music. Unfortunately, they all encounter the same problem—there is simply too much information to process, let alone organize. Nearly every country on the planet is home to at least one metal band and each month the metal community releases around fifty new albums. While the current attempts at centralizing information are admirable, the task is simply too big for a group of individuals.

A metal specific wiki has the potential to be rapidly and thoroughly embraced by the metal community. This adoption is likely for two reasons: elitism and enthusiasm. The metal community is simultaneously close-knit and very individualistic. The different metal genres vary drastically. Metal might be inspired by symphonies or folk music, or more basic primal genres that exemplify aggression. These differences lead to very specialized interests and preferences, and yet members of the metal community emphasize their similarities more often than their differences. These differences might impact an individual’s level of enthusiasm. The metal community’s diversity allows individuals to discover or start emotionally and audibly different bands that directly appeal to the individual. This connection often drives fans to extremes like flying to the band’s native country or tattooing the band’s label on their body. Much like other genres, the web hosts a multitude of fan-run websites. Many fans have even begun to document their favorite bands in Wikipedia articles.

These differences could be seen as a problem. In fact, a significant percentage of metal websites focus specifically on a sub-genre, suggesting that these differences are a problem for traditional websites. On the other hand, these differences might simply be a problem for traditional websites where the content decisions are in the hands of a small group of individuals. Instead, these differences might become a strength once the community is given a platform where the community can agree what constitutes metal and it’s multitude of distinct sub-genres.

The Theory

Wikis fail or prosper due to three theoretical considerations: hacker ethics, transaction costs, and reliability concerns.

HACKER ETHICS. Hacker ethics can be taken to mean many things, but for this article, I would like to focus on the belief that information should be free. This is one of the main reasons wikis have been successful. When considering starting a wiki, one needs to determine whether the community values the opinions of its members or if the community prefers to appeal to an authority. Communities that value individual opinions will be more likely to embrace a system where people collaboratively construct knowledge. Communities that look to experts instead of their peers may find trusting a wiki more difficult.

TRANSACTION COSTS. Transaction costs play a huge role in the success or failure of a wiki. Transaction costs refer to the amount of effort required to contribute to a wiki. Logically, the more difficult it is to contribute, the less likely people are to participate. While some people worry that wikis might make it too easy to contribute, most wikis err in this direction. (You mean they make it too easy?) The ease of contributing is one of the major reasons people have reliability concerns.

RELIABILITY CONCERNS. Most wikis address reliability concerns through tracking functionality and the hope that members of the community will clean up after troublemakers. This is an ongoing problem which can best be solved by providing the tools to reverse destructive changes quickly and conveniently. The Wikipedia community has developed an ethic which seems to work well for that project.

Important Considerations & Challenges

The following considerations and challenges summarize my key concerns for the project.

Encyclopedic vs. Information Resource

The wiki community still debates the best application of the concept and perhaps more prominently, whether the most well known wiki, Wikipedia, is truly an encyclopedia or just a very successful information resource. Early on, I decided that the wiki should not be restrained by artificial constraints. I would prefer for the wiki to become a vast informational resource that contains many encyclopedic entries but also more useful articles and content like biographies. This decision needed to be made early on because it sets the tone for the wiki and has the potential to sink the project. Some communities might be more receptive to an encyclopedia, others might welcome a less formal resource that gives the readers/contributors the opportunity to organize the information as they see fit.

Technical Hurdles

Founding a wiki involves several important technical decisions. First, wiki software must be selected. Wiki software differs in two key ways: functionality and server requirements.

Some wiki software simply allows contributors to create, edit, and track changes to pages. Others combine each article with a discussion page where future or past changes can be discussed. Other popular features are the ability tie changes to contributor’s names and WYSIWYG editing.

Once wiki software is selected, a server must be found to host the wiki. This can be a challenging task if you are not familiar with web hosting and database software. Fortunately, many of the simpler wiki programs only require a web server with PHP running. The files simply need to be uploaded to the web server with a couple of changes to file permissions. Other more complicated wiki programs like Wikimedia require MySQL, a database program that can be intimidating to setup.

Once a new wiki is setup and running, it is vital that a backup plan is in place. The smaller and younger the community, the more damaging any downtime will be. The bigger the wiki, the more damaging any data loss will be.

Rear View Mirror

In retrospect, I would have done a couple of things differently for the school portion of this project. First, I would have focused on hosting the wiki earlier on because I was unable to get MySQL properly running on my university account. Switching between wiki software is not a pleasant experience, especially when the platforms do not share the same features. Second, I would have enlisted the help of friends once the wiki was available. A wiki containing real contributions would have made this project more interesting.

Looking forward, I plan to do two things: recruit help and focus on formats and social norms.

First, I will enlist the help of friends who will help create content, establish formats, and establish social norms. Bringing more contributors in will be important if the wiki is ever to reach critical mass. As Larry Sanger has often noted, the likelihood of success increases as the number of participants increases.

Second, we will establish article formats and social guidelines as we generate content. In my opinion, a wiki needs a certain level of structure in order to succeed with an audience who is unfamiliar with the concept. This structure will make it easier for readers to understand the content and to see where they could contribute. I also believe that the social guidelines will be more effective if they are established as a small group actually interacts on the wiki. The guidelines will be more likely to match actual behavior if they are created based on real experiences.

I will be updating this article with additional findings once the wiki goes live.

Sources

Aigrain, Philippe. “The Individual and the Collective in Open Information Communities.” Invited talk at the 16th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference. 11 June 2003. http://www.debatpublic.net/Members/paigrain/texts/icoic.html (27 April 2005)

Aronsson, Lars. “Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website: Experience from susning.nu's first nine months in service.” Paper presented at the 6th International ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing. 6–8 Nov. 2002. http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html (27 April 2005).

Barton, Matt. “Wikis and College Composition.” Presentation. http://www.mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/ (25 April 2005).

Ciffolilli, Andrea. “Phantom Authority, Self-selective Recruitment and Retention of Members in Virtual Communities: The Case of Wikipedia.” First Monday. Dec 2003. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/ (5 May 2005).

Cunningham, Ward. “How did you come up with the idea for the Wiki?” video interview, Channel9, May 18th 2004. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx? PostID=7726 (20 April 2005).

Jesdanun, Anick. “When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive.” Technology Review. 8 Dec. 2004. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/12/ap_2120804.asp (25 April 2005).

McHenry, Robert. “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.” 15 Nov. 2004. http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html (25 April 2005).

Sanger, Larry. “A Personal Statement About Wikipedia’s Reliability,” version 1. 10 Dec. 2004. http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/sanger3/wikipedia_statement.htm (25 April 2005).

Sanger, Larry. “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism.” 31 Dec. 2004. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 (25 April 2005).

Sanger, Larry. “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir.” Slashdot. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95 (1 April 2005).

Wikibooks, s.v. “Wiki Science.” http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science (1 April 2005).

Wikipedia, s.v. “Wiki.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki (1 April 2005).

WikiWikiWeb, s.v. “WikiHistory.” http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory (10 April 2005).

Viégas, F. B. & Wattenberg, M. & Dave, K. (2004) Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 6, 575 – 582.

References

Wiki Science