Jodi,
Great to have you chip in so quickly.
I am replying only on wiki-research-l to keep the thread from splitting
too much.
I'm not
ready to write off AcaWiki, but I have a number of significant
concerns. Some of these I've mentioned before. I'd really like someone
from that project to comment on these.
* Is the project dead? The mailing list is pretty much empty and the
amount of real editing activity in the past 30 days is pretty low.
Definitely not dead!
OK, your quick response is a great start.
However, do you have thoughts on the lack of mailing list activity and
very low level of edits? Is there a real community around AcaWiki or
just the desire for one?
* It appears
that the project self-hosts - this means that the project
has to do its own sysadmin work,
Neeru & Mike, can you comment on who's doing sysadmin work now?
My point here is: I would like to depend on pros for the sysadmin work,
rather than volunteers, because there's no need for us to be sysadmins.
Let the experts be expert on what they're expert in and all that.
Bottom line: right now I'm not persuaded that the AcaWiki hosting
situation is stable. The key example is letting the domain expire and
the apparent lack of access to someone who can fix it (see
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/acawiki-general/2011-March/000021.html and
http://code.creativecommons.org/issues/msg2778).
The main interest, from my perspective (others may be
able to add their
own), is in making research more accessible. Several AcaWiki users are
grad students who are writing summaries in order to consolidate their
own knowledge or prepare for qualifier exams.
OK, that's somewhat different than the goals being proposed in this thread.
I think that's a problem, but perhaps a surmountable one if different
communities can have different standards for their papers. We (or I)
need to be able to focus on writing "summaries" aimed at other
researchers; if someone else wants to come along and add additional
summaries for laypeople, that's fine. But (for example) if other people
start rewriting our lit review text because it's too technical, I don't
think it will work out.
* I don't
think the focus on "summaries" is right. I think we need a
structured infobox plus semi-structured text (e.g. sections for
contributions, evidence, weaknesses, questions).
I agree! Right now there's some structured information, but that could
be readily changed. I'm definitely open to restructuring AcaWiki, so do
propose this on the mailing list (acawiki-general(a)lists.ibiblio.org
<mailto:acawiki-general@lists.ibiblio.org>), and we can discuss further.
Great!
Is there a sandbox where I can experiment (e.g., as in Wikipedia user
subpages)?
I don't want a lengthy discussion on a mailing list about what the
content of the infobox should be, nor agree across the entire set of
disciplines - I'd like to just build one and then iterate with my own
community until we agree it's good enough to start (in this case, the
people who want to build a wiki research lit review).
One ongoing issue is the best way to handle
bibliographic
information--which has subtle complexities which we're only partly
handling now.
I'd be curious to learn more, though I'll defer that discussion. At a
high level, a key concern I have is the perfect becoming the enemy of
the good. (For example: dealing with two authors both named John Smith.)
I do agree that a big flaw of using (S)MW for this project is the lack
of any way to build a structure data model, unless I'm missing big parts
of SMW. (RDF triples aren't enough.)
To be clear, what I'm interested in (for now) is not solving these
problems but accepting a reasonably good but imperfect platform, which
SMW is, and moving forward with the wiki research survey work.
I do have interest in building a better platform, but in the future.
* It
doesn't look like a MediaWiki. Since the MW software is so
dominant, that means pretty much everyone who knows about editing wikis
knows how to use MW - and not looking like MW means there's no immediate
"aha! I can edit this". There's a lot of value in familiarity.
Actually, AcaWiki uses MediaWiki -- specifically Semantic Media Wiki.
Right; what I meant was that while AW does use MW it doesn't *look like*
it does, and that's a barrier to entry, which matters. The default skin
needs to look more like default MediaWiki.
Reid