Dear all,
With my limited experience both in Zotero and Wiki, two serves, I reckon, different functions.
The list of Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies is useful to announce and showcase Wikipedia related research. It is an interesting place where all Wikipedia-related research are aggregated.
The potential use of Zotero group, depending on the way people can organise it, may be more expansive. It could include work not related to Wikipedia. For example, if some contributor think some text provides some insight into understanding Wikipedia, then s/he as a collaborative researcher can add the text into the Zotero space, preferably with enough tags, notes, etc. to explain the connection and motivation to include that item.
Thus, the goal of Zotero group should be about sharing connections between texts, both inside Wikipedia related research and between in-and-out. If the Zotero is not used to provide extra working space for researchers to share review, comments, discussion, tags, etc., I do not find an urgent need to build and participate one.
Still, as a user of Zotero, I have to say it is quiet flexible. It does not hurt if one tries to organise the Wikipedia related research and then export them immediately via a Wiki-ready template (built inside). It is also useful for researcher to compile a subset of list to be helpful (say, any research that involves the term "collaboration", etc.). Therefore, I can foresee the benefits using Zotero, but I also agree that the list of Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies as a place to show case should be maintained at all time. Whether which one is master list and which one is slave list depends on the need for research community.
The above is just my own personal experience and suggestion. UAYOR ;-)
Best regards, hanteng
Piotr Konieczny wrote:
Michael Ekstrand wrote:
Cormac Lawler wrote:
Thanks for this Michael,
2009/11/2 Michael Ekstrand <ekstrand@cs.umn.edu mailto:ekstrand@cs.umn.edu>
At WikiSym this year, some of us started a Zotero group for collecting research papers about Wikipedia. It's intended to serve a purpose similar to that of the "Wikipedia in academic studies" page[1], but in Zotero so that it integrates well with the research process. Membership is currently open to all, and anyone can add resources.Can you give a link?
Here it is:
Can you explain how Zotero integrates well with the research process? Why not focus on expanding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies ? I have not used Zotero myself; I see it is a Firefox extension (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotero) - nifty, but it doesn't work with my SeaMonkey (nor with Chrome, Opera, and so on). Also, the entries are not sortable, and seem listed only by name of the article.
Personally, I am not fond of off wiki projects, as while we can be pretty certain Wikipedia will be there in few years, who can quarantee Zotero will not go under and disappear (somebody has to keep paying for the zotero.org domain, for example...)?
WP:ACST is also sortable by publication name, author name, venue of publication, year, has expandable abstracts, links - all on the main page (and being a wiki, we can keep improving it).
Further, forking into a new database makes people chose where to contribute. There are several other databases already (linked at the bottom of WP:ACST); neither is complete, some are inactive.
I think we should focus on one of them, try to make it as complete as possible, and ignore the others.
And I think WP:ACST being in a wiki format and on Wikipedia is the best to focus on, and it seems to me that it has a better functionality than Zotero.
Please note I am very, very appreciative of any efforts to improve our knowledge of the current state of Wikipedia research. It is just that I am afraid that forking into new databases is less optimal than focusing on one of them (and if we all reach consensus that we should abandon ACST and migrate to Zotero, fine - but let's agree on one database first).