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@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