Thanks Felipe and Marc,
Meta has been a useful resource to a point - however, the only actual research project that it generated, [[m:General User Survey]], was never actually realised. Apart from this, it served as an organising space for the [[m:Wikimedia Research Network]], and [[m:Research]] was mostly used for researchers to add their name to the list with a brief description of their research. But I never felt a genuine community of researchers there (apart from the short-lived WRN) - and this is always what I have hoped for. This would be more than a knowledge-share space to me - it would be a place for people to form and reformulate questions, to critique one another's work, and possibly develop some collaborative research projects. The case you cite of people coming into Wikimedia with lots of similar questions only reinforces to me that such a space would be useful. However, the knowledge-sharing aspect is also essential, in order to document what is available, and what has been done before - and I'd like to know what other tools you think would be useful/necessary. Finding relevant literature becomes more and more important with the increasing amount of literature being churned out on wikis - this would be facilitated by focused searching of bibliographies, but the human (ie community) element also comes into it. So, it's really more a shared workspace than a knowledge bank that I'm thinking of. I'd be thrilled to start (or continue) work on such a space on Wikiversity if there is some interest from this list.
Cormac
On Feb 6, 2008 1:58 PM, Felipe Ortega <
glimmer_phoenix@yahoo.es> wrote:
Actually, we already thought about creating a common knowledge-share space, possibly based in wiki technology but with many other useful tools. It could integrate many research sources about Wikipedia, currently scattered all over the web:
* WikiResearch at meta.wikimedia
* Wikimetrics at http://wm.sieheauch.de/, and other wiki bibliography sources (maybe, linked with Citeulike lists...).
* A common forum to exchange ideas and resources for research about Wikipedia.
* Most important thing: A common interface to ask Wikimedia Foundation for data sources. Wikimedia admins are (almost always) too busy to attend researchers' petititons. It's not rare to spend at least 3 months to obtain certain information sources, due to both contact and agreement delays. It's also frequent that certain common petitions show up again over time. With a central point to find resources, this problem would be mitigated, at least to some an extent point.
* Of course, a
mailing-list would be also a benefit, possibly split into important subtopics: research-metrics, research-semantics, research-authoring...
Maybe Wikiversity could be a good starting point to integrate the whole thing.
Regards,
Felipe.
Cormac Lawler <cormaggio@gmail.com> escribió:
On Feb 5, 2008 10:56 PM, Dirk Riehle <
dirk@riehle.org> wrote:
I already moderate the WikiSym wiki research list, which is equally
low traffic, so I can offer to take this one on too. --Dirk
I'd kinda like this list to be slightly
more active - currently it's a bit more of an announce list. I'd like to develop a community of researchers who can share ideas, experiences, critiques etc., but I wonder if a mailing list is the best way though. The obvious question arises: how about a wiki? I'd like to offer Wikiversity [1] as a place where people interested could work and see what other people are working on - not replacing this list but augmenting it. Though if anyone has other ideas for a suitable medium or space, I'd love to hear them...
Cheers,
Cormac
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