On Friday 28 January 2005 21:41, Christiaan Briggs wrote:
I must admit it would be interesting to experience
what it would be
BBs are great, but a collaboration groupware platform is even better for the
core members of a wiki! I have installed one for testing at
http://collab.wikinerds.org
A collaboration platform allows the creation of project teams which each
member being assigned a task.
For example, with phpCollab, you can start a project for the creation of an
article on Quantum Gravity. You can create a project team consisting of a
project leader and many members. The leader can assign tasks to the members,
such as writing the introduction, composing a section on mathematics
involved, collection of royalty-free images that can be used in the article,
legal checkup (such as spotting potential copyright violations, getting
permission from proprietors to use their work in the article et cetera. Every
member will get a different task, for example a journalist could be assigned
the introduction, a physicist could get to write the main article, a
mathematician could be assigned the maths section, a lawyer could check the
document for potential copyright violations, et cetera. Each task is assigned
a time priod, for example the introduction should be ready before February
while the maths section can be handed in in the summer. The Web-based
platform then creates automatically a Gantt Chart showing the progress of the
project in time.
In the phpCollab platform, project members can share documents by uploading
them via a Web form. They can also discuss in an integrated BB forum and post
news in a virtual newsdesk.
After the project finishes, the resulting article can be handed to the wiki
sysops to post it on the wiki and assign a distinct version number to it. A
stable version of the article would be posted on the main namespace, while a
publicly editable version would go to the Test: page (which replaces Talk:).
To allow communication between editors and readers, a "Discuss in Wikinerds
Portal" link would be added to the article, pointing to a preexisting phpBB
forum thread.
This idea, although may seem overly structural, is not antiwiki because the
article is still publicly editable in the Test: page. The only difference is
that the edits become part of the "official" article only after sysop
moderation and checkup from the article maintainers (who, ideally, should be
specialists, for example physicists maintaining a quantum gravity article).
Wikipedia is designed to utilise the willingness of thousands of people to
edit here and there whenever have some free time to spend. Although this
results in a very large user base, it means that the articles are moderately
good and not very deep. A good editor could edit for a day and then
dissappear. This may happen for many reasons that cause good editors to feel
unmotivated to contribute: Their name does not appear in the article, they
cannot choose licensing terms for their work, et cetera.
In contrast, my vision is to create wiki communities with very committed
motivated users (collaborating through the Web-based platform), while still
allowing occasional edits by casual readers (by editing the Test: page and
communicating with the authors, if they want, through the phpBB forum). Of
course, in order to keep a team of committed authors, we need to offer
something to them, and we do that by allowing them to display their name in
the articles (or paragraphs) they composed. You can see an example at
http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Zsync . Another potential way to
motivate wikiauthors would be to develop a micropayment scheme so that the
reader can click on a button and transfer some euro to the author of his
favourite article. As such a scheme currently doesn't exist, we offer
wikiauthors to link their name to a page where users can see a PayPal page,
an Amazon wishlist or whatever the author wants.
--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/freehosting