A few weeks ago, I attended WikiSym [1] in the beautiful city of Porto. It was a lot of fun and a great way to meet people using, researching and developing Wikis for various platforms and uses. I originally went there to show WikiWord and OmegaWiki at the BabelWiki workshop about multilingual wikis, but ended up talking and learning about a great many more things. I'll try to give a short overview of the things that I found most interesting, although I'm sure I'll forget something. Here's a list for those looking at an excerpt:
Contents |
- OpenSpace: edit this conference
- BabelWiki: open dictionaries
- WikiTrust, WikiTracer, WikiChanges
- Wiki ResearchPlanet and ResearchCluster
- Application Wikis: XWiki et.Al.
- OpenWetWare: MediaWiki as a tool for research and teaching
OpenSpace
One of the things I liked most about WikiSym was the concept of OpenSpace: Basically, participants make their own schedule, by picking a topic, a place and a time, and putting it up on a wall. A small but important twist was the rule to put down your name for any session you are interested in, no matter if you had any hopes of actually attending it. This way, if no one shows up for a session you organize, you can see if it makes sense to reschedule it.
This worked out really nicely, and was a lot of fun. The only drawback is that I missed a lot of actual paper presentations that way.
Open Dictionaries
At the BabelWiki workshop [2], I attended the session on open dictionaries [3]. We saw some demos of existing (more or less free) online dictionaries, and had an interesting discussion about different perspectives on thesauri and dictionaries (word-centered vs. concept-centered), and about the way translators use dictionaries. Two of the more interesting results were: a) translators want a plain list of possible translation, and perhaps some sample use. They don't care about grammar, etymology, etc. And b) translators like to use "official" standard dictionaries, and are slow to touch free/open resources, perhaps because they are deemed less accurate. Oddly however, they do not have any qualms with simply googeling a term and seeing how it's used.
The discussion we had there sparked some activity by the Hacklog folks, a bunch of people interested in anything related to languages and computers, see [4] and [5]
WikiTrust
WikiTrust [6] is a MediaWiki extension that assignes a level of trust to parts of an article's text, and colors it accordingly. This is a great tool to see which parts of a page need more critical review, based on the reputation of the text's author and the time it remained unchanged. Reputation in turn is based on how long (in number of edits) text written by that author remains in the article.
WikiTrust has been discussed before on the Wikitech mailing list, and many of you have probably also seen the demo [7]. After talking a lot to the author, Luca de Alfaro, I'm more than ever interested in seeing this live on wikipedia. Quite a bit of work has gone into making the system robust against manipulation, and to handle paragraph moves, reverts, etc gratefully. It seems to work great. Now we just have to make it integrate with the MediaWiki infrastructure in a way that allows it to be applied live to every edit on wikimedia projects.
WikiTracer
WikiTracer [8] tries to identify, measure and evaluate indicators for the development of a wiki. For example, they take numbers like admins per user, user per page, etc, correlate them with the growth of the wiki and predict the further development the site will undergo. Kind of like google analytics for wiki communities, only better. They are currently trying to come up with a standard interface for asking wikis for the relevant information. I think it would be interesting to have this available for wikimedia projects, especially for small wikis.
WikiChanges
WikiChanges [9] plots the activity on an article over time, for example for the Tour de France. Recurrent events and also current events are nicely visible (and so are edit wars). There's also a Firefox plugin that inlines this right into the Wikipedia page, besides the tile - looked pretty in the demo, but I'm too lazy to dig for the link right now. All in all, this is not revolutionary, but having it automatically in every wiki page would be... hm... maybe not so helpful, but it would be cool!
Wiki Research Planet
The Wiki Research Planet session was about establishing a central place for collection information on research about wikis - people, projects, tools, papers, etc. The information on the page I likned to is mainly about the bibliographic aspect, which IMHO is only one bit of what would be needed. We actually talked about a lot more things: A mailing list (like WikiResearch-l, but with a browser scope, no focused on wikimedia), an aggregated wiki research news feed (kind of like Planet Wikimedia, but focused on research, and not limited to wikimedia), and of course a wiki. I think the wiki would be a place to collect information about Projects, Tools and Literature -- not only present our own, but to write about any such things we know. Only this way we can become a "living" wiki, and attract more contributors.
Wiki Research Cluster
The Wiki Research Cluster was proposed by Andrea Forte -- the idea is to have a couple of servers dedicated to providing access to wikipedia data for researches. This would be complementary to the Toolserver: the focus would be on providing full text, possible also pre-processed (e.g. without markup), covering all wikis or having live access wouldn't be so important. It would also be nice to provide common libraries for use with that data, for example tools for text tracking (detecting paragraph moves acreoss revisions), etc.
The idea is to get the infrastructure financed by research grands and/or industry donations, and give wiki researchers a powerful playground, while the toolserver's goal remains to provide services to the active wikimedia community.
Application Wikis
Application wikis are wikis that have powerful scripting features that basically allow users to implement complex web applications within the framework of a wiki. I don't think this is the next setp for Wikipedia or other content-centered wikis really -- I rather think this is the wiki way of writing web applications. And that's quite exciting.
On system that looked particularly interesting to me is XWiki. I have not played with it yet, so I don't know how good it actually is, but it sure sounds good: open source, java based, uses hibernate for storage and velocity and groovy for scripting... neat. And the wiki as such is itself just an application of the xwiki framework.
Another very interesting feature is the federated/replicated storage architecture. Impressive. Should try it soon.
OpenWetWare
OpenWetWare is the a platform for research and teaching run by the MIT bioengineering department. It's based on MediaWiki and has some 2000 active users, I'm told. They wrote quite a few extensions to make mediawiki meet their needs, and some of them are definitly worth looking at: BibTeX support for bibliographies/citations. Better TeX support (I suppose especially for chemestry). Calendar-Based blog-style lab book feature. I should really play with this a bit some times.
and more
There was so much going on at WikiSym, I couldn't hope to catch half of it. Stuff I missed includes:
- Wiki Creole
- Semantic Wikis
- Distributed Wikis
- Wiki gardening
- and worst, the things I don't even know I missed
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