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Given the enormous scale of the appropriate technology and environmental crisis problems, I think we need solutions that can scale correspondingly. If we want to address these problems with wikis, they need to be really big wikis, with millions of active participants. It is thus interesting to study how Wikipedia got big and copes with its bigness, and the barriers to further participation that result from size itself. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 13:42, 12 March 2011 (PST) | Given the enormous scale of the appropriate technology and environmental crisis problems, I think we need solutions that can scale correspondingly. If we want to address these problems with wikis, they need to be really big wikis, with millions of active participants. It is thus interesting to study how Wikipedia got big and copes with its bigness, and the barriers to further participation that result from size itself. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 13:42, 12 March 2011 (PST) | ||
== Hi | |||
No I hadn't seen it - thanks, and also thanks for modifications on my talk page. Very handy! | |||
Yes, Wikipedia is a very good example, and I like what you said how nobody really knows how to make successful websites/ wikis - It takes the right design but also luck! Makes me think about what Eric Raymond said how one of the things that made Linux so successful was that they "released early and released often" - in other words a constant improvement, new features, working out old bugs etc... It is complex not necessarily because machines are the problem (the coding and design) but that human creatures are very complex - hard to determine fixes for problems which you have not yet seen, and how do you refrain from too much control and organization over the creative process but give it enough guidance? | |||
A topic well worth exploring... | |||
Revision as of 03:18, 14 March 2011
Check your email
Check your email asap -- Joshua 19:32, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi Ivana !
(We met in Montreal, at RoCoCo.)
Let's keep in touch ! Are you on Facebook ?
Fred Mir - fredofromstart@gmail.com —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 05:45, 3 July 2010, 74.198.15.1
Making a successful new wiki is hard
Hello Ivana, you ask:
- "Is one of the solutions to establish rich interconnected networks/ website/ database/ wikis for all A.T. related needs? How can we speed it up and scale up?"
I have some thoughts on these questions, but before writing them I will read your papers, to see if I have anything new to tell you. Wikis are probably the most effective platform to date for large-scale remote collaboration, but Making a successful new wiki is hard. Barriers exist to productive collaboration on wikis, and the (relatively fewW) successful wikis had to overcome these barriers, either by accident or by design. I suspect success involves a combination of accident and design in all cases - i.e., probably no one really knows how to make a successful wiki, at least not initially, only things they can do to increase the probability of success. --Teratornis 16:09, 10 February 2011 (PST)
- Hi Teratornis. Thank you for the links and feedback! I agree with you on all the points: while wikis and internet platforms are the most effective ways of collaboration making a successful one is not an easy. Like you say there are things you can do to increase chances of success but it is by no means guaranteed. Perhaps with more and more people learning to edit wikis and realizing they can and should contribute, plus with further internet signals and computer outreach in all corners of the world, more data and more collaboration will surely flock on line and will become like second nature. But the sooner we can spur this on the sooner we can reap the rewards!
- We discus this issue in one of our papers "Enabling Innovation" - which is currently under review awaiting publication, and I also plan on talking more about it in my thesis chapters which will also be submitted for publishing in near future. It is as much social as a technological thing - and getting more internet, wikis and tools of online collaborating in classrooms is definitely a key. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 17:50, 21 February 2011, Ivana Zelenika
- I read your paper:
- Buitenhuis, Amy J.; Ivana Zelenika and J. M. Pearce (March 25-27, 2010). "Open Design-Based Strategies to Enhance Appropriate Technology Development" (PDF). Proceedings of the 14th Annual National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance Conference: Open. San Francisco. pp. 1-12.
- and I have been editing some comments about it on my offline (personal) wiki. I will put them on a user subpage when I clean them up a bit. Other items:
- I hope you don't mind that I put a {{Talk header}}{{Talk header}} template on this page. You can remove it if you don't like it, but it links to the unobvious instructions for editing talk pages Wikipedia-style, which can be instructive for other users who might otherwise make your talk page untidy with ad hoc formatting.
- I refactoredW your reply to follow Wikipedia's indenting style.W I like to follow Wikipedia's rulesW by default (only deviating when there is some compelling reason), because I think Wikipedia's editor community has defined the current best practice for editing on wikis. Appropedia's most experienced users like Lonny and Chriswaterguy generally do the same. It seems like all the wiki experts learned to edit on Wikipedia. Learning the same style enables one to immediately relate to the growing community of Wikipedia alumni.
- I used a {{Cite conference}} template (which I recently ported here from Wikipedia) to format the citation to your paper. Citation templates are one of several ways to format citations on a wiki. I prefer them because they are structured and machine-searchable. They understand DOIs,W and archivedW (i.e. rot-proofW) links, which I did not add to the above example.
- Anyway, keep up the good work and I look forward to reading the rest of your papers. I should hurry up with my comments on your previous paper in case something gives you ideas for the next paper. --Teratornis 13:18, 22 February 2011 (PST)
- I read your paper:
Wikipedia editor trends study
Have you seen this?
The English Wikipedia appears to be plateauing in terms of attracting and retaining new editors, even while readership continues to grow and each year's fundraising campaign is more successful than the last. There is a lot of discussion about this problem, whether it is even a "problem," and what if anything to do about it. Many people put the "blame" on Wikipedia's increasingly powerful deletionists. I largely concur, but I think Wikipedia's late intervention multiplies the damage to goodwill. Wikipedia presents itself as an open, welcoming system to the new user, making it relatively simple to create new articles, but without first adequately warning the new user about Wikipedia's thriving article deletion industry which enforces a fantastically complex list of rules for content (wikipedia:WP:NOT, wikipedia:WP:NOTABLE, wikipedia:WP:CSD, etc.). The hapless new user typically has only a vague awareness of these rules before plunging in to the mine field. Only after the new user struggles for hours to put a new article together does he or she discover it was all a waste of time. Even worse, deletionists typically do not bother to inform the authors of an article that it has been deleted. The new user typically discovers that something is amiss after searching for the article on Wikipedia at a later time, only to find it no longer there.
Small wikis typically have the opposite problem, in my opinion: not enough rules. Without clear and detailed rules, it becomes difficult for distant strangers to collaborate effectively. The number of different editors who edit a particular article on a small wiki like Appropedia is much less than on Wikipedia, where hundreds of people may collaborate on a single article. Only when rules are extremely detailed can hundreds of strangers pull together in something like one direction. If trivial details of formatting and presentation are left to personal whim, friction and uncertainty can result. Changing someone's work can become a personal issue rather than a dispassionate application of rules. Site-wide inconsistency, if left to persist, misleads users to create more of it because people tend to learn from examples rather than by referring to canonical written rules.
Given the enormous scale of the appropriate technology and environmental crisis problems, I think we need solutions that can scale correspondingly. If we want to address these problems with wikis, they need to be really big wikis, with millions of active participants. It is thus interesting to study how Wikipedia got big and copes with its bigness, and the barriers to further participation that result from size itself. --Teratornis 13:42, 12 March 2011 (PST)
== Hi
No I hadn't seen it - thanks, and also thanks for modifications on my talk page. Very handy!
Yes, Wikipedia is a very good example, and I like what you said how nobody really knows how to make successful websites/ wikis - It takes the right design but also luck! Makes me think about what Eric Raymond said how one of the things that made Linux so successful was that they "released early and released often" - in other words a constant improvement, new features, working out old bugs etc... It is complex not necessarily because machines are the problem (the coding and design) but that human creatures are very complex - hard to determine fixes for problems which you have not yet seen, and how do you refrain from too much control and organization over the creative process but give it enough guidance?
A topic well worth exploring...