Mathemagenic

Similar to Stowe Boyd and Jack Vinson I’m not a big fan of wikis: while they are good for collective writing when authorship of specific contributions is not important, there are much more cases where it’s essential to know who makes what changes. Of course, the history of edits is there, but it’s just too unhuman to be used systematically.

However, given that the traces are there getting tools to analyse them is just a matter of time. WikiDashboard (thanks to Jane McConnell) is a good example of what is possible: if you use it to browse Wikipedia, each page is enhanced with a visualisation representing top ten users who edited it.

Motivation: The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

I was curious to see how it works, so I used it to check who edits Knowledge_Management page:

And then click on User:Snowded:

The second screenshot is more interesting: it’s a user page that shows what pages he edits most. As I was suspecting, the user is Dave Snowden and you can see not only which pages he edits, but also that he seems to have given up editing KM page (or that visualisations are not up to date, since this is not the case).

Well, on one hand I’m happy to see tools that add transparency and give credits to individual contributors. On the other hand, I wonder what Dave thinks of it. It’s not only about privacy concerns, but also about the potential of tools like this for messing up contributor motivations and all other consequences of measurement.

The people behind Wikidashboard are interested in the patterns that it might show, also inside companies:

We’re curious of how the Web community will use this tool to surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.

I’m interested in those patterns too, but even more in the secondary effects of having tool like that in a corporate settings. I still remember the feedback we’ve got on our innocent prototype that visualised some patterns in a corporate discussion forum. Then I was surprised not that much with the “Big Brother” title for our application, but with a little detail: community members didn’t want to have visible the number of messages they wrote next to their names, the feature that you can see often in public forums. Funny enough, they didn’t mind having a list of messages they wrote displayed next to their names. Numbers are easy to judge and easy to turn into targets, while it’s pretty clear that contribution it not about that.

See also:

• WikiDashboard visualisations explained
• Bookmarklet for WikiDashboard
• WikiDashboard search engine plugin for Firefox/Mozilla Browsers

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16.html#a1965; comments are here.

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I’m looking for experiences and advice of using wiki for a project - any pointers?

To be more specific: the idea is to use a wiki as a shared space for both, project management and accumulating projects results. I’m especially interested in the first one: how wiki could be used for planning, coordination and updates? what types of project management pages it makes sense to create? tips and tricks to facilitate active participation?

On practicalities: 12 organisations in 5 countries, ~30 people, most with little or no wiki experience…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/09.html#a1581; comments are here.

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BlogWalk Chicago was fun :) Jack Vinson did a great job of getting everyone together and all others were brave to get through the snowstorm (and to survive the snowfight :)

• Jim McGee
• David Burn
• Steve Dembo
• AKMA
• Denham Grey
• Tom Sherman
• Matt Homann
• Dennis Kennedy
• Al Delgado
• Stuart Henshall
• Mark Bernstein
• Shannon Clark
• Martin Geddes
• Phil Wolff

Don’t think I’m awake enough to write intelligent comments, but since Euro bloggers are waking up in a couple of hours I’d link to things to start reading.

AKMA wrote a very detailed overview of the day in BlogWalk blogging and BlogWalk After Lunch, so you may start from those, or from photos at Flickr. AKMA wasn’t that active in the discussion, but he did an excellent job of building a bridge between f2f meeting and online world… Thinking of Ton’s post on lurking:

The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he’s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity.

Between the things I really liked today is the changed color palette of Window wiki. I wasn’t feeling like taking the bag of yellow post-its that had travelled around Europe for all earlier BlogWalks, so Jack had to get a whole new set. This time I loved not only the view of colorful mosaic on white background, but also an ability to track my own contributions fast, just by spotting “my” color in the picture.

This is pretty much what I want from a blended weblog-wiki-somethingElse tools - a way to provide both a bigger picture of shared contributions and my traces on it. Wonder how much it will take - I guess less than I expect…

As usual, more posts about it at BlogWalk channel at topicExchange (and don’t forget to ping it :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/23.html#a1485; comments are here.

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There are things that can make you smile after 2 flights, 18 hours in planes, jetlag and all other things that I’d call downside of travel. This time it was a sign at Honolulu airport with directions to “Wiki wiki shuttle bus” (is case you didn’t know - wiki wiki is Hawaiian term for “quick” or “super-fast” :)

Anyway, I’m at HICSS, it’s still 3 January despite of the fact that Radio on my server will put it on 4th, HICSS wifi works (not everywhere and not all the time :), so I guess I’d be blogging. But before I get into anything else, a great piece on conference blogging from Gabriela:

Why do we spend time on this? It is really time consuming and hard to locate all these people and places and papers in order to add the necessary links to the posts, besides the editing of your own conference notes. And it interferes with our day-to-day work, and makes us put off some other tasks. Do we want to show off- look, we’ve been there!? Do we want to impose the world our perspective on things? Are we doing it for ourselves or for the sake of our readers? I’m not really sure. I’ve been writing this kind of reports ever since I attended my first international conference for my own use - writing down names, ideas, references. The fact that now I have the chance to blog them and to link to what other people said makes them a lot richer.

In the last week, two persons had a similar reaction to my blogging itch: OK, that’s nice, I can understand your need to reflect upon an event afterwards as a chance to learn more, even to keep a diary on it, but why show it to the whole world? Why publishing it? What’s the use of sharing this kind of knowledge?

Well, hoarding this knowledge wouldn’t bring me any benefit. And if it’s not interesting for my readers, they will be so wise to skip it. As for the ones who are not my readers and are not interested in the subject, it won’t hurt them at all, because they will probably never find out it about it existence. So who’s the target group?

-People who were there, and want to continue the conversation in the first place.
-People who didn’t get the chance to be there, but they would have loved to.
-Some others interested in the topics discussed there who did not find out about the event.
-Scholars and students studying the topic in the years to come.

To me, it sounds motivating enough.
And I would compare ourselves with cartographers rather than with historians - we’re trying to map the reality (not only facts, but also people and ideas) on the web. We’re actually building a double, that will remain accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, for years from now on.

Having the chance to meet someone whose ideas are already familiar to you shortens significantly the time to having a meaningful conversation - and this is very important. Real life conversations continue via blogs, social networking systems, Skype, participation in wiki editing, virtual environments.

Conference blogging is always a balance: finding a ways to combine your personal goals and informing your readers, choices between f2f time and time needed to reflect and write, balancing fun of being in the flow of discussions and discipline of writing things down. Don’t know how it will go this time, but I’ll try…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/04.html#a1471; comments are here.

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Ton is playing with Wikifying the Blog? idea:

Having a chat with Elmine, discussing creating links between blogs and wiki’s, I came up with the idea of replacing the comment-function in a blog with a link to the edit-mode of a wikipage, that also contains the blogpost.

Ton is working on implementing it, see Wikifying the Blog! and Wikifying the Blog Continued. Seems to be a first step to my dream wiki/weblog tool :)

Update: Riccardo offers a solution for Movable Type (of course, I’ll wait one for Radio :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/01.html#a1328; comments are here.

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At last BlogWalk I was trying to explain my ideas about ideal wiki/weblog tool, so just writing them down.

I wrote about blogs and wikis for thinking earlier, so just in brief on what is important for me:

• process - weblogs are good to keep track of ideas unfolding; datestamp and preserving the original are important
• outcome - wikis are good for (collaborative) working on integrating, refactoring and connecting ideas
• connection between these two is essential - I’d like to see how bits of weblog posts turn into something more tangible

What my ideal wiki/weblog tool should do:

1. Weblog. Usual one. The only thing I need is something like liveTopics to add keywords to each post. Keywords should not be predefined and shouldn’t behave like categories in Movable Type or Radio multiplying content: I need only an index that allows retrieving posts by a keyword (e.g. blog reading).

2. Linkblog. Something as easy as del.icio.us, with only one difference: when I add a keyword the link is added to the same keyword index as weblog posts (so, my posts about blog reading and links on blog reading are indexed on one page).

2.n Ideally I could have other types of logs - e.g. file log, e-mail log, reference log, book log, recipe log. Same: keywords and joint index (with an opportunity of switching indexing off for sensitive stuff).

3. Wiki. Here all the fun starts. When I post something to my weblog or any of other logs it’s added to two places: keyword index (see above) and keyword wiki page. This is the time when I want the software to multiply my content: I’d like any new post about blog reading it is automatically copied at the end of wiki page called blogReading”. Then I (and others) can do all the usual wiki stuff - editing wiki page making a whole from posts there.

If I add new wiki page, new keyword is added to my keyword index. If I rename a keyword then everything gets renamed and reindexed.

4. Keyword indexes (see above) - list of keywords that leads to keyword wiki pages and keyword indexes (and, of course, these two are linked).

5. Keyword (concept) maps. At least three of them: (1) visualising connections between wiki pages; (2) visualising connections between weblog posts based on co-occurrence of keywords in the same post; (3) integration of the two. All organised as webs (not trees :)

6. RSS feeds of every page (especially indexes, so people can subscribe to a keyword).

7. (just dreaming ;) Time-travel machine that keeps track and visualises changes in weblog posts, wiki pages, keyword maps.

That’s it. Should not be that difficult given existing technologies. Even time-travel machines do exist. The only thing which is not in this picture is access rights (e.g. blogging to the world, to a group, to yourself). Have to think about it.

If you have a tool that integrates 1-6 I would switch to it.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/08.html#a1233; comments are here.

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Thinking of blogs vs. wikis to support thinking. For me blogging is easier - it shows how ideas unfold over time and somehow I don’t have a problem when I create new page (I do think twice in wikis - because it increases navigation mess). Blogging is also about permalinking and hypertexting half-baked ideas…

The problem is that at the certain moment there is a critical mass (critical mess ;) of bits related to a theme. At this moment you need a least an overview of all of them and then a way to construct something more coherent. Wikis are great for that. It’s much easier to get an overview of ideas (if they collected on one page :), edit them into something better or even go for refactoring the whole thing.

But then you get the clarity of a final product and lose an overview of path that took you there. And I’m getting more and more convinced that process and artefacts on the way is as important as the final product.

Of course, some wiki/weblog combination can make life easier (but not those where weblog post is edited as a wiki - you lose the path then).

The funny thing that so far I have my own work around: I use weblog for thinking in progress and then ideas are ripe I write papers. It also makes pretty clear distinction for content ownership in a case where someone (like me) gets paid to produce ideas: I’m building my “thought repository” (weblog) while my company benefits from more polished “knowledge artefacts” (papers and reports) I produce.

Hmm, have to dig out some research on process of creative thinking - something about stages in which clear ideas emerge from a mess of doing and thinking, reading and writing…

Lot’s of associative thinking instead of working :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/08.html#a1160; comments are here.

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Is there any (published or in-progress) research on wikis? I’ve only heard about two papers “under construction”, but I don’t believe this is it…

Just realised - there is some in Seb’s dissertation: chapter 4 and 6.3 (evaluation with 2 cases and survey).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/07.html#a1156; comments are here.

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Does anyone know how to refer to a wiki page in a scientific paper given collective authorship?

A complicated case: how to refer to the list of KM bloggers, which is (I guess) a collective work with clear leadership of one person (explicitly saying “started by DenhamGrey” and “my evolving list of KM / eLearning / sna blogs”)?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/27.html#a1096; comments are here.

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Ross Mayfield’s Weblog in Fisking the Fisk on differences between weblogs and wikis:

I took Jeff Jarvis to task for Fisking, the act of ruthlessly ripping apart an article or arguement point-by-point. Weblogs are rediculously easy Fisking tools. You copy a body of text and intersperse your own commentary. Generally, the commentary is short and quippy and stands out from larger blocks of quoted text. Its actually easier than writing your own point or and fits with the copy-paste culture of blogspace. The strength of the Fisk is we can fact check your ass and reveal the devil detail by detail. The downside is the form of the Fisk actually inflames personalities.

[...]Contrast this with any contoversial page within Wikipedia. Wikis de-emphasize personality, reveal group voice, and put emphasis on content. However, the impermanence of the page as opposed to the post doesn’t satisfy the communications of many. Which is why many controversial issues within Wikipedia are escalated to dicussion lists (which would be better done by blog). In the worst case, you take advantage of the infinite space in a wiki to offer differing definitions of the controversial entry, with the original page as a fork point.

In simplified way I would say that wikis are “converging conversational tools”, taking convergence to the extream, where original points together with identities of their authours are lost (hm, may be when wiki is not a “conversational” tool anymore :). Blogs are more “diverging” tools, with capability to take points to their extremes (when it gets to “inflaming personalities” :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/20.html#a913; comments are here.

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