So began the second day of the Wikipedia Academy, Berlin for 2012…

I have to admit I was excited to begin the day as it was my first chance to run my research past an international audience (for my full paper, please visit the Wikipedia Academy site). I also managed to grab a snap of my minimal, Helvetica slides pre-session:

The empty room awaits…

The presentation went well with three questions asked at completion: how do you motivate participation; how do you manage conflict; and are the “widely known” Wikipedia principles useful for studying Wikipedia? The first two questions I was very prepared for, however I did walk away thinking about the last question – it also supports my rising understanding of the tension between the researcher and the researched within the Wikipedia environment. My response was it was useful to use the principles as a lens to view participation, however I’m not so sure how to gauge in the Wikipedia community.

The following are the notes from the session:

Dalit Ken-Dror dalitkd@gmail.com – Gold and Green Models – An open access Solution?

• http://www.thecostofknowledge.com
• whitehouse.gov
• Open access publishing – green model and gold model
• Gold model barriers: high price to researcher, long time to publish, reputation
• How to remove them: a call for institutional green model
• The tension between the open access model and emerging scholars – the high ranking journal is always appealing
• MIT & UCL (University College London) has a solution – reserves the right to publish their researcher’s work, it is published under Open Access – copyright amendment [http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/faqs]
• peer review in repositories by academic institutions – similar to wikipedia model
• Implementing incentive: The researcher MUST review four articles a year to be published in the OA repository
• This avoids the publisher – instant publishing, reduces expenses
• OA green and gold models are new models that disassemble some barriers while constructing new ones
• Question – the reputation of scholars is important through publication within high ranking journals (proved for an interesting debate)

Simeona Petkova – Individual and Cultural Memories on Wikipedia and Wikia, Comparative Analysis

• Mixing social science methods with computational methods
• Wikia – smaller for profit version of wikipedia
• John Peel, first DJ of Radio 1 1967 – memory community upon Wikipedia
• Intersection between web and memory studies
• New media approach – we leave a digital trace that can be then analysed by media researchers
• Geez, us researchers are scrutinising Wikipedia from all angles.  Really rich cultural findings #wpac2012
• Wikipedia and Wikia have the same social/technological specificity – political protocols are also similar
• To understand what the platforms do is the key in understanding what happens in the offline from online community, we need to move away from McLuhan’s approach to newer Manovich approaches – how the technology (platforms) enables (or doesn’t) its users.

Science Communication Panel

• What is the motivation between scientists and non-scientists to co-exists within open access platforms?
• A list of open access platforms – OA thinking, platforms, funding, projects – it seems like a large shopping list
• There is a relationship between popular OA platforms – a critical mass amongst publishing scientists, is the solution policy regulation?
• Interesting thought provocation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action]
• Example of the natural sciences being invading by social scientists and the social uprising that followed
• Subjectivity in data (when published) can have negative impact to the researcher (because of your own interpretation of the data) – we don’t collect our failures, we collect our successes. A semantic shift in understanding what open access can achieve
• Author ID – attribution to authors, an automated process?

Paper Session 2

Alexander Mehler, Christian Stegbauer and Rüdiger Gleim: Latent Barriers in Wiki-based Collaborative Writing

• How can we measure collaborativeness?
• personal views can become stereotypes
• Centre-periphery structure

Centre-Periphery Model

• http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com/wiki/GuttenPlag_Wiki
• Plagarising wiki used to check the German defence minister who was dismissed because his PhD was plagiarised
• Collaborativeness Analysis though productivity, sensitivity to social roles, time sensitivity, sensitivity to cohesion, sensitivity to coherence – useful for analysing social networks that are collaborating
• Centre-periphery is a useful way to understand the organisational structure of a network
• Interesting point around participation vs collaboration – in terms of taxonomy

All in all, great day of extrapolating the thinking around Wikipedia and how this impacts on other areas of open access/platforms and the production of culture/knowledge.