Note: this is the outline of a short talk I gave describing my undergraduate honor's project to the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford. I have done some minor editing. A community-edited (and hence probably better) version of the what-is-a-wiki part of this talk is here. Slides from the talk are linked from here. The actual thesis is here. -- bayle

Roadmap

• Two useful tools
  • Wikis
  • Collaborative encyclopaedias. In particular, encyclopaedias for:
    • A.I.
    • neuroscience

• Brief description of other areas of my project
  • Brain Imaging Wiki
  • Community Programmable Wiki

• Acknowledgements

My project has a couple of different parts. So, in the interests of time, today I'll focus on the parts that I think will be most useful to other SymSys people. The common theme of my project is the usage and extension of the collaboration tool called "wiki".

First, I'll tell you what a wiki is, and what they are used for.

Then, I'll talk about two new projects to create collaborative encyclopaedias of research, and, I'd like to invite all of you to participate in them.

Later, I'll give a brief description of other areas of my project, including:

• Brain Imaging Wiki
• Community Programmable Wiki, a radical extension to wiki which I coded, that applies the wiki collaboration paradigm to software development.

What is a wiki?

Fundamentally, a wiki is just a type of website in which all of the members of a community can edit the content of the pages. If you follow this link, you can try out editing a practice page. Come back here when you're done.

So, the site's readers are also the site's authors and editors.

Another way to look at a wiki is as an electronic whiteboard. Just like the whiteboard in the hallway of your research lab, each person with access to the board can not only read it, but they can also add something or change what someone else wrote. A wiki has the usual advantages of that electronic documents have over physical ones: large storage capacity, word processing, full text search, internet access. But more importantly it provides two unique features:

• Revision history

A wiki, unlike most physical whiteboards, can remember all of its past versions. This means that if somebody comes by and erases something important or vandalizes the board, it's trivial for someone else to rollback those changes.

Here's the revision history of the practice page.

• Recent Changes list

A wiki can generate a report of all of the modifications to the text since your last visit.

In addition to allowing you to keep up with new or changed content, this encourages group peer review of all of the changes to the collaborative document.

This link goes to the page named "RecentChanges", which contains the Recent Changes list for the wiki website called "CommunityWiki".

Uses

Project management

This is probably the most common use of wikis. Projects or labs often have have a variety of project documents; announcements, to-do lists, status summarizes of various subprojects, documentation, meeting agendas, or hints and resources for others in the project.

Without wikis, nothing on a project site can be updated without the webmaster.

The result is often stale, out-of-date websites, and the real business shifts to email lists. By allowing project documents to be jointly maintained by the whole group, wikis remove the webmaster bottleneck.

This sort of wiki is often access-restricted (or edit-restricted) to those in the group.

Collaborative paper writing

This is the most natural use for wiki, although it isn't very common yet.

Rather than emailing versions of the paper back and forth, wiki allows you to edit a single document as if you and your coauthors were all standing around a computer together.

This eliminates the headaches of keeping track of the latest revision and of keeping track of old copies of the document (because the wiki does that for you).

Clearly, this would usually be done on a private site accessible only to the authors.

I should mention that there are LaTeX extensions to many popular wiki software packages.

Public wikis

Some wikis are opened up to everyone on the World Wide Web. The result is a collaborative document that anyone can edit.

O.K., having told you what a wiki is and how it can be useful, I'll move on to introducing public, collaborative encyclopaedia projects, and particularly two research-oriented sites that I think you might be interested in.

Collaborative Encyclopedias

Why wiki works

Here's two of many empirical examples that demonstrate that this collaborative model actually works.

• Example 1: Planetmath

Planetmath is an encyclopaedia of math. It's not quite a wiki, but it's close; anyone can add an entry. Planetmath has quickly accumulated a large number of highly technical, quality entries and proofs.

• Example 2: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a general encyclopaedia. Started 2 and 1/2 years ago, it already has over 100,000 entries of generally high quality. Here's a sample WikiPedia entry (on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).

Two new collaborative encyclopaedias

• http://purl.net/net/neurowiki
• http://purl.net/net/aiwiki

These wikis seek to be encyclopaedias of research trends and ideas in their respective fields. They are collaboratively authored and edited.

There are entries on specific research projects.

There are also entries on specific topics and ideas.

And, there are pages detailing current knowledge.

The neuroscience wiki ranges from general topics like the encoding of memory or the philosophy of mind, to more specific entries on specific physiological processes and anatomical locations, to research resources like methodological tips, and lists of summer programs or funding entities. The artifical intelligence wiki has similar scope.

As the site evolves, we expect entries to turn into 2-3 page summaries, with references and public discussion. These would be much like the MITECS Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science (example), except collaboratively written and hence more comprehensive. An additional difference is that our sites support discussion about each entry.

The projects are just getting started; although there are hundreds of entries, many of the entries are rather sparse. We need your help to turn these into world-class resources! If you notice something on the sites which is incomplete, please go ahead and add what's missing. All you have to do is hit the "edit" button at the bottom of the page.

If you'd like to contribute to or join these projects, you can either email me or you can just go ahead and start posting on the sites.

Other Parts of my project

Brain Imaging Wiki

Community Programmable Wiki

Acknowledgements

• John Gabrieli and Jan Borchers (my advisors)
• David Andel, founder of AIWiki and major contributor to NeuroWiki.
• The participants on MeatballWiki

This talk focused on NeuroWiki and AIWiki but glossed over CommunityProgrammableWiki. That's because (1) many SymSys people are very interested in neuroscience and A.I., and (2) CommunityProgrammableWiki is hard to explain in 3 minutes when the audience doesn't already have a solid grasp of what a wiki is. Personally, however, I think that CommunityProgrammableWiki is the most interesting and most unique part of my project.