Wikimedia Research Network/Meetings/2005-11-06

Fourth meeting, first with James F. as CRO.

Log

Summary

The meeting lasted 1 hour 25 minutes and included 9 speaking participants. Nearly all the conversation was focused on four specific topics, Single User Login (SUL), the General User Survey, Wikiversity, Wiki Research Bibliography. Please feel free to help refine this summary. Hope to see you next meeting!

Specific topics

Single User Login

• See Single_login_specifications
• We should start by preventing new conflicts.
• Ballpark number of possible conflicts would be nice for planning purposes.
  • Create a unified name database as a start and check the number of overlapping names.

General_User_Survey

• See General_User_Survey and General_User_Survey/Questionnaire
• cormaggio: mostly inactive, requires PERL script, planning pilot study.
• JamesF will bug Erik Zachte about it
• A pilot user survey would be a starting point, perhaps also a usability study on syntax issues.
• Privacy policy being drafted at Wikimedia_Research_Network_Privacy_Policy
  • soufron: it must not be exactly anonymous; anonymous survey have no scientific value since you can't test the data (ed: contested)
  • soufron: it must protect privacy and respect privacy laws
  • soufron: can work on improving legal part

Wikiversity

• Vote ended Nov. 1st -- 203 to 80-odd (passed the 2:1 ratio 'requirement')
• Board meets next week to discuss
• Angela: If anyone has ideas on this before the board meeting, please add them to meta (possibly at Moving Wikiversity forward) and link them to Wikimedia_meeting_agendas
• See also http://de.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hauptseite
• Other similar projects http://www.once-cs.net/ http://gnuedu.ofset.org
• where do the teachers/moderators come from?
• Accreditation is not a big issue or concern. aggreed not to seek it anytime soon.
• There seems to be a lot of motivation to get Wikiversity going but not much in contributing to it on Wikibooks
• A multi-year plan would be a great help in structuring what we want to do.
• project ideas
  • ww: I see it as a repository for e-learning material that is open source or GPL.
  • ww: this project is not only a repository, it's more something like a sourceforge for researchers and teachers
  • ww: The so-called didactic triangle includes learners, material and methodology.
  • cormaggio: I think it could be both a repository of materials but also an e-learning space
  • cormaggio: ...courses which could interface with other Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia, Wikibooks..
  • cormaggio: wikiversity in my mind could be a community of learning communities, each focussed on specific tasks, probably feeding into Wikimedia projects
  • angela: one thing that didn't seem clear so far was whether it was meant to be a resource for schools, or be a school itself; the name wikiversity implies university
  • sj: I think Wikiversity should clearly aspire to be a university.
  • sj: a repository for course materials; public discussion pages for online learning...; perhaps even organization of home-schooling curricula?
  • could be used to help expand and notate existing online resources (MIT courses, etc)
• feasability study seems a good idea
• sj: Would it be useful to have a chat with people from other big e-learning projects? U. Phoenix online, MIT's OpenCourseware, related projects in Europe & India?
  • yes, part of feasability.
  • cor: i will be doing at least one for my current masters, and then hopefully extending it for the real thing in my PhD
  • target former teachers and advanced students to avoid conflicts of interest? TEFL community?

Wiki Research Bibliography

• PatrickD: The german chapter has lunched a Wiki Research Bibliogrphy ists works with a wiki like tool called WIKINDX.
• Collection of citations on everything Wiki, all scientific papers about wikis and wikipedia.
• Read-only, contact PatrickD by email for write access.
• Can export the results in bibtex or endnote format
• Will create alias at http://bibliography.wikimedia.de soon.
• Using software from wikindx.sourceforge.net
• related idea at Wikicite as a general citation index for literature in wikipedia that one could link to from all WM projects

Other business

(none!)

Notes:

Quote of the day: [14:33] <WiseWoman> I get hives when I read a lot about what people believe that they can do with Semantic Web.

Attendance

The following said at least something during the meeting:

1. JamesF

1. Angela
2. Cormac
3. Dan Smith
4. Nikerabbit
5. odile
6. PatrickD
7. SJ
8. Soufron
9. WiseWoman

Here summarized the meeting.