For those interested in starting a wiki but don’t want to (or can’t) host it yourself, Wikia recently announced that will host wikis for free…

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Wikia founder Jimmy Wales believes in “free content for all.” That is why the company launched OpenServing today, a service that is giving away complete Web hosting support to any wiki developer – for free!

OpenServing allows anyone to setup and maintain their own collaborative site. Wales told TechCrunch in a phone call today that OpenServing is also intended to go beyond wiki hosting to include free software, free applications, etc. “Basically, anything goes into the model of free culture,”

I’ve been looking at emerging publishing options. Future of the Book has several I’ll mention in a future post, but I thought I would point out that Yochai Benkler whose book: The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom has just recently been published has also made the book available via PDF download and in a Wiki. Here is his description for what he hopes will happen in the Wiki:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

One has to register to see the changes, comments, etc. from other users which are substantial. It is an interesting model for scholarly discourse that includes but moves beyond traditional scholarly publishing.

I mentioned to a couple of people at ATLA Annual Meeting in Chicago that the Library hosted a wiki that was used in by an Introduction to Theology course last Fall. The professor assigned the class the task of collaboratively creating a glosary of 100 theological terms that he had assigned. Later in the semester, he exported the content of the wiki to produce a small booklet that students used to study for a mid-term exam. It was an interesting use of a wiki in the classroom and was successful overall, though some of the students didn’t get the hang of formatting in the wiki.

I discovered an article entitled: “Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom” by S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder (Ferris, S., and H. Wilder. 2006. Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom. Innovate 2 (5). )

Synopis: S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder discuss the changes that are occurring in teaching and learning in a world where teachers and students are increasingly products of two different learning cultures. Adopting the linguistic theory of Walter J. Ong, they see teachers as part of a print paradigm of learning whereas they propose that students are increasingly part of a secondary-oral paradigm of learning. The growth of the secondary-oral paradigm, they argue, has been fueled by the expansion of technologies that allow for the communal cohesion of oral-based cultures on the one hand while also allowing for the preservation and convenient transmission of knowledge that characterizes print-based cultures on the other hand. In this context, Ferris and Wilder argue that wikis provide one possible tool to help bridge the gap between teachers and students. They contend that wikis draw upon the best aspects of print and secondary orality by offering a medium in which information is neither fixed in format (as it was in the print age) nor limited to locale (as it was before the print age) but still changeable to meet the needs of the community, freely accessible to remote parties, and easily archived for future use. After addressing some of the debates that have characterized the legitimacy of wikis as learning resources, Ferris and Wilder illustrate and discuss potential uses for wikis in educational settings, and they offer resources for teachers interested in using such technology in their work.

Innovate – Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom

George Johnson’s response to the Nature article about errors in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica helpfully points to (and questions) some of the items identified as errors in each. Is omission as a result of an editorial process an error?

The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts – New York Times

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: January 3, 2006

Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.

The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.

It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians – even with an occasional saboteur in their midst – can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.