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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
  • To: acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] Expanding scope?
  • Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 09:13:45 -0800

On 11/12/2014 01:53 AM, Kẏra wrote:
I found AcaWiki while looking for a wiki-based alternative to SparkNotes/CliffNotes, a WikiNotes of sorts (specifically because I knew that such a thing would probably also cover academic articles). I was surprised that it was specific to academic articles and only open to some exceptions:
http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:FAQ#What_about_non-peer-reviewed_research.3F

My two questions are "Why?" and "Is this something that can change?"

I think it was a way to more or less clearly define the scope of the project. I don't think any non-vandal/spam summaries have ever been deleted. I've certainly contributed some summaries of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_literature

I'd be fine with changing the language to make it more inviting, feel free to edit!
WikiSummaries seems to do what I'm talking about, but registration seems to be closed: http://www.wikisummaries.org/Main_Page

Why not merge these efforts? The only issue I see is that the name 'AcaWiki' doesn't seem to make sense for including non-academic works.

There are some others listed at http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:Similar_projects (I hadn't heard of WikiSummaries, added it). I'd be fine with merging any/all of these. None has really taken off, including AcaWiki. So there isn't a lot of reason to think merging would produce anything active, but maybe the side effect of being forced to rethink the resulting site would? Would a broader scope help create a community of people who care more about summarizing stuff than academia, latter maybe not well aligned with actually doing the work? What would the broader scope be? Any work anyone felt like summarizing? Any work that would qualify for having an item in wikidata?
When I searched for WikiNotes, I actually found another project that might be a cool future expansion of AcaWiki: course notes. We could keep the main wiki for summaries, and then subdomains for different universities to allow students to take notes on their courses, and easy linking to the articles/books/etc discussed in class could be a powerful combo, especially in terms of getting more contributors to the main wiki.
I'm too disconnected from what students do to have a feel for this. Are there existing sites on which students collaborate on class notes?

Mike




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