Yesterday we had the first meeting of the wiki editing working group. Without knowing how many people were going to attend initially, I just pointed out some very basic ideas to raise to the people who approached. There were six people (5 men and 1 woman) who already knew previously of several projects inside and outside Medialab. The result for me: a very nutritious and full of ideas first session.
One of my interests in this group is to try to find out the reasons that lead to a certain resistance to documenting "our history" despite the existence of collaborative tools (wikis) to develop documentation work. I list below some ideas that tried to respond to this issue, and that we just put on the table and we hope to be able to elaborate and deepen:
- Looks like we need a personal involvement and a particular motivation from users to generate a documentation routine;
- the very concept of wikis produce rejection: there are people who don't trust that it can work if anyone can write and change what someone else has done;
- having to write with a encyclopedic language, which is not very close to colloquial language, means that many people do not know how to approach the drafting of articles;
- the fact that to edit a wiki you have to "enter" a zone with code (labels) means a technical brake;
- articles need sources and that collection work it can also be complicated;
- neither in the college nor in the university does there seem to be a protocol for editing entries as a natural part of a process documentation process;
- in addition, the appearance of the wiki format predates social networks, and these are perceived as dynamic and alive while the wiki is already seen as something more static.
> Differences and similarities between wikis and pads
We commented on the differences between the work that takes place on a wiki and the work that takes place on a pad:
- although in both cases a text is developed between several people, in the case of the Wiki there is one succession of editions while in a pad you can produce a content generation in a collaborative way;
- We also saw that one Wiki can be edited by many people who do not necessarily have to know each other while a pad tends to be elaborated by individuals who know each other or have certain affinities or belonging to the same group;
- another difference has to do with the fact that, in the case of pads, you have a chat in which you can solve doubts at a given time with other users while in the case of the Wiki, even if there is a discussion tab of the article, communication feels less fluid and the least close contact;
- in a step even before editing, when you create a Wiki you have to think about what the objective of that structure is, what it will be used for, as there are processes in which it may not be necessary to structure as much; in the case of pads, we talk about tools that serve a more direct and ephemeral purpose They therefore do not require an overly complex prior approach.
In both cases, however, that seems widespread. "fear of breaking" what others have done that slows down the participatory process. How to change that perception will be another interesting exercise to try in future sessions.
When later we do experiments in the elaboration of texts, we will be able to see what it is that is conflictive when it comes to give up our ‘I’ for the sake of a ‘we’. During the session it was proposed that this "acceleration" can occur when positions or nuances on a committed or personal issue conflict, since in exercises such as collection of bibliography or writing of certain statements, it does not seem that there is any conflict.
> Some starting points
This first meeting served to put on the table a series of questions, questions, approaches, doubts, possible exercises and avenues of investigation. As it is a little hasty to talk about "conclusions", we will talk better about some starting points that will allow us to continue analyzing about the collaborative development in the wiki environment:
- according to different experiences, if you collaborate in a project (of any kind) as individuals we want get some profit, even if it is of a personal nature and may refer to mere socialisation in a collective: we want form "part of something greater than ourselves";
- despite the lack of editors we see in many wiki spaces, de facto it is being documented, even if it is done in a chaotic and non-cohesive way; it is necessary to put these processes (however unstructured) into value and not lose sight of them;
- document a wiki involves a lot of effort and a lot of perseverance, and the fact that it is "antisocial", since you only talk to others to discuss when some editing conflict occurs, makes it difficult to create stronger ties in that environment.
Although it was said that the wiki does not work as a collective tool, for the moment there seems to be no other way to document collaboratively. We will continue to think about it in the following meetings to which you are invited.
English (UK)