Topics+arising

**Workshop / Topics arising **

Various topics arose during the Knowledge Wiki Workshop at Brunel University on 8 July 2009. This page is a portal to further discussion of those topics, and others which arise in the process of subsequent discussion. While this corner of the site is under early stages of development, some of these topics mentioned below will be ‘stubs’ — i.e. placeholders awaiting development.

Steve Dale’s Knowledge Hub case study

 * Steve made a presentation about the Improvement and Development Agency’s ambitions to create a Knowledge Hub, to aggregate and integrate knowledge across local government. The functionality they are envisaging challenges the boundaries of what can be achieved with a wiki.

Edmund Lee: English Heritage guidance notes, a wiki application?

 * Edmund Lee of English Heritage made a presentation about his section’s work, publishing standards and guidance notes. Might there be a role here for wikis?

Wiki roles for editors and ‘social reporters’

 * Some people like wikis because they potentially give people unmediated access to sharing content in a community. An alternative point of view is that skilled writers and editors, and people who can capture knowledge from others and report on it, can play a useful role in the development of wiki content.

Information policies for wikis

 * Graham Robertson introduced the concept of Information Policies. Organisations which define such policies could develop guidelines to help steer how people collaborate in a wiki space.

Polythemus

 * This is cluster of pages under development by John Lindsay, examining among other things how various knowledge management methods and technologies relate to the missions of various UK professional societies, including the BCS and RSA.

The preservation of points of view

 * A topic raised at the KIDMM wiki workshop of 8/7/2009 in an exchange between Aboubakr A. Moteleb and Conrad Taylor, in which it was noted that there is a strong expectation that wiki entries will be ‘neutral’, and will evolve as a synthetic view that blends and subsumes the opinions of multiple authors. However, it is valuable to know about different points of view; and even more problematically, different people might organise a body of knowledge differently, according to different categories. Might there be software which could accommodate this?

What is the place of discussion in a wiki?

 * This topic has a double meaning. Firstly, to explore the role that discussions play in the evolution of knowledge wiki content; secondly, to look at the mechanisms that support such discussions (particularly discussion pages). Also, the practice of discussion on a wiki and what should guide and regulate it.

Assuring the permanence of wiki content, and issues of citation/reference

 * If a wiki is being used to accumulate a knowledge-base, how can one make sure that the knowledge-base will not evaporate at some point in the future? How does one archive wiki content? If a wiki is changing all of the time, how can one make a reference to a particular page, and to the state that a page was in when it was referred to?