2025-01-12
Wikis as knowledge commons have a chequered history. There's Wikipedia, of course, which despite frequent controversy continues to be extremely valuable. But for Wikipedia:No original research is allowed. I've seen several other hopeful wikis, some of which I've contributed to, but almost all seem to follow a similar pattern. They are usually set up by enthusiasts who want to share what they and others know, openly, on their area of common interest. And I want to applaud that, heartily. But mostly, after an initial burst of energy, one of two things happens. Either they continue, one person soldiering on gallantly, maybe adding plenty, but without the resource to keep the pages current and updated; or alternatively even the enthusiasm of the originators runs out and the whole project stagnates. Once stagnated, who is motivated by adding something to an unmaintained, out of date resource? Who has the time and energy to go right through what might be a whole lot of information, to bring it up to date?
Following my own background in research, both academic and informal, I personally see great potential in a collaborative wiki-based knowledge commons for research. I'm imagining a joint effort here, including myself, so I will call the potential group of collaborators “we” — this is what we could do.
All this would help us to coalesce research teams around topics that we all rate as important, and where the team members all have compatible approaches. Teams could be brought together to write papers; to put together funding applications; to carry out research projects, sometimes even if they are not funded, to establish a reputation in our fields — in effect, to lay the groundwork for consultancy work, which would be another route to paying for the research work.
So, why doesn't this happen as much as it could? Here are some speculative thoughts on the matter. (And I invite comment as to how much this is realistic.)
For these reasons among others, I see the need for collaboration that extends beyond institutional or disciplinary boundaries. Collaboration could instead be grounded in shared values. A promising contemporary example of this is what people know as the regenerative movement. This is very loosely defined, but I find that people generally recognise others who have this essential alignment, and share a number of core values.
If this kind of informal network is to work, and to include participants who may be low paid or even unpaid, it must be efficient in terms of time as well as money. Inefficiency and lack of money are demotivators. (Several decades ago these were called “hygiene factors” in Herzberg's Two-factor theory.) If these are the so-called hygiene factors, then what are the motivators?
Herzberg was studying people in existing companies. But in our scenario, outside the bounds of a single organisation, there is the additional challenge of finding other people with aligned visions and aims. Taking this into account, I am suggesting two main challenges, each with suggestions designed to meet those challenges.
Let's deal with these separately, and go on from there.
There is so much out there now on the internet. So many groups clamouring for our time and attention. The more groups we look at, the less time we have to assess whether a group is worth joining or not. Probably like other people, I make this judgement intuitively — I suppose, based on whether I see my perspective reflected somewhere in the group. To exaggerate, for illustration, if I see a group where science skepticism seems to rule, with no one defending a scientific viewpoint, I'm just not interested. Yes, I can live with quite a lot of mystical and spiritual perspectives, but the science needs to be there as well. For other people, a science-and-rationality-only group might put them off, but add a spiritual perspective and that might be fine.
Simply put, to attract more people to a group, display more perspectives within that group. This could be done in many ways, but I have a particular proposal for wiki pages. My ideal is that on each wiki page, there is a “commentary” section, in which different participants can express their own perspective on whatever the topic of the page is. On many web sites this is done on a separate Comments page — on Wikipedia the closest you get is the “Talk” page for every article.1) But I doubt whether many people look closely at these. Better, in my mind, to have the commentary on the same page, clearly demarcated so that readers know what is the main article content (ideally: factual and neutral, as in Wikipedia) and what is commentary.
I believe that if we display multiple perspectives in this way in a collaborative wiki, more people will be interested, and moreover, we will be demonstrating a quality that is valued both in the postmodern and metamodern paradigms.
Once we have people interested enough to engage initially with the community around a wiki-based knowledge commons, how do we help them cohere in collaborative work?
My approach to answering this draws on several decades and several witnesses on the topic of questions, completely independent except for the fact that Parker Palmer is a Quaker. I'd like to list some good ones here…
My personal view also similarly favours questions over answers. When someone gives an answer, I may disagree. That may be a parting of ways. But if someone poses a question which is significant to me, then I may be drawn into something like Bohm Dialogue. Through that dialogue, I may come to understand the perspective of the other, and through that be mutually enriched — that is an opportunity lost if I simply disagreed with an answer that was given first and broke off before dialogue. In this way, questions help with getting to know, respect and trust each other; understanding each other's interests and points of view. Thus it can be regenerative of relationship. This kind of open question points us away from a competitive individualism, towards a collective experience in which new synthesis can emerge in a co-creative manner.
Questions are also absolutely central to research. An older research colleague once shared with me a very concise saying, that a research dissertation or thesis can be seen in relation to 5 words: Is It So What Next. That is three compressed questions:
And I keep passing on this gem to anyone involved in research. A good piece of research not only attempts to answer an interesting or significant question, but also opens up further questions. Too often, academic researchers seem to have forgotten this, with their conclusions drily restating what they have tried to prove or demonstrate. But really good research, in my view, always includes something like “further work”, after the conclusions, where you make explicit the questions which seem to have been opened up by your research. This is then a valuable resource for other researchers in the future.
So, how do we include questions in a wiki knowledge commons? My ideas here are untested. Can you improve on them?
First, to recall that the generative questions are those that different people with different perspectives can come together around in dialogue. Questions that occur just to one individual may not be ready for that. So my starting point is for people to raise their own questions, either on their own personal research-oriented page, or in their comments on other pages: what questions does this page raise for me? Follow-on questions could be critical – like “yes, but what about … ?” – or they could be simply additive: where do I see work carrying on from there?
Having all these question openly on a well-structured and cross-linked wiki with useful information will mean that other people are likely come across them. If I come across someone's question that seems close to one of mine, I may want to get in touch and develop that question. Thus, my second step would be to have some dialogue between the two of us, open to others to join in, where the question is refined into a form that is of genuine interest to several people. This kind of process of question refinement is common in, amongst others, the Art of Hosting community.
A refined question, in a research context, is a powerful lead towards collaboration and further output. To do this most effectively in a wiki-based knowledge commons, my vision is to have a separate page for each of these refined questions. This page would give factual details of where the question arose, and how it was refined, and then most of the page would be commentary, and links to where that question had been taken up or addressed — including further question arising from that.
Within a research collective, as I envisage, I expect that we would be documenting, reviewing and commenting on the works in our broad (transdisciplinary) field, and harvesting questions from those sources as well, within the same wiki format. With suitable cross-referencing and cross-linking, we will be well-positioned to have collective fingers on the pulse of the most significant work, both old and new.
Another vital perspective is that of the learner. Can we include the kind of questions that people new to the area might be asking, and link those through both to learning resources and to deeper and more sophisticated questions?
I hope that this has explained my two specific patterns that I see as beneficial in research-oriented knowledge commons wikis:
I believe that if these were implemented as part of a research group's site, they could lead towards
I'm proposing that these ideas be implemented in the Second Renaissance wiki, managed by Life Itself.
How could I not have this section? The points I have raised bring up many questions, including obviously whether my expectations are correct or useful.