Wikiresearch
Wikiresearch is meant to be scientific research with Wikis and inside of Wikimedia. Several ideas and aspects have been proposed under several names. There is also the idea of a Wiki University "Wikiversity" containing both research and education. Wikiresearch is also the title of a Wikibooks project that started at the Oekonux Wiki.
Since "research" is quite a fuzzy term it should clearly be stated which actions we want on an open research wiki:
- Collecting research information and resources (bibliography, bookmarks, database of people, journals, conferences...) - a portal. This might be done in normal Wikipedia articles named "research on XXX" but there are also technical problems (Wiki[pedia] is not a database)
- Translating scholarly articles
- Peer reviewing and correcting existing scholarly articles
- Writing WikiAbstracts, WikiReviews to summarize research activities and results (this is also done in normal Wikipedia articles but on a much more general level and in Wikibooks)
- Asking for new articles to create a wiki scholarly journal
- Doing original research using a Wiki.
- Doing Experiments
- Collecting and summarizing ideas
- Using a Wiki as a common collection of notices
- ...
Some examples of original research:
- Research on Wikis and Wikipedia. In the German Wikipedia it is called Wikipedistik.
- The Wikimedia Research Network, studies the content of Wikimedia projects.
Free electronic access to the results of research (for example, see the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central may become standard practice for all disciplines involved in research activity. Inter-disciplinary researchers might be among the first to experiment with Wikiresearch. Some meta-wiki articles such as those in the Wiki Science project are already in the wiki format and are at the fuzzy interface between research and education. There should be a Research Division in Wikiversity to promote the idea of "publishing" research in the wiki format, both for the sciences and for disciplines outside of science. This could interface with the academic publishing wiki on wikicities.