Multiple Wiki Philosophy
From Qwiki
Why is it necessary to have both qwiki and quantiki? You claim you wish to develop community but you aren't. comm-UNITY, get it? -- Spoil Sport
Great question Spoil Sport. The short answer is that it is not necessary to have multiple quantum wikis, but it is not necessarily a bad thing either. Historically, we actually didn't know about Quantiki when Qwiki was started, but now we look forward to cooperating with them in whatever way is best for our users as determined by the feedback they give us. Below I elaborate on our position in more detail. If you have any specific comments, please add them at the bottom of this page.
Ultimately, we are proud of the service we provide to the community through this site. We are providing free web space to anybody, all of the information on the site is free (under the GFDL license), and we are providing maintenance of the site at no cost to anybody except ourselves. If you don't like the site, that's cool and criticism of all kinds is welcome. If you do like the site, that's cool too and contributions are welcome.
Multiple redundant wikis are inevitable
In addition to Quantiki, you could also reasonably consider the physics section of Wikipedia and the Wikibooks effort as redundant resources. And thanks to the great people who have developed open source wiki software (e.g., Mediawiki) it's a very low threshold to start a wiki in the first place, so I wouldn't be surprised if many more quantum physics related wikis started up in the near future. In fact the people associated with Wikipedia encourage this situation by making the software open-source and they are actively developing ways to incorporate smooth inter-wiki linking and other forms of connectivity.
For scientific communities like ours, there are also multiple non-wiki web resources and of course, many, many journals. Some people complain about this too, but the key is not necessarily to make one uber-journal, but to have a diverse set of information sources, combined with a good meta-level search interface that integrates everything.
Diversity is healthy
As with investing and evolution, diversity can be a good thing. Wikis are very new to many people and it's an experimental question to ask which is the best design for a particular sub-community (format, licenses, scope, etc.). By having several mutations we can answer this question experimentally. We do feel that a focused quantum wiki does serve a healthy diversification role as compared to a more general resource like Wikipedia, which is a topic addressed in more detail here.
Search tools provide integration
When people look for information, they don't go to a particular site, they go to a search service. Around 50% of our hits come from Google, a common search interface that equally well sees all of the other wikis. If you trust the search tool, then the best information will be found.
Participation is the problem
One more important question is how to get participation on any wiki. Participation rates for Qwiki, Quantiki, and the physics part of Wikipedia, are all not amazingly high. This is likely due to a combination of reasons:
- The physics population is small. The fraction of this population that are willing to learn the technology (typically young) is small; it takes a certain kind of personality. The fraction of time any one person spends contributing to a wiki is small, especially when professional validation is historically given for other pursuits. All of this together leads to not a lot of activity.
- The existing wiki sites need to improve or new better sites are needed. Hopefully one site, given the right combination of scope, design, functionality, licensing, trustworthiness, etc. will catch on, but they are all still developing.
- It's too early to tell. It's going to take time for people to become aware of this technology and even more time for them to become comfortable with it.
It is unlikely that low participation is caused by the fact that multiple quantum wiki's exist. In the event that many people do not ever participate, we will still be happy with this wiki as simply a resource for our own very local community (i.e., our lab).
We will likely be assimilated
Ultimately, with the extremely short half-life of technology, it may be that some other system will come along and subsume all of this stuff in some way. However, this should not dissuade anybody from contributing. By their nature, wiki's are very subsumable: the databases can easily be ported elsewhere (or searched) and the typical licenses used (e.g., GFDL) are minimally constraining. If you contribute something, it will be saved for posterity and incorporated into the next great thing.
--John Stockton 14:47, 4 Sep 2005 (PDT)
Further Comments
Two wikis ON THE SAME THING means duplicated efforts, which is a waste of manpower---manpower which is scarce to begin with, as you yourself admit. It means some people will have to submit the same text twice into two wikis, and then follow future changes within two growingly disimilar versions. A nightmare. It would be like having two ArXivs. Redundancy can be good, but you can still have redundancy within just one wiki. Merging two wikis is for the most part a task of human editing, not merely a machine doable task, and the bigger the two wikis become, the harder this task will become. --Spoil Sport
Thanks again for your comments. It's nice to know that at least someone cares about this. Here's another long-winded reply.
I do appreciate your point and have spent some time struggling with it. To sum up our differences, you think having one wiki is best to get everyone coordinated, while I'm worried about the best way to get the best site (who runs it, structure, etc.), which is about more than just pure participation. I think multiple sites are a good way to discover what the best approach is. You haven't completely addressed the issues I've addressed, but I'll just say a few things in response to your response.
First, I don't fully agree that the two quantum wikis (and possibly more) will necessarily be on exactly the same thing. I admit that from the front pages the two efforts superficially do appear very similar, using words like quantum information etc. However, we've been careful not to pigeon-hole ourselves too much because we want to scope of the site to be user-defined. Already you can see a branching of the two sites. Quantiki has a few tutorial articles on quantum computing and information, while Qwiki is more experimentally driven and more connected to other fields like quantum control and quantum metrology. Further branching will likely happen. Also, so far Qwiki has placed much more effort into making the user profiles functional and making the category structure of the site clear.
Incidentally, I don't think two arxiv's would necessarily be a bad thing. As much as I appreciate what the arxiv has done for physics, and as much as I appreciate the need for it's stability, I think some healthy competition would go a long way towards making it better. It has unreasonably small memory constraints for papers and figures, there are problems with the endorser program, etc. Also, if there were two significant arxiv's, then I'm sure one could easily find or develop a reasonable means of reading both simultaneously.
Regardless of these considerations, let's assume your statement is true and that one wiki is best. First, what do you think about a quantum wiki versus Wikipedia which is also redundant? If it wasn't so easy to make a wiki, I probably would be fine with putting everything on Wikipedia, despite my qualms with some of it. If there's a difference between one and two sites, why is there such a big difference between two and three?
More importantly, if we take the one-wiki philosophy, where do you suggest we go from here? How do we decide which one to go with? Should we have big stable wiki run by something trustworthy like a society? Should we choose between one of the grad-student-run wikis based on size, precedence? Roshambo? I don't know. These are honest questions not rebuttals. Anyway, we are in contact with the creators of Quantiki, so if something makes sense to all of us, then something will happen.
In the end, if a quantum wiki is truly a good idea, then somebody will do it right and I can't seriously imagine these initial conditions set up by a few grad students in their spare time will have such a great final effect...
--John Stockton 11:22, 5 Sep 2005 (PDT)
