In the Open Access and Open Science problem an unsolved problem is available, called missing peer review. If anyone can write a pdf paper, who decides which of the papers was written well? Let us describe first the problem in detail. Suppose there are 100 amateur scientists who are motivated to write some papers. Each of them has it's own blog. The first author prefers Wordpress, the second one has a godaddy hosting server and the third one has uploaded a paper to Google drive. That means, the 100 bloggers are creating content what is missing is some kind of journal which is equal to a peer review authoritaty. How can such a journal be organized in the context of Open Science?
The answer is really simple. Peer review is equal to create a news portal. A news portal is collecting URL from the last week. In contrast to a blog of a single author, a news journal is curated by a group of users who are working together. This can be realized technically with a WIki system. A wiki allows to collaborate on the same topic.
The best practical example which goes into this direction is https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/UnNews:Main_Page
This website demonstrates how a bottom up news portal is working in reality. The idea is, that anybody become a user and submits a URL which is enriched with a small introduction. Let us make an example.
At first, we need the mentioned 100 amateur bloggers, five of them have a written a new pdf paper and put it on their individual blog. A search with Google in the all the blogs shows that new content was added. Somebody else takes the URL1 which is referencing to paper1 and puts it to the news wiki. He writes, that a new research breakthrough was made by a famous blogger and is referencing to the original content.
What happens next depends on the group in the news wiki. Do they like the URL1 too, or come they to the conclusion, that the quality is to low? They they will modify the news headline into something which is more accurate. They won't call it a breakthrough but a well written introduction about a topic.
The main idea behind the overall structure is to keep the content creation seperate from the news website. The content is created by individual bloggers and uploaded to their own blogs. While the information that a new paper is available is curated in a dedicated wiki which can be edited by a group. Such kind of hierarchy allows a certain amount of conflicts. For example, the News wiki can come to the conclusion, that the paper quality is weak, while the individual author thinks it's a great paper. And if the conflict escalates, the blogger will become angry against the wiki portal because he was understood wrong.
Such kind of conflict potential is desired and it helps to increase the overall quality. It allows the authors to write what they want and it allows the news wiki to critize the content as much as they can.
In theory a news wiki can be realized with a different technology. For example in a normal forum, in a social network or with aggregated RSS feeds, but a handcurated wiki is the best technology available. It is transparent because all the edits are logged and it allows that many users can edit at the same time.
In contrast the content itself can be published in a normal single user blog. That means, each author has it's own blog and he can use his own layout. He has nobody to ask if he can write or upload a paper, because it's his own blog.
UnNews project
Let us define more precise what the UnNews project is about. From a birds eye perspective it is a discussion about a playlist. The playlist contains URLs which are referencing to content. What the wiki has to answer is, if a certain URL in the playlist is important or not, and if the quality is high enough or not. In the literature this discussion is called a peer review. Because it is done by a group of experts in a confrontation mode. That means, not all users have the same opinion but they must find one judgment.
UnNews can is grouped around a playlist which contains URLs from a timespan which goes back to one month. The question is which of the content should be replayed in the wiki and which not. If a link stays in the wiki, the public will click on it. Sure, the public can read the content even it's not mentioned in the wiki but then the URL is not in the charts. A chart is a ranking, or a quality judgment and all the papers / articles would like to become part of the charts.
Enterprise social wiki
A while ago it was asked if it's possible to use a wiki engine for building a social network, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Tv0e6rrdb0h0tisx Sure it's possible. A commercial example is the confluence enterprise wiki which is used for building intranet social networks. From a technical perspective the confluence wiki provides similar features like a normal wiki. The difference has to do with how the software is used.
It is important to define what a social wiki is exactly. The most important feature is, that the users have the ability to post URLs. Posting a link is from a technical perspective not that hard. It is similar to a short text of information which fits into 100 chars. But this makes the difference between a project like Wikipedia and a social wiki. WIkipedia is a project for building content in the wiki. The idea is to fill the database with articles, pictures and categories. In contrast a social wiki is similar to a news website a curated playlist of URLs which are referencing to content outside of the wiki.
How the workflow of posting a link is organized depends on the software. There are endless ways in doing so. The reason why social wiki are easier to use than a content storing wiki is because the amount of time which has to be invested is smaller. A desired behavior of a user of a social wiki is very simple: He has to copy and place some funny links which he founds while browsing in the internet and the other user have to comment if the URLs to the cat photo is really cute or not.
The task of posting a link can be seen as entertainment, and that is the reason why social wikis are loved by the users. In contrast, the desired behavior of a user in a content wiki is quite different. Here, the idea is that the user isn't posting links but has to write articles with the wiki syntax. Creating an article or uploading an image to wiki system is long duration task. It will take days up to week and it can't be done in the background. That is the reason why content wiki are hated by the users.
Social intranets
Let us define what exactly a social intranet wiki is. From a technical perspective the same software is used like in the WIkipedia project which is called media wiki. What is different is, that the guidelines for using the mediawiki installation are different. In Wikipedia and other content wiki the users are asked to create content. The wished behavior is, that the user creates an article which is at least 20kb long, the article is written like an academic paper, contains sections, tables and images. Other users should improve the article and this results into a knowledge base.
The surprising fact is, that such a user guideline doesn't result into a social intranet but it will result into a content wiki. A social intranet has a different user guideline. Here the rule is, that the user should post URLs to existing content and categorize the URLs into groups like funny, NSFW, cars, games. The user isn't asked to create content, but he should copy and paste the URL to existing content outside the Wiki. If the users are acting according to this guideline, this results into a social wiki. That means, the wiki will become populated by lots of URLs to different subjects and then the user will discuss about the URLs.
The difference between a content wiki and a social wiki can't be made by the software. In both cases the normal mediawiki system is used. The difference is made by the guidelines which are defining what the correct user behavior is and what not:
rules for a content wiki: the user should create academic articles which containing of sections, tables and images. A typical article is 20kb long and the user has to invest at least a day for writing it.
rules for a social wiki: the user should post URLs to existing content. The URLs should be categorized and only fresh links are allowed. It's not allowed to post the same link again. The amount of work for doing so is around 10 seconds, and if the user likes he can comment the URLs posted from others.
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