I suppose you've probably seen it, but since it's fairly new, it's worth mentioning since it could help with your presentation. Geoff Mulgan, Omar Salem, and Tom Steinberg discuss Wikipedia in Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential. Some good thoughts there on the open source development process which they see (and I agree) as represented in Wikipedia. It's a good read :)

Wow that's a good report no I haven't seen it yet, thanks so much for the link!

I'm very excited that someone is doing a presentation on my favorite subject, Wikis. I hope that I will be able to help you.

Some questions that seem worth asking about your proposal (and, indeed, any proposal) is what discourse you see your work fitting into. I wrote an article about wikis using Habermas and talking about consensus. I did another one on building communities with wikis; there I talked more about collaboration and the "peer review process" of wikis.

I'd be happy to share these articles with you if you'd like to read them. Just let me know where to email them. (You can email me here.)

Perhaps this is the better question. Why? well, though wikipedia is the most largest public wiki-based project that I know of, it is not the first, and its success will depend somewhat on what you mean by 'success'.

Slashdot has a nice history of the nupedia project, and a bit of history of the gnu-pedia, so i'm not sure that it is really a new idea.

It is not clear to me that there is a new mode of collaboration, i mean wikis have been around for quite some time. the way people use them reminds me very significantly of what has went on in newspaper rooms for ages and in other collaborative writing projects likely long before I noted any similarities.

so I guess... I would like to know just why you think this is to be new, or perhaps to address the broader historical traditions of collaborative writing and collaborative knowledge work in which wikipedia has arisen. It might be interesting to find out what is the same, before you outline the 'differences', because without an established point of comparison, you can't really claim difference.

Jeremy Hunsinger will respond to this presentation.

Thanks Buridan,

How's wiki different from slashdots:

(1) lower entry barrier - to contribute you don't have to be a specialist in any field, also english is not the only language as there're multi-lingual-wikis running on their own

(2) Neutral Point of View - people are valued for being opinionated in slashdot but definitely not in wiki

(3) Possible impacts in relatively conservative countries: What we see in Chinese wiki-community is fascinating - wiki has become an important learning tools for them given the objective principles and the participations of Chinese worldwide which helps foster a more balanced view on facts-reporting in China. There are currently more than 27K article in Chinese wiki right now

The 'success' of wiki refers to the extent of folk-contributions, peer-review, scale of the project, and how far-reaching it is - not just for the English-speaking community, but also in some developing areas given their motto - make knowledge free and available in every household.

Does this make sense? :)
Yeah i'll look up the historical evolution of wikis or Nu-pedia please feel free to drop me any leads, great suggestion!