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Non-technical issues for museum staff members
Leading the project of an internal Wiki at the National Museums in Berlin I detected a series of non-technical issues which prevent especially scholars from collaboration. Scholars seem to be role models for other museum staff members, too, and therefore affect the museum community as well.
From my experience I'd specify the following issues:
- Authority of autorship
- Conception of completeness
- Efforts of the expert
... which all result in the
- Merits of monographs.
The internal Wiki is intended to provide a Wikipedia style environment in the daily workspace of museum staff members including curators, and should help them to adapt more and more collaborative skills. But the active participation of scholars seems not to develop easily. I assume, that similar issues exist considering Wikimedia projects.
Thanks a lot for the comments.
What I wasn't clear enough about is the fact, that in my view professional scholars are part of collaborative communities already. But those communities share a much larger part of the timeline: first we absorb the knowledge of the generations of preceding scholars during our studies, then we enrich, change or discard the items in the store of knowledge with discussions and publications becoming a part of the source for the coming generations of scholars. That makes the authority of autorship and the conception of completeness less important on a large scale.
How can we help scholars to engage in those much faster collaborative communities like the Wikimedia projects?
Adrianne describes processes in Wikis which are known in the social environment of scholars as well, but these are usually not visible from outside like in Wikis.
How can we show the benefits of transparency not only for the "consumer" of the results but for the participants in knowledge production as well?
Could projects like the WikiProject Museums in Wikipedia, the MuseumsWiki (e.g. as a node for other collaborative communities/projects), or ideas like a CoReWIKI help scholars to feel more comfortable in long-term collaborative projects?
See also: Wikimedia@MW2010 (Model projects)
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ThT
One of the questions a wiki raises is how much the participants care about who posts the idea and how much they care the intrinsic value of the idea. In a sense, a wiki-community could become a very meritocratic society, based on logic and argumentation, if they participants so chose. Posts could be analyzed not be who posted them ("authority"), but by their relevance and helpfulness. I think that people develop a cultural cache on a wiki for being particular kind of thinkers or writers, leading to a kind of expertise not found outside the wiki. On the other hand, a society can develop the rejects all expertise and logic. Chaos can reign and it can become a kind of mob rule, with emotional persuasion running rampant. You can actually see both of these at work on Wikipedia in different places.
Yes indeed - all of these issues you've raised as potential reasons for reticence of using an internal-wiki exist and are magnified on a public wiki. Furthermore, Wikipedia adds a few other problems including:
One of the interesting problem that apparently arose with the creation of the US State department's private wiki "Diplopedia" was that people at the beginning were concerned that people would start to slander their boss or their organisation. To which the reply came: yes, there are many ways to commit career suicide already, simply giving people access to a wiki doesn't mean that they'll somehow lose all professionalism. :-)
However, with all of these points, I would contend that they are not "Wikipedia problems" but issues of people being unsure of a new mode of communication. For example, in reply to the problem of "concepts of completeness", the reply "perfect is the enemy of good" is a quote from Voltaire and is not exclusive to a Wiki-way of doing things.
Equally, not being able to rely on your credentials and authority of your position is not exclusive to Wikipedia - academics and knowledge professionals constantly submit themselves to blind peer-review in a deliberate attempt to make their ideas stand apart or fall on their own merits.