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WikisForCollaborativePaperWriting

Wikis are fundamentally systems for collaboratively writing documents. Therefore, writing a paper together with a group of coauthors is perhaps the most natural use for wiki; however, it isn't very common yet.

Rather than emailing versions of the paper back and forth, wiki allows you to edit a single document as if you and your coauthors were all standing around a computer together.

This eliminates the headaches of keeping track of the latest revision and of keeping track of old copies of the document (because the wiki does that for you).

Clearly, this would usually be done on a private site accessible only to the authors.

It should be noted that there are LaTeX extensions to many popular wiki software packages.


In contrast, keeping a book or a paper open to the public could have advantages... though perhaps not even as co-authors, but editors.

JD Lasica has prepared his book Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television on a wiki for group editing. The author describes his aim:

"Goal: In the spirit of open media and participatory journalism, I'd like to use this wiki to publish drafts of each chapter in the book. I hope you'll participate in this effort by contributing feedback, edits, criticism, corrections, and additional anecdotes, either through the comments field below or by sending me email. Feel free to be as detailed as you like or to insert comments or questions. After all, you're the editor. (And remember, this is for a book manuscript, not a finished online document.) If you make a couple of helpful edits, I'll mention your name in the book's Acknowledgments (and buy you a drink next time we meet up)." (accessed: 10 May 04)


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