[OWW-SC] Private wikis?

[Austin Che]

    Here's my semi-long perspective on private wikis. First, we've
    been discussing the same issues for a while:
    http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare_talk:Software/Subwikis
    http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Private_Pages 
    but let me rehash my current thoughts on this.
    
    It seems from the feedback so far that the private wikis are
    clearly useful to everyone who uses them. So what are the issues?

    "The cost/time issue": We can pretty easily calculate how much a
    private wiki costs in terms of server cost. We could see how much
    space and network usage a subwiki uses, use what we're paying for
    the server, and calculate a per KB disk and network usage cost (my
    quick estimates for an average subwiki is around a dollar a
    month). In terms of time, I don't spend much time worrying about
    the subwikis.

    "People can go elsewhere for private wiki": Before I gave myself a
    private subwiki, I didn't keep my lab notes on the wiki. But now I
    put most of my scientific thinking on the wiki. It certainly
    wasn't because I didn't know how to setup my own wiki or didn't
    have access to a server. If it was that much trouble for me to
    maintain my own wiki, I'm sure very few people would set up a wiki
    at all. Now I think there we can safely say that having as much
    science be digital as possible can only be beneficial down the
    road. We can guess what will happen down the line as wikis become
    easy but as of right now, getting a OWW subwiki is easier than
    anything else I know about.
    
    "People shouldn't be afraid of people editing their stuff": I
    agree. If that's why people are requesting private wikis, we need
    to work on educating people better and perhaps get them used to
    the public wiki first like Maureen's experience.
    
    "There's no need for private wikis as everything should be
    public": Unfortunately, there are things which should remain
    private. The OWW board has a private wiki. One could argue that
    the operation of the board of OpenWetWare should be open and
    transparent to set an example. There are many practical concerns
    and honestly I don't think we can argue that all information
    should always be public.

    "OpenWetWare's mission is to promote the open sharing of
    information": I think the only way the primary open site can be
    sustained is by providing useful tools to the scientists who use
    the site. The primary asset of OpenWetWare (and perhaps the only
    one) is the community of people who use it and rely on it (anyone
    could just create an OWW2 with our database dump). By providing
    tools such as private wikis that encourage people to come back to
    the site can only help with the site's future. 
    
    "People will put stuff on the private wiki that they would have
    put on the public wiki": Note that if we believe that anyone can
    make their own private wiki site easily, then we aren't making the
    problem any worse with our own hosted private wikis. My guess is
    that without private wikis, most of the information would have
    stayed on individuals' computers and that moving them to a private
    wiki on OWW's servers is only one step away from being on the
    public wiki. However, I don't think this is a problem specific to
    private wikis but a general problem of creating incentives for
    people to contribute to the public wiki (regardless of whether
    there's a private wiki). If we solve the problem of people WANTING
    to contribute to the public wiki (reputation system? each edit
    gets entered into a raffle for an ipod?), then we solve the
    underlying problem and don't have to worry about the private
    wikis.
    
    So what do I think? I think everyone (individuals, groups, labs)
    should be allowed to have a private wiki. We work out the cost and
    agree on a policy for payment. Payment could be in terms of edits
    to the public wiki, service to the community, or
    money. OpenWetWare is in a better position to provide private
    wikis for scientists than other services and I think we should
    take advantage of that to help build the community. We need to
    create incentives for people to want to edit the public site
    regardless of us hosting private wikis as private wikis will
    always exist somewhere out there. Thus, I see very little reason
    for us to not host private wikis.
    
-- 
Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899