User talk:Ravi

From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki

Hi Ravi.

Thanks for stopping by The Psychology Wiki and inviting us over. We are always willing to collaborate with others and to help spread psychological knowledge. I think there is some important work to be done rationalising the number of wikis, and sorting out branding, specialisation etc so that we can all live side by side. Already I can see that your particular take on organising your material is different form ours, and obviously you are a more specialist outfit.

All our material is published under an open access license and you are welcome to take from us what you need.

Our experience to date has been that copied material is then cannabilised and used for our own purposes and it doesnt become possible to keep updating it - its more of a placeholder and starting off point. So only rarely will an article be copied and serve its purpose without revision.

We would like your permission to garner relevent articles from you, Are you under an open access license? Our social psychology area needs expert attention to organise it and we would be really grateful if you and your coworkers could help improve the structure.It would be good for you to get acquainted with our set up and you may find you can import the structure back to your site

A couple of words about wikia. They are the new company set up by the people who run Wikipedia and there is a lot of technical overlap which is useful. The potential size of our site is such that we estimate it will eventually need over 50 computers to run it. We already have over 12000 pages and 40MB of material. This could only be funded through an advertising model, but to maintain our academic independence we are not involved nor profit from the financial side of things.

You are most welcome to bring your site over but I appreciate its your baby and its hard to hand them over.But the thing I have learnt is that the boundaries around areas of study are not very rigid and it is useful to have a lot of contextual links. With developments in genetics and neuroscience coming on stream, impacting on social behaviour etc you will need a lot of supporting info and we have done a lot of work gathering this together. How many pages do you have up? How long have you been going?What "market" are you aiming at?

Nice talking to you. I'll copy this across to my email to make sure you get it. Lets keep the dialogue going, cos Im sure good things can come out of this.

Cheers Lifeartist

Hi Ravi

I have uploaded a new page called Other Wikis which details the Psychology Wiki at present.

I would still love for you guys to merge with us in some way, maybe in the future, because there is a critical number of contributors required to make any Wiki project work. See this article: Will Wikis Work?

I think that because we are a larger site, you may get the impression that a merger might be more like being 'eaten' by the psychology wiki. I can understand this, as you've clearly put lots of effort in here. There are several things that are better about your Wiki than ours though:

• You have a much better domain name - www.PsychWiki.com compared to psychology.wikia.com
• You have a better funding model, for your size (we need the Google ads because of our ambitions for growth & content size)
• You have social psychology experts! (I am really bad at social Psychology, being better at Neuro type stuff)

Why don't we continue seperately for another few months, and see how we are doing later on. Perhaps we could merge on our first birthday? January 2007? Any merger would be more of a 'marriage' than an 'eating'.

Good luck with the project, I'll continue to copy over Social Psy subjects relevant to Wikiediting. I wonder if Groupthink type stuff is relevant? Mostly Zen

Removing article

Thats ok Ravi, no problem at all. The articles that we have copied from Wikipedia to the Psychology wiki are purely intended as placeholder articles, we are intending to completely re-write them as and when we attract contributors who are interested in the subject. There is no intention at all to keep the data synchronised with Wikipedia, as this would just make us an inferior clone of their content.

Maybe I should make this more clear on our wiki, as our WP content does look as though we're just trying for a copy. It will take quite a while to get all of this stuff re-written to a good academic standard, but we just got two new and enthusiastic contributors (1 undergrad and 1 retired academic) who are volunteering to write stuff for different areas.

Pllleeeeeeeeaaaaaase come and be our administrators for our social psychology articles. We really need people as expert as you! I shall shamelessly beg you until you tell me off for being annoying :)

I've got to go chat to our new people, if we write anything new on Social topics, we will of course always copy it to your wiki. Have a look at this article I've written on how to make Wiki's successful: Will my Wiki Work?. Ooops, its based on the article I showed you earlier, but its been added to by several other contributors, and has 3 other articles on improving wikis linked to it.

Tom

• Mostly Zen 13:38, 25 July 2006 (EDT)

Question about wiki

Hi Ravi, I don't know if you got my email, but I've been trying to ask you or Doug a question, with no luck so far... Z@ch 14:58, 8 October 2006 (EDT)