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About the wiki

"Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding ... subjectivity not just out of one another's discourse but also out of their own." [3] [4] (NYC Magazine July 1 2007 article on how Wikipedia managed to evolve not only an encyclopedia with NPOV but major news coverage with NPOV and faster than the news)]. NPOV is neutral-point-of-view. A Wiki is a collaboratively-edited website, anyone can contribute and share: Edit any page by pressing Edit at the top of the page. With community participation, editing one another's entries, what can emerge is NPOV on a discipline, its methods, its successes, its open problems. MediaWikis like ours, InterSciWiki, are now common that are run by scientific communities, like ours, a complexity science wiki at http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki. Its goal is to share information on how to do better interdisciplinary science, to contribute to a worldwide collaborative research community, and to serve the education mission of interdisciplinary and complexity approaches to the sciences, and to the human sciences in particular.

The Complexity Research Community wiki at InterSciWiki was instituted as an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students who organized a biweekly videoconference on Human Sciences and Complexity aka Human Complex Systems, featuring speakers -- faculty and students -- from the University of California campuses and from complexity institutes and program such as Santa Fe, Michigan, and elsewhere. Soon we learned how to retain our speakers' talks and the discussion as streaming videos which we posted on our web site. Seminars consisting of students and faculty at the respective faculties popped up, and undergraduates were invited to join them. UCLA, with its minor in Human Complex Systems, instituted an undergraduate class for participants. At the end of a second successful year we discovered that students wanted more about what was behind these talks: what are the range of methods used in these studies, how might some of the specific approaches be mobilized in approaching a thesis topic, in collecting data that is suitable for analysis, in designing and doing simulations.

How do these approaches fit together in ways that allow borrowing across disciplines? We saw faculty knitting together issues about causal inference and artifical intelligence that promised to bring more integration and coherence to AI in computer science and to causal modeling in economics and econometrics. We saw graduate students integrating GIS, Google Earth mapping and data spreadsheets, network and political analysis of the operations of governance merged with those of leadership and governance in clans, the mixing of ethnography/anthropology with political science and networks. The list goes on an on.  iscussion of the possibility of the wiki project began at UCSD with a meeting of 5 faculty and 9 graduate students in May, 2007. Three weeks later the wiki was launched. Two weeks later it began to have a structure, to mobilize its mission, and to grow a nucleus, at that time of a dozen user/contributors. Instead of funky and anonymous login names, each user contributions under their professional name, each writes their own pages and has them rewritten by others. We have begun to discuss how to get the full value out of our speaker series, who to invite, where to draw from, to explicate methods, even to teach large chunks of courses or seminars off the site, where text, static and dynamic visuals, formulae.