Welcome to WikiSym 2008

Welcome to the 4th International Symposium on Wikis, Porto, Portugal. The Faculty of Engineering from University of Porto (FEUP) is honoured to host on its campus this year’s WikiSym - the premier conference devoted to research and practice on wikis.

Once again, WikiSym will gather researchers, professionals, writers, scholars and users to share knowledge and experiences on many topics related to wikis and wiki philosophy, ranging from wiki linguistics to graphic visualization in wikis, and from the vast Wikipedia to tiny location-based wikis.

A large and diverse program committee exhaustively reviewed more than fifty technical papers, from which the best high quality ones were selected. During a meeting at Porto, the final structure of the conference program was defined, and later consolidated with workshops, panels, tutorials, posters and demos. For the first time, there will be a Doctoral Space, for young researchers, and the WikiFest, devoted for practitioners. More than twenty hours of OpenSpace will be available for you to fill in.

After the conference, WikiWalk will take the symposium out into the streetscape, as investigators and users walk along the city of Porto, joined by citizens, journalists, and other leaders. Casual and spontaneous discussions will allow the users to share their experiences, concerns and challenges with wiki experts and researchers. Such a diverse conference program reflects the nature of wikis, the tremendous vitality of the wiki spirit, and its ever-widening community

Ademar Aguiar and Mark Bernstein
Conference and Program Chairs

Commitees

Keynotes

Research Papers

WikiFest

Panels

Wikis empower users to collaborate with each other using prose. Users imprint data structures and processes onto wiki pages using social and technical conventions. Application wikis enhance wiki engines with lightweight programming features that aid in making data structures and processes explicit. Using these features, end-users can program a wiki to better support them in their collaborative processes and integrate their work into the overall IT infrastructure. Application wikis make database access and business process integration easy from within the wiki while maintaining the wiki-style of collaborative work. The panelists of this panel, together with the audience and the moderator, will review existing work and explore future research directions in application wikis.

Panelists: Ludovic Dubost, Stewart Nickolas, and Marc Laporte (replacing Peter Thoeny)

Moderator: Dirk Riehle

DoctoralSpace

Workshops

A growing number of projects seek to build upon the collective intelligence of Internet users, looking for more dynamic, open and creative approaches to content creation and knowledge sharing. To this end, many projects have chosen the wiki, and it is therefore the subject of much research interest, particularly Wikipedia, from varied disciplines. The array of approaches to studying wikis is a source of wealth but also a possible source of confusion:

This workshop intends to provide an opportunity to explore these questions by researchers and practitioners willing to participate in a "brainstorming research meeting".

The goal of this workshop is to explore how wikis and the wiki way might impact, and be influenced by, multilingual collaboration and language work. It aims to bring together people with an interest in multilingual collaboration, as well as specialists such as translators and terminologists, and authors who hope to find ways for their work to reach other language communities.

The use of wikis in software engineering dates back to 1995, when Ward Cunningham created the first ever wiki as a platform for discussing patterns and software development efforts. The simplicity and effectiveness of wikis as a medium for collaborative authoring has lead to their vast popularity across many domains.