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The General section has the philosophy of containing as much generic material as we can assemble, free of software used, free of government grants or vested interests, consortia, etc. The material may be of global interest, as well as to the Australasian region.
Why?
This wiki is aimed at improving information flow between players in the open access arena in Australia. It can do this via several mechanisms:
- Conventional websites operated by universities and other organizations are observed to change far too slowly. They are seldom worth revisiting, or if so are revisited only infrequently. (I except gateways and search engines, of course.) A wiki can be much more dynamic as end-users can change it rather than go through an ICT intermediary.
- If a community develops around the wiki, as I hope, it will become a joint effort, and thus leverage all the expertise in the community.
- Unlike a mailing list but like a bulletin board, the information contributed is not ephemeral. Thus a wiki is a good place to post changes in policies, the new great paper you just read, a useful piece of advice you just received from a publisher, etc. A mailing list remains a good place to ask a question or have a debate.
- The Wiki is not associated with any vested interest. Even if the moderator has some views and a host university, the wiki belongs to the communitty, and all can comment on anything. The information it contains is thus much more valuable than websites associated with particular interests.
- Finally, a wiki is a great place to jointly develop documentation. Wikipedia is a prime example of this, as are the user manuals for PmWiki and php, to take two examples.