Starting from a study of the emergence of wiki communities on the internet, we describe and analyze the use of an academic wiki based on the concept of PeopleWiki [1] [2]. PeopleWiki is a specific type of wiki in which the core content of the wiki is about community members. Thus they are the main subject of the information produced, discussed and archived on the wiki. p. 1

In the first part of this paper, we start by exploring the concept of Community of Practice introduced by Lave & Wenger [3], as a process of social learning. We survey the typology of wikis as studied by Challborn & Reimann [4], Majchrzak et al. [5], Gaved et al. [6], Moshirnia [7]. Starting with some specific problems of wikis: participation [8], altruism and motivation to contribute [9] [10], we put an emphasis on information systems closely related to academic wikis: corporate wikis described by [5] and Learning Management System [11]. The use of wiki in learning [12] and the propagation of academic wiki implementation [13], its narrow ties with constructivism and collective learning [14] are discussed. We also point out the limits and failures of these experiments [7]. In the second part of this paper, this article will discuss our experience with CentraleWiki, the PeopleWiki which has been running for more than a year in our Grande Ecole in France. We review its degree of success and explain the choices made in different domains. The question of information reliability, core wiki content dealing with persons and observed use are tackled. As a conclusion we examine the effective use made of the wiki by the community and point to further developments. p. 1

Participation is the social experience of belonging to a community while reification is the translation of an experience into an object (information system, sketch, method, prototype…). The process of reification reduces the meaning conveyed by the experience, but provides a collective anchor that allows the sharing and capitalization of knowledge. This paper examines wiki as contributing to reification in the wider community of practice of a university. p. 2

In a PeopleWiki, actors of the wider academic community are not only readers and editors but they are themselves the core subject of the information brought by the wiki. So our paper is about implementing both a social networking tool and an academic wiki with pages pertaining to courses, governance of the university, student’s associations, curriculum projects and training periods. Now what we get is more than a mere mix between a Learning Management System [11] and a social networking website: some of the characteristics of our wiki match the use of a wiki in constructivist pedagogy some a more alike a corporate wiki. In short, PeopleWiki in academia could be defined as a means for the academic and alumni community to be aware of itself as a community of practice. p. 2

2. WHAT ARE WIKIS? p. 2

Scientific studies have also made some interesting observations on the limits of wikis. p. 3

- Although many think of the wiki as an egalitarian system, Felipe et al. [8] study shows that the fact that it is easy to contribute does not mean that all authors contribute with the same intensity. Calculating the level of inequality of the contributions to Wikipedia was done using the Gini coefficient. This shows that Wikipedia strive on a kernel of very active users with less than 10% of the total number of authors being responsible for more than the 90% of the total number of contributions. So growing a wiki is not in fact about making all users participate equally, but above all about recruiting and retaining core contributors. The question of “wiki gardening” is also tackled by the WikiPatterns community [webography] in which People and Adoption Patterns and AntiPatterns are discussed. p. 3

Involvement in a wiki is another a key question: what are the motivations that make users contribute to a wiki? Wagner et Prasarnphanich [9] and Kollock [10] show that in a open and free community motivations like 1/ altruism, 2/ anticipated reciprocity, 3/ one's reputation, 4/ a sense of efficacy in contributing [16] 5/ filling someone's or some group's needs and 6/ commitment one can have to the group can all play a role. These research contributions are very interesting in setting up a wiki though they do not automatically apply to a corporate wiki or to an academic wiki. In these cases, the community exists before and outside of the wiki and it strongly affects the stakes and the incentives to contribute. p. 3

3. WIKISINHIGHEREDUCATION p. 3

Rick and Guzdial [13], in their chronology of wiki adoption show how the CoWeb application - started in 1997 in Georgia Tech - turned into a pedagogical innovation and was transferred to secondary and primary education. Forte and Bruckman also highlight how the availability of free, easy-to use and reliable applications has been important in adopting wikis in education. More than individual learning, collective learning is hailed as foremost with a wiki, and Bruckman [14] shows how it is important that information systems designed to foster learning create and structure social interactions. On a wiki, reification of knowledge is a social process, as students write for other students to read and work in a process of shared editing. Other authors [17] discuss how wiki help collective work on pedagogic projects. p. 3

However, while wikis are often displayed as introducing radical changes to teaching, recent research, Moshirnia [7] challenges this claim. In effect, while the wiki open source model seems to promise a new pedagogy (based on decentralized discovery, learning and collaboration), student concern for individual grades lowers the motivation for wiki-based collaboration, and teachers end up seeking measures to ensure individual grading. What is observed by Moshirnia [7] is a centralization of wikis, as student requests and teacher concerns progressively transform an open wiki into a closed system with “explicit formatting instructions, incentives, and mandatory assignments”. While these changes may have created a more useful academic tool, they also contradict some of the basic characteristics of a wiki. Likewise, Grant [18], p10 concludes that “the social and cultural practices of collaborative working that need to accompany the use of the software in order to take advantage of the functional affordances of the tool (are) not in the students’ repertoire of shared practices. Instead, they import practices of individualised written assessment”. When this type of situation prevails, as is it often the p. 3

case, a Learning Management System (LMS) [11] can do the job better than a wiki in the field of classroom learning. p. 4

An introduction to the fundamentals of PeopleWiki being already published [2] we shall deal here with three major questions we had to tackle: core content, informality and actual use. p. 4

Core content of the wiki: people p. 4

Beside the PeopleWiki use, the uses made of the wiki are: − Students' projects, which are around 2000 man-hours are each introduced on a specific page which lists the project team and partners. − Guidebooks and how-to's to help p. 5

− Some courses make use of CentraleWiki: knowledge management, project management, sociology. The wiki helps page links to resources : course material, readings … and students are asked to subscribe to the page to be informed as new information appears − Each training period can be entered on one's personal presentation page, and each company or organization has its own page linked to that page. − Information and archives about the history and activities of students associations. − Dedicated pages allow voting to nominate the “best page of the month”. − Consideration on the decisions and governance of the university, student's charter, process for choosing degree specializations … − Laboratories, MBAs and research programs within the university and for further study in France or abroad. Of course, students interested by these programs are urged to get in touch with alumni. − Pages aimed at groups of professionals of several fields have also been introduced, but they are not very much used yet… 98% of users today are students. p. 6

References p. 6

[1] Bachelet Rémi (2008) Mettre en oeuvre un wiki académique CentraleWiki, un PeopleWiki à Centrale Lille Colloque Questions de pédagogie dans l’enseignement supérieur – Brest, juin 2008 http://rb.ec-lille.fr/l/PeopleWiki.htm p. 6

[2] Bachelet Rémi (2007) PeopleWiki: wikis as community tools Proceedings of Wikimania, Taipei (Taiwan), Poster with paper, 3-5 août 2007. http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00325678/fr p. 6

[12]Forte Andrea ; Bruckman Amy (2007) Wiki as a Toolkit for (Collaborative?) Learning In Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis. New York : ACM Press http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/ForteBruckmanPaper p. 7

[13]Rick, J. & Guzdial M. (2006) Situating CoWeb: a scholarship of application. ijcscl 1 (1), pp. 89-115 http://ijcscl.org/_preprints/volume1_issue1/stahl_hesse_1_1.pdf p. 7

[14]Bruckman, Andrea (1998) Community support for constructionist learning. Computer Supported Collaborative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 7, pp 47-86 http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/Bruckman-paper.pdf p. 7

WikiPatterns, How to grow a wiki http://www.wikipatterns.com p. 7

A list of Academic Wikis: http://universitywikinodewiki.wikia.com/wiki/University-wikis p. 7