are added to talk pages, and if so whether they then ‘flow’ into the main-page.  I know I park links on talk pages, sometimes because I’m not qualified to assess them, sometimes because I’m busy, sometimes because although it’s a good source of information (e.g. a repository) I don’t have a direct link to relevant information, etc.  This is about collaborative information seeking.  That study would be relatively easy – track link inserts on the talk page, and then see if the link is moved into the article space.  In fact, even the suggestion of new subheadings, etc. on the talk page is a way of thinking about the sorts of epistemically salient distinctions we should be making between types of information on the article page – some of which may be new, some of which could involve restructuring already present information. Subsequently, I have also thought about other ways to support such collaborative information seeking on the talk page – would a chat function beyond the current wiki markup be useful? How could we facilitate the meaningful sharing of results?  Should talk pages have a ‘useful resources’ section, or ‘queries you might like to try’?  Some of this could be automatic given, for example at a very basic level, we know when pages “link in”, a suggestion might be made to “link out” too. So, here are some preliminary notes on some related wiki-research: Information seeking in wiki Some work has been done on research in this area. * Suggests semantically related links [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Consus_-_Advanced_content_suggestion_for_Wikipedia]1

Footnotes

  1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Consus_-_Advanced_content_suggestion_for_Wikipedia 2

  2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Using_information_sources_to_drive_contributions_to_Wikipedia

  3. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Information_Seeking_and_Use

  4. http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/List_of_research_areas 2

  5. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/April#Time_evolution_of_Wikipedia_discussions

  6. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/June#Dynamics_of_edit_wars

  7. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_role_of_IBIS_in_Wikimedia

  8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_studies_of_Wikipedia

  9. http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=Behind+the+Article%3A+Recognizing+Dialog+Acts+in+Wikipedia+Talk+Pages&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp

  10. http://dl.acm.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/citation.cfm?id=1150061