Tying up ends: an evaluation and reflection.

It has been about a month since my internship officially ended, but my efforts with the ACMS reference wiki are not over. Staying true to the spirit of wikis, I have decided to continue to contribute in whatever capacity I can. This will likely mean that I will have long dry spells when school work is bearing down on me later this year, but even a few small contributions here and there can add up. I still have some topics I would like to address relating to my internship focus, including more on education, media, and the affiliated government agencies. But I would also like to do more on the side of knowledge creation in Mongolia. Two of my favorite topics that I researched were the poets Renchinii Choinom and Danzan Ravjaa. I would also like to learn more about the functions of prophecy within the knowledge society; there is a book sitting on my desk that keeps calling out for me to read it called Time, Causality and Prophecy in the Mongolian Cultural Region by Rebecca Empsom. I'll also be finishing up Travels of an Alchemist (长春真人西游记) soon too, which is the record of the travels of the Daoist monk Chang Chun as he makes his way to an audience with Chinggis Khan as he is engaged in the Western Campaign.

The one thing that is most clear to me from this internship is that wikis need active members. During the internship I was more or less the only active contributor. This would lead me to wonder about the future of the project and contributed to a feeling of isolation in my efforts. Certainly one of the biggest difficulties for me in this project was that I was working from my study in an anonymous apartment in Madison, Wisconsin. It is hard to feel like you are part of something when you are thousands of miles from the organization you are working for, but it is even harder when your contact with everyone else is minimal. My weekly Skype meetings with Brian definitely helped on this count. I did end up in contact with other people, such as Krystina Matusiak at UW-Milwaukee, however, those contacts were fleeting and sporadic. In the end, I can't really blame anyone for not wanting to spend a prime part of their summer emailing with a guy working on an internship. Often though, the communal aspect of wiki work, an integral part, was seriously lacking during the internship.

It is important to point out that I am not bitter on this point at all, since I realized going in that the project was new and would involve a lot of learning by trying things out. Also, since the end of my internship the wiki has picked up a number of contributors that have expanded the article base greatly. Hopefully I will be able to tap into some of the energy from their contributions and they can help shape mine as I participate in the future.

As I have noted in other posts, it can be difficult dealing with a relatively new technology. I should qualify this since wikis have been around for at least a decade. What I mean is that actually applying the technology has not entirely trickled down to regular people. Sure, almost everyone has heard of Wikipedia and maybe even contributed to it. There is even a significant community of very knowledgeable people out there. And, as many people have touted, wikis are relatively user friendly. But in reality, they do require specialized knowledge in order to make quality documents and it can be difficult to find information on how to go about that. I did find a good textbook that helped me out called Wiki: Web Collaboration, but I found very little worthwhile and unbiased information on how they are being used as reference tools. This is somewhat surprising since the largest wiki in the world is used for reference and "library 2.0" appears to be all the rage in the LIS field right now. People, however, seem more concerned with the authority of Wikipedia (more authoritative than I ever would have thought by the way) and discussing the potential for 2.0 technologies rather than actually putting them to use. There is definitely some uncertainty about where these technologies are going to go. Something that I think information agencies will have to think more about with 2.0 applications is the fact that you have to get people invested enough, not only to do writing and research, but also to learn how to use the application.

In an international venue, such as the one for my internship, this is even more tricky. I recall the experience of some classmates of mine some months back who were working on an outreach project with Kyrgyzstani librarians to help them research 2.0 applications they could use. My classmates cited as their number one frustration with the project the difficulty in getting the librarians in Kyrgyzstan to contribute to the wiki thye set up. Ultimately, it is important to recognize that distance does still impact wiki projects despite the space crunching magic of the Internet. On top of that, language and culture have a huge role to play as well. There were a number of Mongolians I sent emails to either asking for information or to suggest that they contribute to the wiki on an area of their specialization. Very little came of this because: 1) emails are all too easy to ignore, 2) especially if they are in English and you speak Mongolian and 3) why in the world would they waste their time on me and a wiki they have never heard of?

It all comes back to a need for community, which is hard to build, and a degree of altruism on behalf of the contributors.

I would sum up what I learned and my overall experience as follows:

Objectives:

To make information on the Mongolian Knowledge Society more accessible.
I do think that I made worthwhile progress on this issue and that my efforts could be used to significantly help others. I didn't make as much progress as I expected, but then, in retrospect, my expectations were not realistic. Researching, writing, formatting and embedding links for an effective wiki reference article takes a fair amount of time. There can be a lot of detail work that takes longer than some people might expect. Zotero turned out to be a great time saving tool here.

To learn more about digital technology.
I definitely learned a lot about digital technology. As one might expect, most of what I learned was about how to write for Mediawiki. But I would venture a guess that what might be even more important for me to learn from this experience is that actually getting technology to be used in a meaningful way can be tricky. I am fairly certain that Monreference will one day come into its own and be used regularly by Central Asia scholars, but getting there will take a large group effort. Eventually it will be a useful time saving tool, and until then it will need people to feed it their time and energies.

To learn more about Mongolia.
I definitely did that. I ended up with much more information on many topics than I knew what to do with. This internship did reconfirm something I already knew as well about studying Mongolia: not only can answers be hard to find, but you can also easily find conflicting "authoritative" answers. Even something that should be easy to find a solid number for can end up ambiguous. Take, for instance, the population of Mongolia. According to the CIA World Factbook Mongolia's population is 2,996,081. However, a hard to find, but probably more accurate document, the 2007 Mongolian Statistical Yearbook, puts the number at a significantly lower 2,635,200.

And in conclusion . . .

If I had a magic time-swapping machine I would have changed my summer so that I took the class Organization of Information before doing this internship. The theory I learned in the class probably would have helped me to better piece together my entries. Also, some of the technical things we learned might have been helpful. Oh well, here's to wishes and time-swap machines in the future.

As I write this the Monreference wiki is down. I have no idea why. That is just one of the idiosyncrasies of working on an internet project associated with Mongolia, sometimes you are no longer able to communicate. Minor hiccups such as these aside, I think that my experience with ACMS has been a good one. Anyone interested in learning more Mongolia and doing something unique for an internship would be well served to consider them.