WIKISYM

Welcome to the proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym for short), the first international conference dedicated to wiki research and practice!Paper SelectionWe received 20 paper submissions, of which we selected ten to be presented at the symposium. Of these ten papers, eight are research papers, and two are practitioner reports. Despite the high acceptance rate of 50% we are very pleased with the quality of papers presented here; we attribute the high quality to the fact that before WikiSym 2005 there was no place for focused wiki research.For a research paper to be accepted, it had to meet strong academic standards of publication. Research papers advance the state of the art by describing substantiated new research or novel technical results or by reporting on significant experience or experimentation. Papers were reviewed both with respect to conceptual quality and clarity of presentation.Proceedings ReferenceResearch papers went through a rigorous review process; each paper received at least three reviews, many received more reviews. Both research papers and practitioner reports can be referenced as having being published in the "proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis" (ISBN: 1-59593-111-2). This is the title under which the papers can be found in the ACM digital library, where they are archived.Wiki VocabularyYou are holding in your hands the first exemplar of scientific literature on wikis. To that end, we suggested to authors to use a common vocabulary. We believe that the word "wiki" is now a common word in the English (and other) languages and therefore should be spelled with lowercaps, unless it is part of a specific name, like Ward's Wiki, more formally known as the Portland Pattern Repository.Looking ForwardFrom the submissions we reviewed, it is clear that we are a diverse community. We received papers about wiki technology, like implementation, interoperability, and new forms of access; we received papers about the social processes around wikis; we received papers about novel and interesting uses of wikis in education. You will get an idea of this diversity when you read the papers presented in these proceedings.We also believe that this diversity represents a major challenge for the community in general and WikiSym in particular and encourage you to share your thoughts on this topic with us, either at the symposium or through email. We would like to hear your thoughts and encourage you to help build WikiSym into a flourishing community of wiki researchers and practitioners!