2. Does anyone have any references (articles, chapters, etc.) about collaborative reference projects? More specifically about the possibilities they pose for "democratization" (buzzword) of knowledge/language?
you'll want to read Will Emigh's paper on wikipedia for this year's HICSS conference (with Susan Herring); available at http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/wiki.pdf there are some very interesting notations about democratization in the paper; I think you'll enjoy it. there will eventually be a quicktime version of a related talk Susan gave this fall, to be made available here: http://isdc.stderr.org/content/ just as soon as it gets ripped off of the tape... [There's an RSS feed available there; I encourage people to subscribe to it.]
ps - If there's something I'm missing here about the difference between "collaborative," "open content," and "wiki" (aside from the fact that the latter is branded), I'd also be grateful for terminological clarification!
my take is that those three terms all have different and varied implications. but... * you can have collaboration without "open content". * you can have open content without it being wiki-fied. * you can have collab. without it being a wiki. * you can have wiki without either collaboration or open content [there are plenty of closed wikis...] or maybe you mean to say something i'm not getting? my brain is a little foggy today... maybe dot-danah will have something to say. --elijah