The Irony of Netwiki

Along with one of my collaborators (Peter Mucha of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), I help run netwiki, a site dedicated to social networks. The site has both private and public sections. The private section contains group data and discussions and has worked beautifully. The public section, on the other hand, has struggled to get some sort of critical mass to become a useful place for the networks community. Even with the presence of blockers, the spam problem has become increasingly huge and it finally got to the point where server space at UNC was becoming an issue and we had to disable the ability for the public to make changes on the site. This has been temporarily disabled for a couple of days until we incorporate one of those tools where a human has to type in some word to distinguish it from spam.

OK, so we just changed things so the public can't make changes on our networks wiki. The story doesn't end there, as I got the following e-mail from Peter earlier today:

After nearly 18 months in relative obscurity, NetWiki made the INSNA mailing this morning... There have been over 600 page views since this email went out, and of course no public editing capability! (INSNA is the International Network for Social Network Analysis.)

The relevant portion of the e-mail that was sent out to their mailing list (which goes to a rather large number of people and which I am going to join, now that I think about it) reads as follows:

Found a new network analysis site today, courtesty of Wikipedia's "Social Network" article:

Netwiki, run out of Chapel Hill, by what appear to be mathematicians: http://netwiki.amath.unc.edu/Main/HomePage


I'm the one who added the link to our page on the wikipedia entry for exactly this purpose. It took a while, but I'm glad we're finally getting an influx of people via that mechanism.

And, yes, we are indeed mathematicians. (I simply love the phrasing, "by what appear to be mathematicians.")