Author Stewart Mader makes a convincing case in his wikipatterns book that wikis are a powerful collaboration tool. I have dabbled briefly with wikis. I’ve come to rely more and more on wikipedia to understand technical terms quickly. I just don’t practice collaboration with them.

This may change if a grant that we currently have pending with the NSF is approved. We proposed a collaboration with New Mexico scientists at the Jornada Experimental Range to develop a photogrammetric system for UAV images. Collaboration management was a mandated section of the proposal and we included a slew of tools that we currently use — revision control, emails, issue tracking — as well as the MediaWiki software in a list of tools we intend to use to facilitate managing the work related to the collaboration.

The more tools like Wikis become part of our scientific practice, the more I wondered how anybody got things done in the past. How did scientists communicate before emails? I know letters were written. I wrote a few of them back in graduate school. But it seems so strange now to think of writing a letter to someone instead of sending an email.