Author | 662 unique contributors |
---|---|
Genre | Collaborative fiction, Hypertext fiction, Electronic literature |
Publisher | Penguin Books and De Montfort University |
Publication date | 2007 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Wiki |
Website | amillionpenguins.com (archived on 3 February 2007) |
A Million Penguins was an experimental collaborative fiction framed as a "wiki-novel". It was launched in 2007 by Penguin Books in collaboration with Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, inspired by the success of Wikipedia.
As the first collaborative web fiction to be sponsored by a large mainstream publisher, the project received a lot of attention. [1] [2] The site quickly became a target for vandalism, and no cohesive plot or narrative developed. [3]
The story ran on an installation of MediaWiki and could be contributed to by any site visitor, although a team of students at the university moderated contributions, in an attempt to keep the project on-track. [3] Despite having 1,476 registered users, only a small portion contributed to editing the site, and of that small portion just two users contributed to over 25% of the edits. [3] Due to the site receiving more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed "reading windows" [4] that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going.
On March 7, 2007, the Penguin Books UK blog announced that the project had come to an end. [5] [6]
Although some commentators expressing interest in seeing how the project took shape, including the potential educational benefits [7] others described its progress as "predictably horrible". [8] The final report on the project notes that the project neither produced a cohesive narrative or a community: "The contributors did not form a community, rather they spontaneously organised themselves into a diverse, riotous assembly." [3]
Subsequent scholarship on collaborative fiction frequently references the project, though often as a warning. Paul Rower writes that the "result was deemed a failure because of the many un-integrated elements", [9] while Anne Cong-Huyen calls it "ambitious but incomprehensible". [10] Writing for the Institute for the Future of the Book, Ben Vershbow questioned why Penguin would choose the wiki as a form: "they chose the form that is probably most resistant to these new social forms of creativity". [2] Those who reference the project positively note that the project turned into something that was more of a social experiment, rather than one of literature, since the contributions were from a diverse mix of people. [3]
In April 2008, the Institute of Creative Technologies of De Montfort University published A Million Penguins Research Report, which concluded: "We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was, ground-breaking and exciting." [3]
Frederik George Pohl Jr. was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia. Containing a record of experience on running wikis, it is intended for "discussion about wiki philosophy, wiki culture, instructions and observations."
A wiki is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them."
Open-source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com. Although the term was not actually used in the body text of Leonard's article, the headline encapsulated a collaboration between users of the internet technology blog Slashdot and a writer for Jane's Intelligence Review. The writer, Johan J. Ingles-le Nobel, had solicited feedback on a story about cyberterrorism from Slashdot readers, and then re-wrote his story based on that feedback and compensated the Slashdot writers whose information and words he used.
Collaborative editing is the process of multiple people editing a same document simultaneously. This technique may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially improve the quality of documents and increase productivity.
A collaborative real-time editor is a type of collaborative software or web application which enables real-time collaborative editing, simultaneous editing, or live editing of the same digital document, computer file or cloud-stored data – such as an online spreadsheet, word processing document, database or presentation – at the same time by different users on different computers or mobile devices, with automatic and nearly instantaneous merging of their edits.
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.
Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.
Kate Pullinger is a Canadian novelist and author of digital fiction, and a professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, England.
Chris Joseph is British/Canadian multimedia writer and artist who also creates work under the name 'babel'. He was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and now lives in Berlin.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.
WikiTrust was a software product, available as a Firefox Plugin, which aimed to assist editors in detecting vandalism and dubious edits by highlighting the "untrustworthy" text with a yellow or orange background. As of September 2017, the server is offline, but the code is still available for download.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Alice Campion is the pseudonym of a group of Australian writers who have published two collaborative novels, The Painted Sky, and The Shifting Light. The group promotes collaborative fiction writing through workshops, public lectures, and the internet.
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