Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

Welcome to WikiSym 2009, the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration! WikiSym 2009 is taking place in beautiful Orlando, Florida, on the grounds of Disneyworld, at Disney's convention center. The event comprises three days of leading-edge wiki research and practice. The proceedings of WikiSym 2009 that you are looking at represent the permanent record of the event. The overall program of WikiSym 2009 continues the success of prior years. At the event as well as in the proceedings you'll find not only the traditional technical papers, but also tutorials, workshops, panels, posters, and demos; a record of the growing breadth and depth of interest in wikis and related technologies. We are excited to note that Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research will be opening the symposium with a talk on "the inner lives of text" and that Brion Vibber of the Wikimedia Foundation will be closing the symposium with a talk on "community performance optimization". The two keynotes are only two examples of the exciting talks and events that will happen at WikiSym 2009. Open collaboration is a paradigm shift facilitated by technology that continues to increase in impact. Reflecting this, we had an outstanding set of submitted research papers, demonstrating the field's growing significance and depth. Forty-five research papers were submitted this year, and sixteen were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 36%. All papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers, and some as many as five. Accepted papers come from nine countries (Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, and the USA). One thing that is special about WikiSym is its use of open space. Not only does WikiSym offer the traditional content you just read about. Far beyond static talks, WikiSym is a community that comes together at the symposium in a collaborative setting called "open space". Open space (technology) is a meeting facilitation technique that ensures that everyone gets a voice and can bring the topics they are interested in to bear and meet other likeminded people. To support this (and other) ends, we have set up the WikiSym 2009 event wiki, as usual, and you can find it at: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009 The event wiki will provide additional content to what is presented in this proceedings and will paint a much more lively picture of the event that is WikiSym 2009. You may have noticed the name change of the symposium: WikiSym is still WikiSym, but the long form now is "the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration". The WikiSym 2009 symposium committee as well as the overall WikiSym steering committee arrived at this name change after lengthy discussions. It is to signify our increasing scope, as you may have noticed when looking at the program or the proceedings' table of contents. Open collaboration stands for anything that involves open, not centrally controlled collaboration. It is typically egalitarian, meritocratic, and self-organizing.