Trillium Report
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2011) |
 |
This article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links. (August 2011) |
|
|
The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for web content. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (August 2011) |
The Trillium Report is a German medical magazine dealing with innovation management in medicine that was established in 1997. the editor-in-chief is Georg Hoffmann (University of Munich and University of Virginia). Its special focus is on developments in diagnostic and preventive strategies in biomedical and automation technologies. The journal uses supervised collaborative writing.
Contents |
[edit] Collaborative writing
The Trillium Report has been using Wiki technology for collaborative writing since 2005. The user interface looks very much like that of Wikipedia, but the mechanisms of knowledge management are different in two respects:
- Access is limited to invited authors, and the process is supervised by a team of editors.
- An automatic messaging system makes sure that at least two authors get informed about any changes being made to Trillium articles.
The algorithm of the messaging system makes sure that each change to an article prompts other authors to make more changes. In its simplest form, an e-mail is sent to the previous author if his or her name is different from the current author. If more than two authors contribute to an article, this algorithm introduces an effective stochastic element called "principle of floating couples": The more authors contribute to a given article in a given period of time, the higher is the probability that a message sent out at time t0, reaches an author, who is no longer the previous author at time t1, when he or her makes the next change to the article.
[edit] Scientific aspects
The scientific challenge of the "Triki" approach is to optimize the number of authors in a way that the number of e-mails is kept high enough to fuel the process, but not that high that Triki messages might be perceived as spam. Obviously the "ideal" number is not a constant but rather depends on behavioural and cultural features of the respective group of authors. For example, the ideal number is inversely correlated with the number of daily SPAM e-mails in a given country or professional group.
[edit] Technology
The underlying program "Triki" (Trillium Wiki) has been written in pHP and JavaScript using MySQL as a database. Programming started mid 2005, i.e. approximately at the same time when American news papers such as the Los Angeles Times started collaborative editing as well.
