Engaging (Past) Participants: The Case of radicalprintshops.org

Baines persuasively describes her experiment to mobilize the participatory potential of wikis through the instigation of the open access wiki, radicalprintshops.org. While wikis are mostly utilized as a means for closed groups in academic research to manage research data Baines conceives it as a method for research. The chapter explicates how wikis can act as an important part of empirical research in two ways: first, radicalprintshops.org is an attempt to balance the nature of the research process and its final form with the collectivist politics and practices of the research subjects; second, the aspiration is to engender participants’ interest and generate new empirical material to draw on. Without losing sight of the potential and actual value for the principled and instrumental aims of the wiki, Baines discusses the developing challenges and contradictions the experiment raises.