Mongol Studies Online Reference:About
From Mongol Studies Online Reference
The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS), in cooperation with its institutional and individual members, created this collaborative online reference guide for Inner Asian and Mongolian Studies. The guide is intended as a repository of secondary sources of information regarding books, articles, artifacts, historical events and people, culture, research projects, and other snippets of information useful for researchers to acquire an initial sense of the topography of research and information available in a particular discipline active in the region. The guide may be thought of as an online encyclopedia, almanac, and annotated bibliography merged into one centralized web-based resource.
The ACMS and its partners intend to make the development of this resource a community effort, and as such Mediawiki, which supports the well known online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is the platform for the "Mongol Studies Online Reference Guide." This technology allows decentralized and independent contributions to the reference guide through simple text based interfaces which require rudimentary training in order to utilize. This allows subject experts the ability to contribute their knowledge to the reference guide from a place and at a time that is convenient to them without the need for extensive technical training to understand arcane programming languages. This aspect of the technology is a key part of ensuring the sustained development of the reference guide because practical constraints of geography and dispersion among the academic community working on Inner Asia are reduced.
