My Dream of a Folklore Wiki/Database/Ontology

A pet project I have on one of my many back burners is a wiki-based folklore database. My dissertation research involved creating an ontological database using the program Protege. My dream is to expand this project, and to make it collaborative. Of course, this is a massive undertaking. Where's my grant money?!

As a student teacher I taught a class that incorporated a web-based collaborative-writing tool that allowed the students to critique and read each other's writing. It was a great tool for getting the class to interact with one another and there was a marked improvement in the computer communication skills of the students. However, the project did not really present a way for the students to collaborate on folklore-specific projects. For example, they did not post the stories they collected for fieldwork practice.

Lydia Fish at Buffalo has a wiki-based project for her folklore class, and it makes for interesting reading. I am a big fan of these sorts of projects, especially the presentation of student-researched topics. More often than not this material just gets shoved into a filing cabinet,or even worse, the professor incorporates the material into their own projects. Here the material is shared with the world at large - which is better for all involved. The website can be accessed here.

Interesting things collected by her students: pregnancy beliefs, folklore of restaurants, skateboarding folklore.