I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Andy Coverdale
As one of a team of student interns with the Visual Learning Lab at the University of Nottingham, I recently set up a wiki in Wetpaint for our collaborative research work. Due to the confidentiality of some our data the site is private, but you may be interested in our experiences with it.
Overall, Wetpaint was very easy to set up and to invite members – we were up and running in no time. However the group have raised a number of user issues: Whilst page updates are recorded, one cannot revert back to specific stages, the ‘Recent Site Activity’ drop-down menu (a useful feature) frequently breaks down, and there is no page autosave. I use Google Sites for my own wiki (http://sites.google.com/site/andycoverdale/) and personally, I would recommend it over Wetpaint, but I’d be interested in how you get on.
An additional problem with collaborative writing and editing of texts (that is not specific to Wetpaint) is the need to reliably identify contributions. We started using different colour fonts, but in Wetpaint at least, only 3 or 4 colours are readable.
By the way, Wetpaint do remove ads on request if you are using the site for educational purposes (it may take them a week or so) so you may not need to upgrade.
Jill Walker Rettberg
Thanks for the tips, Andy – I’ve sent Wetpaint an email to ask about removing ads. I’ve since discovered that our university does offer pre-built hosted wikis, which would be just as good – but I think I’ll go with Wetpaint this semester, both because I already made students sign up for it and because I suspect that not having to learn the slightly bizarre formatting codes of the Meidawiki system might be helpful in getting students active.
Of course Google Docs might have worked as well – or Google Sites, I haven’t looked at their Wiki features.
Jill Walker Rettberg
Hm. Wetpaint discontinued their ad-free education program. We might simply switch to Google Docs – everyone editing our annotated bibliography worked beautifully there.