The UBC Blogs platform has gone social; it is now supporting groups, forums, and activity tracking. On the new platform, a group for UBC Wiki Support has been created. In addition to the wiki itself, the support group is a place to discuss ideas, issues, and topics related to the wiki. The UBC Wiki support group is public and any member of the UBC community is welcome to join.
Using the UBC Wiki as a Content Management System
The new UBC eLearning site recently went live and part of its content is being managed in the UBC Wiki. For example, the source of the eLearning toolkit page is this UBC Wiki page.
The Wiki Append WordPress plug-in allows pages from any wiki running on the MediaWiki platform to be embedded into a WordPress page. As the wiki page gets updated and edited, the changes will be pushed out to the wordpress page so that it always shows a live view of the most current page.
Using the UBC Wiki as a content management system (CMS) makes sense if you have content that needs to be periodically updated by multiple people. Instead of having to wait for the appropriate web person to make the changes, content can be added or edited on the fly as it is needed. The wiki comes with built in safety features as well; the ability to rollback changes means that mistakes can easily be fixed and that content is never lost.
This screencast from the University of Calgary give a brief overview of the Wiki Append plugin.
Intro to the UBC Wiki Screencast
Here’s a screencast giving a quick tour of the UBC Wiki:
This is the first screencast that I’ve made so it’s a bit rough and I’ll be editing and tweaking it over the next few days. The final video should be featured on the homepage of the new UBC Blogs site, which will be going live later this month.
Wiki Roadtrip: Davis
Davis, California, is home to one of the largest municipal-focused wikis in the world. As of November 2009, DavisWiki.org had over 14,945 pages, 11,134 registered editors, and averaged 10,000 unique visitors daily. Not bad for a town with a population of just 65,000 people. Michael Andersen, writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab, summarizes six lessons that helped them achieve this success:
- Wikis need content to breed content
- Business information is the holy grail
- A wiki’s strengths kick in after one year
- Start with a subculture, then build out to a general audience
- Keep your content open source, no matter what
- Don’t get hung up on mimicking Wikipedia
The entire article is worth reading and most of the lessons learned by the Davis Wiki can and should be applied to the UBC Wiki. The Davis Wiki started with its founders, Philip Neustrom and friends, creating 500 seed articles – snippets about things that only exist in Davis. They also hit the streets and did a lot of promotion – such as sticking flyers in the bathrooms at the local university (I particularly like this one). I think seeding and promotion are two things that the UBC Wiki can be focusing on more.
Ultimately, though, I think a lot of the success with the Davis Wiki is due not just to their ability to just attract users to their site but also to their ability to create a community. In describing how it wasn’t just the founders who were sticking flyers in bathrooms but also the users, Neustrom explains: People don’t do that for sites they think are neat. They do it for sites they own.
Consolidating the Crops: Revisiting the Main space
The UBC Wiki, as originally described, serves multiple purposes:
- It is a course repository: The wiki provides a collaborative space for faculty and students to create and share course related content.
- It is a documentation repository: The wiki provides a collaborative space for the creation, updating, and hosting of documentation, user manuals, and the like. Using the wiki append plug-in and the wiki book creator, specific documentation could easily be syndicated and republished.
- It is an open space that anyone can use for any purpose.
- Finally, it would be a knowledge sharing repository of all things UBC. For example (again as originally described):
The genome page [on the UBC Wiki] should inventory UBC resources about Genome – topics like people, groups and departments that research genome; papers, posters and thesis published about genome etc. In the ideal scenario, UBC faculty, students and staff would update topics of their professional (and wider) interests and so make resources more presentable and easier to find.
To accommodate these multiple purposes, the UBC Wiki was divided into four public namespaces: Course, Documentation, Sandbox, and the Main space. However, as I’ve detailed in my early Course Conundrum post, users tend to not use the namespaces and just create new pages in main space. To some extent, this problem is getting better. I’ve created some expanded documentation and created wayfinding aids about the different namespaces. I’m also moving all new pages to their proper space and dropping a note to the page creator explaining what I did and pointing them to the proper help pages. Finally, I’ve been moving older pages to their proper spaces as well – as you can see I’m close to hitting the 500 page mark.
One thing that would really help users notice the organization of the wiki would be to better define the purpose of the main space:
- If the main space is intended to be a wikipedia like resource for anything and everything UBC, then this needs to be stated in clearer terms in all descriptions of the main space.
- “Best practice pages” or better examples of main space articles should be developed so users have a better idea of just what it is we are trying to create.
- Policies and guidelines should be developed as to what types of content fit into the main space (I’ve started developing some here).
- The term “main space” should go and it should be renamed with something that better conveys the space’s intended purpose, such as UBCpedia, UBC Dictionary, UBCompendium, or (my favourite) the UBCnomicon
Of course, these suggestions apply to all namespaces. However, since the main space is the most prominent part of the wiki, clarifying its purpose would help clarify the the purpose of the other areas as well.