Tag Archives: coop

UBC Wiki

Wiki Seeding

In an earlier post, I listed some lessons that helped the Davis Wiki become widely used. One of these lessons that stood out is the idea that wikis need content to breed content. The founders of the Davis Wiki created 500 “seed” articles to get their wiki off the ground and to give potential editors the idea of the purpose of the Davis Wiki. In a comment to my post, Novak asked that if we were to to create “seed” articles, “what would be the right strategy to distribute the effort and engage different user groups, academic vs staff vs students, and across various disciplines and fields?” and I wanted to follow up with a few thoughts about this question and about seed articles in general.

First, though, it should be noted that the UBC Wiki is hardly a barren place. There are currently 5,642 pages in the UBC Wiki (this number includes all created pages, such as categories, redirects, and talk pages). Since the MediaWiki installation and the current UBC Wiki went live in 2009, 1,291 people have registered for an account and 46 people have edited the UBC Wiki within the last week, which isn’t bad for August when things are slow at an university. The UBC Wiki is being used.

However, if the UBC Wiki can be seen as having two grand purposes, that of a collaborative work space and that of an information repository, then much of the content created to date fits mostly in the former category. The UBC Wiki is being used, but it’s not being used to it’s full potential. The Wiki is clearly seen as a tool for individuals and groups; however, I’m not sure if it’s seen as a tool for the entire university.

I think the seed articles that we create should exemplify how the UBC Wiki is a university wide tool by capturing or compiling information that does not exist in a centralized, easily up-datable space. For example, this information might be informal student knowledge, such as the real differences between the Place Vanier and Totem Park residences. As a Google search reveals, this information is something students are looking but they would have to read several forums and blog postings to get a somewhat clear picture. The UBC Wiki is a great place to compile that info – students can easily updated and discuss the topic as it changes over time. Likewise, it’s hard to get a clear picture of all that UBC is doing on the topic of climate change research. The UBC Wiki could centralize that knowledge by pointing to all the different projects, departments, people, or whatever that are currently engaged on a specific topic. As new projects get started or as people change research approaches, there wouldn’t be any procedural roadblocks for updating that info; anyone could edit that page.

As Novak points out, the university community is not a homogeneous crowd and seed articles might be different depending on what their focus is; however, I don’t think they will be all that different based on the audience. Instructors might look at an article called Bars and Pubs on Campus and undergrad students might read an article on UBC research efforts into terrestrial climate change. Thus, the distribution of seed articles should be thought more in terms of topics rather than audiences; I’m not sure what would be the best strategy for creating the proper topic distribution other than to say it is very important to have a mix of articles from all different aspects of a university: from the cheapest places for lunch to what genetic research is being done here.

The most important part of seed articles, though, is simply planting the idea in users’ minds of what the wiki could be.

Image: Public domain picture from USDA Plants Database

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MediaWiki, Wiki News

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.

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UBC Wiki

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.

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MediaWiki

Learning by Doing, Training by Tinkering

I installed a local version of MediaWiki on my laptop today. MediaWiki is the software platform on which the UBC Wiki runs and I wanted to go through this process for a couple of different reasons: First, I hope to be able to do some experimentation with the UBC Wiki without having to bother the development guys who keep it running and healthy. Second, I really want to get a better grasp of how MediaWiki works behind the scenes. Afterall, while knowing how to drive a car is often all the knowledge you need, having a basic understanding of how the engine works can be the difference between a good day and a really expensive one.

At any rate, installing MediaWiki was much easier than expected. MediaWiki is a web application and to get it to run on a laptop, you need to have a program that can act as a localized web server, such as MAMP. After installing MAMP, I downloaded the latest version of MediaWiki (the 1.16 beta that has the new and sleek vector skin). I saved the MediaWiki files in the MAMP htdocs folders and then I just followed the basic steps outlined here.

It was quick and painless process and already I’ve begun to get a better idea of how the UBC Wiki is configured and what sort of effort it would take to add additional extensions. As I gain a further understanding of how the engine behind the UBC Wiki works, I hope to gain a clearer picture of it’s potential and how to keep it better organized. And, just as my folks never wanted me to tinker under the hood of their car, its good to have my own copy on which I can learn.

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