I added a Wiki Gardening page to the UBC Wiki. The new page has a detailed project overview and some of the specific tasks on which I will be focusing.
The purpose of creating this page is to provide some documentation to wiki users about any changes that might effect them. For instance, I can see adding a link to the page as part of an explanation on why I might have moved a specific article.
The UBC Wiki is organized into a couple of different namespaces. Two of the major ones are the root space (found at wiki.ubc.ca) and the Course space (wiki.ubc.ca/Course). The purpose of these spaces is to help organize the wiki by differentiating between the purposes of pages at a high level. The root level space is an open area that can be used for any academic or UBC-related activities and is generally thought to be a good place for general knowledge articles about UBC (the wikipedia of UBC if you will). In contrast, the Course space is the area where pages regarding specific course based activity or content should go. If a faculty member wishes to have a class wiki and their students edit and create content based around that class, rather than having random and vaguely named pages in the main part of wiki, it would make to sense have them instead organized into a course structure.
And here is the conundrum: organizing course material into the Course space is slightly more complex than just adding content to the wiki and people are tending not to do it. Indeed, much of the content currently being added to the wiki is related to specific courses and this content does not make sense when viewed in isolation from the other course content.
One of the major tasks of this wiki gardening project is to understand how best to organize course content, but even more importantly, is how to best create processes, structures, or systems to have the wiki self organize. Rather than have a wiki administrator force top down organization (i.e. someone like me reviewing and moving/renaming pages so they follow prescribed wiki space nomenclature), a goal of the wiki gardening project is to figure out a way to create a framework so users can easily organize their own content and make the wiki more useful.
Specifically, over the next week or two, I’ll be looking at how to make it easy for people to add course material in a way that is organized and makes sense both to people in the class (for example, how do I create a student page that is related to an assignment page) and to general users (for example, why is the page on apples discussing a particular horticulture assignment).
Specific things I want to focus on include:
Welcome to the new Wiki Gardener blog. A wiki gardener is someone who helps a wiki grow and thrive. As Sam Aparicio on the Social Text site explains:
One of the great things about a wiki is the way structure emerges organically. Rather than imposing rigid “top down” hierarchies, taxonomies, and ontologies a wiki enables people to organize ideas and conversations in ways that make sense to them. The structure emerges and over time, and is constantly evolving. Like any organic process, however, it can be messy. There will be duplicate pages with slightly similar names, links to nonexistent pages, pages that aren’t linked to, and so on. So it’s helpful to do a little “gardening”–pruning, tending, and cleaning up the wiki as it grows. The objective of good gardening is to lend the wiki some shape, but not kill it with rigid rules or taxonomies.
The purpose of this blog is to document the ongoing projects, discussions, thoughts, and ideas for helping the UBC Wiki become a useful and valuable tool.
Most gardening in the real world is not done as a solitary project. Instead, gardening can be done with friends, colleagues, groups, or communities. Likewise, a successful Wiki is a community project. We hope you’ll help garden and a great way to do that is to drop us comments on this blog or on the WikiAdmin discussion page.
I decided that a good first place to start with the wiki gardening project was to review the help documentation. I first looked at what currently existed on the wiki and then I moved some articles over from the public domain user guide of the MediaWiki to fill in what I thought might be missing.
In order to make the help documentation more visible, I created a help category for all pages that provide information for helping users add, edit, or create content on the UBC Wiki. In doing so, I got to see my first glimpses of why weeding will be part of this project.
In general, I think some specific help tutorials need to be created for the specialized needs of the UBC Wiki (such as how do I organized my course content).