Monthly Archives: July 2010

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 … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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Converting Documents into Wiki Pages

In addition to an overall organizational structure, a wiki also should have some organization within its individual pages. The use of headings, subheadings, bold, bullet points, and the like make an individual article or page easier to scan, navigate, and … Continue reading

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Quick Thoughts About Purpose & Community

I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of the UBC Wiki. Wikipedia has a pretty narrowly defined purpose: it is an encyclopedia. Only content that fits with their mission of being an encyclopedia is allowed to remain.  Inherit in … Continue reading

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Wayfinding on the Wiki

Wayfinding, as Wikipedia succinctly summarizes it, refers to the user experience of orientation and choosing a path within the built environment and to the set of architectural and/or design elements that aid in that orientation. While signage is an important … Continue reading

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General Thoughts on Correcting the Course: Conundrum

Here are some preliminary thoughts on correcting what I have begun calling the Course: Conundrum (the creation of course specific pages in the main space of the wiki instead of into the Course namespace). In general, I really like the … Continue reading

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Categorization Manipulation

One of the main tools to organize a wiki is categories. Mark Choate, in his book Professional Wikis, describes adding categories to a wiki article as a parallel to adding tags to a blog article or a photo: tags and … Continue reading

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More on the Wiki Gardening Project

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 … Continue reading

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