Philosophical Ownership & Open Collaboration

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

Atriplex L. - saltbushOccasionally, I get inquiries if it is possible to create or modify a page on the UBC Wiki so it is only editable or viewable by an invited group of people. The UBC Wiki is an open platform with no easy way to restrict the editing of specific pages.  This open approach drives a philosophical view that no articles in the root of the wiki belong to any specific owner; anyone can really edit anything and they should be encourage to do so.  However, we’ve created a couple of different spaces on the wiki that imply a soft ownership of pages: while anyone can still edit these pages, the idea is that pages in these spaces do belong to someone and outside editing should kept to a minimum.  This is more of a philosophical than a structural ownership but I think this idea will be important if the wiki user base continues to grow.

If a user does create a page where they have an implied soft ownership (such as an assignment page in the Course space) and if they are concerned about someone else editing this page, then there a couple of options to help them manage it:  First, they can add the any pages to their watchlist and then update their account settings to have the UBC Wiki send them an email anytime a page on their watchlist gets edited.  This process will help call attention to any changes being made to their content.  They can then easily rollback all changes made by the last person to edit the article by simply going to the page history and clicking on the rollback link. This will remove all consecutive edits by the most recent contributor.

In an early 2004 post on using wikis, Matt Barton addressed this issue:

How do wikis protect an author’s work? Answer: They don’t. A good preface on every wiki page would be, “Abandon all authority all ye who enter here…wikis are protected not by code, or by law, but rather by the participation of an active wiki community. If you are proud of your entry, you will feel compelled to see what’s up if you receive a notification that the entry has been changed, and “roll it back” if it’s obvious the page was vandalized or rendered less intelligent.”

Wikis are fundamentally about open collaboration. The advantage in this sort of platform is that knowledge sharing is truly community based – anyone can make the wiki a better place.

While the UBC Wiki’s namespaces imply a soft ownership of content, it is certainly possible that it might not be the right tool for all projects. In this case, I would encourage users to look at the other tools offered at UBC Blogs: a group can be a great place for private online dialogue and a multi-user blog allows collaboration while limiting access to only those who need it. However, for community collaboration and open knowledge sharing, I think the wiki is unsurpassed as a tool as it inherently maximizes these benefits while minimizing the risks.

Image: Public domain image from USDA Plants Database

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Wiki Seeding

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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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Wiki Drop-In Support Sessions

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

Have questions on wiki mark-up, organizing your content, embedding media, or any other topic? I’ll be offering drop-in support sessions for the UBC Wiki. In my mind, these will be sessions where I am able to give one on-one help or answer specific questions regarding the UBC Wiki.

The next session will be on Thursday, August 26th, from 1 to 3pm at the Fraser River Room in the CTLT Tag offices in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

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UBC Wiki Support Group Created

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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.

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Using the UBC Wiki as a Content Management System

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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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Intro to the UBC Wiki Screencast

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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.

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Wiki Roadtrip: Davis

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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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Consolidating the Crops: Revisiting the Main space

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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.

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Learning by Doing, Training by Tinkering

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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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Converting Documents into Wiki Pages

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Will (WikiAdmin)

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 read. Most of the internal page organization can be easily accomplished through the use of formatting and Wiki Markup. However, a problem that I’ve noticed is that a lot of users do not write their content directly in the UBC Wiki; instead they most likely use a word processor to draft and format their text and then copy and paste that text into the wiki. Unfortunately, word processor formatting does not often transfer well into MediaWiki. Thus, the user has to take additional time to reformat their content on the wiki. Often, though, they just leave their content as is, which can look pretty bad and be hard to parse.

I wanted to quickly point out a couple of tools make getting content from a document into wiki page a bit smoother. The first is an extension for Open Office, the free, open-source word processor program which is a pretty great alternative to MS Word. The Sun Wiki Publisher extension allows a person to type up a document in Open Office just as they would normally, and then save it in a MediaWiki format. All formatting, such as links, bullet points, and headers, is automatically converted to Wiki Markup. In my basic testing, this extension works really well and can handle even moderately complex tables.

I have yet to find anything that works as well for Microsoft Word. The easiest strategy seems to be to save the document as an HTML file and then to copy and past the HTML into an online Wiki Syntax converter and then copy and paste that output into the wiki. Novak recently recommended this HTML to Wiki converter and it works well, especially if you are using HTML directly from a website (which is how this UBC Wiki page was created). Unfortunately, when converting from Word to HTML to Wiki Mark-Up, the process is not quite as smooth and some reformatting or tweaking of the Wiki Markup seems to be necessary. Still, its better than having to create a table from scratch or insert a ton of links into a list.

I’ve created a couple of Help pages on these topics: Converting Documents to Wiki Syntax and Converting HTML to Wiki Syntax.

Update:: Brian points out in the comments saving a Word document into HTML and then converting it doesn’t work all that well. I agree and I’ll keep looking for better solution.

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