Wiki update (one week of wiki mania)

[nibot]

I suppose I should write a little notebook entry about the Wiki project, as in any good experiment one should keep notes.

I would have absolutely no recollection of when I actually installed the Wiki software had I not mentioned it to myself in the nibot_lab notebook. I installed MoinMoin Wiki on my CSUA account on May 11, but didn't do much with it for a day or two. I added a few pages corresponding to pictures I had taken, and mentioned the project here on May 12. AlexStorer (probablevacancy) and KevinLin (eigenvalue) started work on the Mathematics and Cognitive Science entries. In one of the first occurrances of WikiMagic, Alex started a ColorStory entry, I mentioned it here, and Kenny easwaran really fleshed it out.

Yesterday I announced the Wiki on the UC Berkeley livejournal community, and it immediately received a huge burst of traffic. However, only one person added themself to the Wiki during that time, BinaGhanaat. One existing Wikipedia-fan asked "why bother?" in the context of the Berkeley Wiki. I have yet to reply; I'm often quite struck with surprise and lack of understanding when others question the utility of something I see as having astounding levels of inherent coolness. (It is all about conveying that astounding level of inherent coolness to others...)

Alex seems to have been the most successful at recruiting WikiFans, such as NathanSpindel, (natan) and DavidWallace (metamouse).

The First Cool Result of the Wiki was definitely discovering these fine folks, who seem to be quite interesting and fun.

Today I announced the Wiki to my house (bringing XiangweiLeow to the wiki) and, in particular, mentioned it to JennyJoReinhart, who immediately set about creating all kinds of fun things, including a particularly awesome page for Dwinelle Hall. Check it out.

Pursuing the GeoWiki interest, I created a clickable map of campus that links to the relevant Wiki entries.

Kenny added a GourmetGhetto page, linked to the Districts page, and he listed CafeDeLaPaz, which I took the liberty of populating with the text from a recent blog entry.

I'm mentally sorting out the relationships between blogs and wikis and newsgroups and other such phenomena. Already I feel like every web page should have an "edit" or a "comment" button at the bottom, and the supernifty way of seeing the edit history of the page (check out this example). Blogs are very good about feeding us chronological content as it's updated, but they're blunt objects when it comes to searching by topic rather than by date. Searching my livejournal for past entries is a quite frustrating experience -- sometimes I can remember a phrase I used and then use Google to find the entry (yes, I want Google to index this), but othertimes I have to go searching around the time I think I made the entry (usually good to +/- a month). The "memories" function in Livejournal exists so that you can categorize your entries according to topic, but it has some severe limitations (such as in communities where only the moderator can add to the memories list[?]). I think that a "wiki" serves quite a good role in linking to content that was originally developed in a blog context, and since anyone can edit the wiki, it's like you have an army of individuals who are seeking content to categorize. Much better than doing it all yourself.

Kuro5hin (aka K5) is not a blog, but it is similar to one. People write stories and submit them. People see the stories that have been submitted, and vote on them. High quality stories get promoted to sections like "Science," "Politics," etc; and from there they can ultimately be promoted to Kuro5hin's front page. Kuro5hin generally has very high quality content, but again it suffers from the fact that the organisation is primarily chronological (or should I say, depositional). There was an experiment in which a Wiki was created (Ko4ting) to organise the content of K5, and I think the results are splendid. Take a look, for instance, at the Classic Stories Wiki entry, or directory by topic. Immediately this brought to my attention some stories of interest to me. I think that the Berkeley Wiki can have a similar relationship to the UC Berkeley community on Livejournal (and other online manifestations). We can have pages to answer the FAQ's, like "What's a Spring Admit to do?" etc.

MoinMoin (the software I am using) is very extensible, and lots of modules have already been developed that experiment with the Wiki-Blog relation. A little bit of content aggregation could do very cool things for us. A very handy resource is the WikiFeatures wiki, which does a very nice job of presenting many atoms of bleeding edge WikiTechnology.

Incidentally, I chose MoinMoin pretty arbitrarily. I saw that (1) I liked the feel of some Wikis that were using it, and (2) it is written in Python. For a rather random decision, it's turned out to be a very good one, as MoinMoin seems quite well crafted. I would have installed MediaWiki (which powers the WikiPedia) except that it is written in PHP, which I loathe.

I created a mailing list for more structured discussion of the Wiki and plans for its future and organisation. You can subscribe by sending a message containing the body text "subscribe wiki" to majordomo@splorg.org.

Some things to address:

1. hierarchical organisation would be really nice! I feel like the WikiEngine should be at he level of the server itself, serving up .wiki files in a WikiWay.

2. diane says that editing the wiki is "too indimidating". how can we encourage people to add to the wiki, no matter how seemingly trivial their contribution?

3. Why doesn't LiveJournal allow the use of "Structured Text" or WikiSyntax? Structured Text is a kind of nice idea in a the-simplest-possible-way-that-could-ever-work way of turning an ASCII text file into a pretty HTML+CSS document.

4. I want this Wiki to be fully geo-tagged so that its pages can be found via search-by-location.

5. We need a new icon to replace the "Moin, Moin!" character. Also, if any CSS wizards would like to play with stylesheets.. please do!

Well, I forget what else I was going to say (if anything), so I'll leave it at that. So far I'm very pleased with the success of the Wiki. (-: After one week, we have 124 pages (although some/many of those may be the help system, etc) and eleven registered People. Already I want to make Wikis for my work, U of Rochester, and Lunds Universitet.

Comments

[natan.livejournal.com]

Alex didn't recruit me, I came across it by your livejournal. :)

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's cool. I was starting to wonder, "Is Alex really good at recruiting, or are CogSci majors naturally attracted to Wikis?" (-: Anyways, glad to have you onboard.

[ragnus.livejournal.com]

I'll try to contribute something tomorrow after my finals.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

great! (-: