Some comments on the notes[]
- "Wikis are good for description (e.g. who you are, what you like), but are not the best tool for community development. They don't automate certain tasks - are high maintenance."
They are high maintenance for one person, or a small group, but this becomes less of an issue as the community grows. Then each member can take on part of the work and work together to maintain the site. If you are looking for a static site, then maintenance is a problem. But for a living, changing wiki, the advantages are the ease of making changes and the opportunity for interested people to share in and contribute to the site.
- "Take calendars, for example. Eventful and Upcoming make it easy. Maybe you can pull calendar apps into your wiki."
Mediawiki is very flexible, and if extensions for applications like this don't exist yet, then they can be written. Wikia has a growing technical team and popular requests will go on the priority list
- "Forums are important. Is Wikia's Forum function good enough?"
Not yet. The forum is very basic - really just a way of organising pages. We have a better system in development right now (one of those popular requests I mentioned above). this will integrate full forums into all Wikia wikis.
- "Training, proposed webinar. That will take a lot of coordination. You should focus on making it easy to use online, e.g. step by step, visual."
There is a starter tutorial at Wikia:Help:Tutorial. I've had some feedback on this, and know that it needs to go further than it does. We've also been working on a set of pages at w:c:starter that can be used on any wiki. This is a set of basic help pages and others that will give wikis a start.
- "Who owns the information?"
The contributors hold the copyright to their contributions. This is licensed to the wiki under the GNU Free Documentation License. The content is available to anyone else under this license, so any time the community wants to put it elsewhere they can do so freely. We provide full database downloads to ensure it's fully available.
- "If a vandal enters incorrect or damaging information into an organization's page, are you liable?"
I am not a lawyer etc. but my understanding is that you are not responsible for anything written by other users - only for that which you write yourself. Wikia is a host of the information, and so have a duty to take down problem content when we are notified of it. As far as I know, none of this has been tested in court for wikis, but the situation is similar to that on other sites of user-generated content.
- "Info in & out. Using tools like rss and microformats, you should be able to feed into other sites (e.g. blogs), and let them feed into your site (e.g. their press releases can go directly into your news feed)."
Yes, Recent changes and New Page are available on rss or atom feed. See the links on the those pages. I'd love for us to have watchlists too, that's not been coded yet, but we do have an email notification system for watchlists that I find very useful (see your preferences)
On the comments from Tara Hunt - much of this applies to Wikia. We are open source, free, we tie in with the MediaWiki developers as well as having a growing team of our own, templates are easy to make and we are developing more standard ones for easy use.
We also offer the advantages of hosting - you don't have to look after servers or figure out why something isn't working, that's our job. And as well as the technical side we have community support for help with any issue from community arguments to fixing wikimarkup.
Jill Finlayson's comments all sound like things that can be done on wiki. Categories are a large part of the organisation of a wiki, I recomnend using them as much as possible. All the other pages can be made on a wiki, and I love the idea of a specific calendar extension to make that easier to do.
With all of this, if you need help getting the pages to do what you want them to do, just let us know.
I hope this is helpful, I'll put this page on watch for any replies -- sannse (talk) 14:09, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks[]
Thank you for such a thorough and informative response Lisa. I'll email Greg, Tara, and Jill - being techies and community developers themselves, they might be interested to know where Wikia is headed. Leo|Talk 01:15, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Audio blogs, user page protection[]
Lisa, one of the Boot Camp presenters is thinking about making her home in the siliconvalley wikia. (1) One of the things she wants to do is audio blogging. Is that doable on Wikia? (2) Is it possible for users to protect their user pages, or do they have to be admins to do that? Thanks; Leo|Talk 12:47, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
- It's possible to upload files in .ogg format, but it may be better to upload them to a free audio/video site (Angela suggested ourmedia) and then link them.
- Only admins can protect, and protecting a user page will mean the user themselves can't edit the page. However there is a workaround that uses a mock .css page, which can be edited by the user and admins only. It's a bit of a hack, and it means the user page isn't as easy to edit, but it does work. It's used here. To edit, the user changes the page here. I can help set this up if you want it.
- However, I generally recommend against protecting pages unnecessarily. Open editing works, surprisingly well. And even a user page can be improved by a passing user. All my user pages are open to edit - I get some vandalism, but I also get kind people fixing that and sometimes improving the page.
- By the way, feel free to use my talk page rather than this page if you prefer. I get notified of changes there too :) -- sannse (talk) 16:55, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Wiki community vs. multi-tool community?[]
(This is Greg from the Nonprofit BootCamp - I think what I was getting is that Wiki's are primarily about publishing and maintaining documented, somewhat static/ historical information. There *is* a community that builds up around it, and the larger it gets, the easier it is to mainatin the the documents.
But there are other tools (see Tara's reference to Drupal) that are built specifically for people to talk to each other on forums; enable personal blogs; post events (in a functioning calendar) and overlay different calendars; RSS out _and_ aggregate into the site...
I guess my first thought when I talked to you, Leo, is why recreate these tools on a Wiki when they exist - fully functional, open source and suppported - elsewhere? My first instinct - which is where I think you started - is that I think of a wiki as a place to go for documented information - I don't think of it foremost as a place to go for community-building or an ongoing discussion. (The community that maintains the information may have discussions, but for example the dissussion format is explicitly tied to particular pages - yet backgrounded to that page.)
Take the example of a directory of organizations - as far as I know, a wiki won't automated tasks like sorting all orgs alphabetically - even if someone added an org 10 minutes ago - or finding results based only on address zip code. Yes, all the functionality could be added - some of it automated, and some of it done by hand, once the community of maintainers reaches a certain size - but ultimately I'm not convinced this is entirely the right tool for community-building per se. :-(
- Hi Greg, welcome! I think you are right that there are applications out there that are great for community building, but I believe wikis are one of them. My background is Wikipedia, and one thing I learnt as a volunteer there is that a wiki is a community. If it becomes a static repository for information, then it will die. It needs to be somewhere that grows and breathes, somewhere a community comes together to build something important to them. Wikia is all about exploring and developing that side of wikis, looking at what we can do with the software that is outside the idea of a wiki as a simple editable database.
- My view is that the forums that are being added will be key to this, they are a tried and tested way of arranging conversations. I also looked further into audio blogs today, and there is an extension available for this. I need to find out more, and check with our technical guys, but it seems that it is something that exists for MediaWiki.
- On the directory... what is it that you are thinking of? There is a category system in MediaWiki, that gives an automatic, instant, alphabetised list for any set of articles. Articles can be in more than one list too. See the Central Wikia and wikia:Category:Wikia categories for an example. To use it, you just add [[category:category name]] to the article.
- Anyway, I'm obviously biased towards wikis, but at least we've got some varied viewpoints here for Leo to consider ;) -- sannse (talk) 20:06, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Thank you Greg & Lisa. You're outstanding teachers, and have taught me a lot. Wouldn't it be nice if our political debates were as civilized and edifying as yours? I think Wikia is great for much of what I want to do, but I'm always game for new toys and will play with Drupal as well. Leo|Talk 13:29, 1 September 2006 (UTC)