[Pmwiki-users] Wiki best practices, good implementations, good sites

[Chris Lott]

Lloyd Budd wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> Your questions may be a little open ended.  In the spirit of 
> "collaborative web technologies, it is good netiquette  
> for you to demonstrate your research.  I think it would be best if you 
> let us know what you have already found out in answer to those 
> questions?  Then we can complement the information.

Fair enough. I'll post more direct content of the presentation after I 
complete it :) But immediately, my problem is finding examples of 
successful Wiki implementations, and some in the arena of education and 
the humanities would be useful.

I basically have three potential audiences in mind:

1. Educators who want to facilitate collaborative work in the classroom

2. Researchers who want to create collaborative knowledge spaces (I will 
be talking about RSS, Furl, del.icio.us, and weblogging in general as well)

3. Staff and developers who are looking for ways to enhance their 
internal collaboration and find new ways for dealing with project 
management and document collaboration.

4. With time and involvement, what can a good wiki look like?

5. Less common uses, such as Matt Haughey's personal 
site/resume/portfolio (http://haughey.com/matt/home?pagename=home) just 
to expand their mind a bit.

I have found a whole lot of dead and moribund sites. The good examples I 
have so far of where I think Wikis are working in a way that is 
comprehensible to an audience who will be brand new to it are:

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/
OpenGuides http://openguides.org/
WikiTravel http://www.wikitravel.org
MeatBall http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki
EmacsWiki http://www.emacswiki.org/

I haven't found good (i.e. active, live, current) examples that address 
#1 and #3 above. I suspect that #3 are mostly behind firewalls and on 
intranets. I am trying to "sell" and educate here :)

My general outline is (excuse the formatting):

What is a wiki?
	Live, browser (form) based, open/community editing
	Simple structured markup
	Automagic linking

Where did wikis come from?
	Ward Cunningham - the WikiWikiWeb

What do wikis "Bring to the Table"
	Community/collaborative maintenance
	Ease of participation without tech tools
	Not limited to web designers, developers, geeks
	Holistic growth of the knowledge space
	Focus on content, built-in revision control
	Improved cycle for updates
	Opportunity for refactoring
	Not limited by top-down structure of the tool/CMS
	Built-in Search, site map, recent updates
	Natural team communication
	Potential for documentation and other output "builds"
	integrated change management, RSS feeds, notifications
	
Where are they being used
	(See above)

Wiki challenges and responses
	Wiki Death and Decay
		Need active project "champions" (editors)
		Must build community involvement
	Potential for defacement, though temporary
		Need editors, monitors, and integrated use in team 				workflow
	Yet another tool to use, site to check syndrome
		Text formatting is easy, don't need to know much
	Bypassed in favor of email
		Promote advantages above, archiving, searching, history, 		etc.
	Ownership issues within group spaces
		It's a different model-- the team owns content, not 				individuals
	But it's chaos!
		Only at first glance, some areas can be "turned off",
		It's hierarchical and organic!
	Limited/difficult to "design"
		different philosophy focused on content
	Integration of images
		plugins and variations in wiki software

Does that help?

c
-- 
Chris Lott (chris at chrislott.org)
http://www.chrislott.org/

"May my silences become more accurate" --Theodore Roethke