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Wiki What? Wiki Why? Wiki How? July 15, 2007 A Special Session presentation to: Founder: Gregory Kohs 489 Lake George Circle ● West Chester, PA 19382 302-463-1354 (cell) ● [email protected]
Wiki What? Wiki Why? Wiki How?July 15, 2007
A Special Session presentation to:
Founder: Gregory Kohs
489 Lake George Circle ● West Chester, PA 19382
302-463-1354 (cell) ● [email protected]
WIKI WHAT?
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A Show of Hands
Everyone raise your hando Now, lower your hand if you’ve ever personally installed and set-up your own wiki website.o Next, lower your hand if you’ve ever created from scratch a page or article using someone else’s wiki
site.o Lower your hand if you’ve ever corrected a spelling error or otherwise copyedited a page or article on
a wiki.o And, lower your hand if you’ve ever visited and read a page or article on a wiki website.
o The following 4-minute video is for those people who either just lowered their hand, or who still have their hand in the air.
o Everyone else, I think can still benefit from this simple refresher course that tells us – in plain English – why a wiki is cool.
Used with permission from:
Lee LeFever, the founder of CommonCraft.com
Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY
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Who Invented the Wiki?
Howard “Ward” Cunningham is a computer programmer who started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham in March of 1995.
You know I thought about patenting it 11 years ago, and I was a small company and I figured, well, if I got a patent then I'd have to go out and sell people on the idea that anyone could edit. That just sounded like something that no one would want to pay money for.
…I also thought, well, if it is more widely used, it'll just be a calling card and a way for people to know me. It certainly worked in that regard.
The word ‘wiki’ since 2004
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Wikipedia : Wiki :: Aspirin : Acetylsalicylic acid
For many people, the word “wiki” practically means the same thing as “Wikipedia” – the enormous community-edited encyclopedia that is structured upon the amazingly robust Mediawiki open-source software.
While it is huge and has had a profound impact on information and even culture, Wikipedia is merely one particular wiki, implemented with one type of wiki software.
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Overview_FAQ#How_big_is_Wikipedia.3F
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English Wikipedia – it’s Number Four!
It came as a surprise to me, too. The English-language Wikipedia is only the fourth largest wiki on the Internet, in terms of article count.
Qweki (a crude, advertising-heavy listing of websites), Richdex (an intermittently working listing of websites), and AboutUs (a glossy bot- and human-generated listing of websites) all outpace Wikipedia in terms of sheer number of articles.
But Wikipedia busts them wide open if measuring:
Users Administrators Edits Images Page views (most importantly?)
Source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikis
Qw eki
R ichdex
AboutU s
Englis h Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
French Wikipedia
Chainki
Lyric Wiki
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And Wikipedia is nowhere close to finished
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACP
WIKI WHY?
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AACP’s place on the web
Once the AACP created a website, its “nearest neighbors” aligned themselves in a complex web of interrelated links.
Within a wiki, the very same thing takes place.
Schools are linked to corporations, which are linked to pharmaceutical formulas, which are linked to research scientists, who are linked to students, who are linked again to schools, etc.
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Why would my institution build a wiki?
Lessons & Assignments
Student Activities
Policy & Government
Study Groups
Scholarships & Financial aid
Wikipedia has proven that no open,
community-edited reference is ever 100% reliable, nor immune to vandalism or partisan
squabbles.
However, it has proven that nearly 2 million
encyclopedic articles can be written in less than
seven years.
Your school may not “need” more than 1,000 articles to constitute a very useful reference.
Course Curriculum
Student Bios
Faculty Bios
Who will write all this stuff?
Can we trust the students (or faculty) to
do it well?
Will a wiki work?
In and Around Town
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Who writes the wiki?
People Patterns90-9-1 Theory
BarnRaising
Champion
IdentityMatters
Invitation...
Look Before You Leap
Maintainer
MySpace
OverviewPages
Social Tagging
StartingPoints
Viral
Welcoming
Wiki Charter
WikiGnome
WikiZenMaster
Source: http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
A WikiGnome is a person who performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality.
WikiGnomes are important to the success of a wiki because their edits increase the value of everyone else's content, such as:
• Cosmetic editing to keep the wiki from being overrun with "weeds" (typos, misspellings, poorly structured sentences and paragraphs)
• Add or fix links to make sure relevant content is navigable within the wiki • Improve the flow and clarity of content improve the readability of the page • Setting an example for other users of how and when to use the wiki
WIKI HOW?
…with Dr. Steve Weppner of Eckerd College, of course!
