Mediawiki Wiki as Medium

1
MediawikiWiki as Medium

• Randy Thornton
• rwthornton_at_ups.edu

2
The Wiki Way Wikis are collaborative web sites
where anyone with the proper permission can edit
the pages in place. In practice, the Wiki Way
is about building on-line knowledge-bases by a
community of contributors through collaborative
editing.
3
The Wiki Way form follows function / content is
king
4

• The original context of the web

A group of professionals in the same discipline
who already have a culture of information sharing
with well established procedures for Group
editing authoring Attribution and
credit Authority citation Peer review Levels of
publication
5
(No Transcript)
6
The basics
7
The goodies
8
More goodies
9
basic properties
hypertextual asynchronous collaborative
unstructured
10
emergent properties
Pioneers become settlers / process becomes
product Rapid change rapid response Contribut
ion the 1 to 999 ratio Stylistics and
readability Systemic bias of users geographic,
linguistic, technical Scalability is not
technical but administrative organizational
11
Wikis are textual but not fixed like print A
characteristic of every medium is that its
content is always another medium -MM
12
The best place to read more about wikis is the
wiki article on Wikipedia
I didnt read the book, but I saw the movie Wikis
in Plain English
13
pedagogy
14
Wikis work best where the goal is the
accumulation of knowledge about discrete
subject(s) over time, and where the contributions
are collaborative in nature they emphasize the
ongoing process of knowledge accumulation.
Wikis are not well designed for projects where
the attributions and authorship of individual
contributors is paramount (as in traditional
publishing), or where the goal is the
presentation of perfected final product that does
not need feedback (as in the traditional web
site).
15
Author
Author-ity
16
(No Transcript)
17
(No Transcript)
18
The wiki knowledge model privileges content
over authorship and is conducive to
constructivism
Knowledge Base
Multiple, Independent, Varying Sources of
Knowledge
19
Authorship data is irrelevant and sometimes
even detrimental to the creation of truly
communal repositories of knowledge
Holloway, Bozicevic, Börner (2005) re GNU Free
Document License
20
(No Transcript)
21
wikiphobia
22
(No Transcript)
23
Middlebury A necessary but not sufficient
response
You You tell me
24
Imposing order

• Structure
• Editorial style and control must come from the
  culture of the users
• Because it doesnt come from the software
• Attribution
• Wikis are fundamentally about the end product
• So methods of attribution must be made explicit
• both citation to external sources
• and internal authorship attributions
• Especially over time with multiple generations of
  students editing each others work

25
Some pedagogical issues Learning outcome
assessment How do we assess whether this is
an effective way to learn ? Student assessment
As in other group activities, how do we
measure and grade individual student
contributions ? (Other online social software
systems such as blogs and forums still maintain
authorship modes so that reputation can be
assessed. Wikis in general, and Mediawiki in
particular, do not make this easy, nor have the
tools to do this as easily as the traditional
LMS, for example.)
26
Discipline specific issues How do wikis fit
into the corporate and group authorship that is a
norm in some fields, especially the sciences, and
some social sciences, e.g. psychology ?
Probably pretty well
27
The course
How does a non-sequential, disruptive technology
such as a wiki fit with the notion of a course as
a graduated series of knowledge and abilities
that build on one another ?
28
Homer and the Homeric tradition Herodotus The
Aristotelian commentators Servius and the
Vergilian tradition Pliny Varro Martianus Capella
and the 7 Liberal Arts Isadore of Seville Jewish
Torah Islamic hadith Tales of 1001 Nights Iranian
epic and dastans Mediaeval epic Carmina
Burana Dante commentators Veda Upanishads
commentators Dharmashastras and law texts Sutras
commentaries Buddhist Pali canon Mahabharata Ram
ayana Kalidasa commentators Spring and Autumn
Annals Confucius tradition Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu
tradition
Text and Aggregation Intertext and Commentary
29
Beyond the compendium modelsome examples that
work

• Production
• Oberon group design and management of a full
  scale theater production
• Collaborative writing
• Penguin Wiki novel
• The commentarial wiki
• Pynchon
• Hitchcock

30
Technical Issues (Pro)

• Getting one up and running is quick, cheap and
  easy
• Almost all popular wiki software runs on the
  LAMPP platform, some on Windows
• Hardware requirements for smaller wikis are
  minimal
• The Open Source advantage
• If it doesnt do something you want, check that
  someone else has already done it, or just add it
  yourself

31
Technical Issues (Con)

• upporting omething ele yndrome
• Policies
• How well can standard user policies apply?
• User accounts roles
• Who decides who has rights to what
• Retention data management
• External Security
• Wiki spam and grafitti
• bots
• Software exploits
• The Open Source disadvantage
• If it doesnt do something you want, check that
  someone else has already done it if not and you
  cant fix it yourself, you suffer

32
(No Transcript)
33
(No Transcript)
34
Best Practices

• Accounts
• Non-anonymity encourages responsibility
• Limit your editors
• Define editor groups to edit main content
• Grant editorship as you would in a paper based
  system
• Consider allowing all user to leave comments
• Policies
• Define and publish explicit editorial content
  policies
• Plan for the future of the data

35
(No Transcript)
36
(No Transcript)
37
Andfinally, wiki as a medium
The message of print the principles of
uniformity, continuity, and linearity.
It is the framework which changes with each new
technology and not just the picture within the
frame."
"Environments are not just containers, but are
processes that change the content totally."
Marshall McLuhan