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[personal profile] go_gentle
There's now a tag on my LJ for the wiki stuff, for ease of finding and subscribing. FYI.


Timeline

My thinking on timeline, which has no basis in any kind of reality, is that I am hoping to get these decisions made by the end of this next week, work on getting categories and stubs and skeletons all laid out during the week of the 24th, and open it up for actual information input the first week in April. (My spring break is the week of the 24th. This is not entirely coincidental.)

Between that thing I mentioned in my last post, and some family issues that have come up recently, I don't know how realistic that is, but I'm going to try.



Wikifarm options

Okay, so at this point I've basically decided to go with one of the wikifarm options. I've been playing with them a bit, to get used to the markup languages and see what sort of features are supported.

Go play in them and tell me what you think:
Wiki-site's official sandbox. Username: demo, password: 1234
A test wiki I set up at Wikispaces - no need to log in.
Wikilot's official testpad - no need to log in.
A test wiki I set up at ScribbleWiki - no need to log in.

Scribblewiki and Wikilot both appear to be running fairly standard MediaWiki - anything you can do in one you can probably do in the other.

What I'm really interested in is feedback from people who consider themselves non-technical - do you find the MediaWiki syntax easy to understand or use?

If you want to play in one of the MediaWiki wikis, or just learn more about the editing style, Wikipedia will tell you all about that sort of thing.

Wikispaces uses tags, the others use categories. These seem to be basically the same in practice - a few cosmetic and markup differences, but mostly the same functionality.

So, the choice is really WYSIWYG vs MediaWiki vs Wiki-site. MediaWiki is better documented, WYSIWYG is easier to learn, Wiki-site appears to have both options, but something about it makes me a tad nervous about long term viability. That might just be me, though.



Mod team

I'm thinking we need two kinds of mods: technical and research. Technical mods are responsible for keeping markup standard, making sure templates get used, and making the pages look pretty. (Tech mods could also be a resource if people have questions about markup, formatting, etc) Research mods will enforce some sort of citation standards. There'll be a way to tag/categorize a page as needing attention, either research or technical, so mods know what needs working on (although anyone would be welcome to do those sorts of things as well).

I'm going to point you to procedure outlined by [livejournal.com profile] olivia_circe in comments of the last post: "The citation-checking process probably goes like this: x submits a bunch of tour dates without a citation, mod says "hey, x, do you have a citation for this information?" x says, "oh, whoops, here it is" or "I got it from here, where someone posted it but didn't cite it," in which case the mod gets to do detective work. If the dates can't be substantiated by the mod team and posters, they get taken off the wiki. Or something."

If you're interested in either of these roles, let me know. It's not a commitment, I just want to know what sort of interest is out there.



Media Organization

Fun fact: I have a to-do list with all the issues that people are bringing up that need to get addressed. It includes the line 'media organization. *cries*'

Presumably, we want to tag our media with band, source, approx date, maybe subjects discussed or members interviewed. Things like that. Coming up with the categories is not the hard part. I mean, it's not trivial, but it's mostly just brute force*. The trouble is organizing them.

MediaWiki's categories are, as far as I can tell, essentially hierarchical. Go play with the categories on Pete Wentz's wikipedia page, I'll wait. (Incidentally, if you google 'Pete Wentz,' the 3rd displayed image on the main search page is a manip putting Pete at Hogwarts (or at least it was when I googled him this afternoon.) I felt it was important to tell you this.)

Okay. The problem is, this is not a good match up with the tags I've proposed above. It's okay, in that you'll still be able to find every page tagged with 'Ray Toro' or 'Articles in Kerrang,' but as far as I can tell, there's no good way to find pages marked with 'Ray Toro' and 'Articles in Kerrang' (ie, articles in Kerrang that mention Ray Toro.) This is not the end of the world, and tags are still useful, just not as useful as they could be in the perfect world in my head.

Basically, I want someone to integrate del.icio.us's tagging structure with MediaWiki. I kind of doubt that's going to happen, though, so we have to work with what we do have. I think categories are workable. Or, we could use some unholy combination of del.icio.us and a wiki, but I can't figure how that would work in any sort of intuitive way, either for the editor or the reader. Thoughts?

So if we use our wikifarm's built in category/tag feature, we still need a way to organize them logically. I feel like using the hierarchal structure is at least a little bit useful, but I don't know how the hierarchy should happen. I'm pretty sure at least some of you are librarians or otherwise people much more familiar with organization of information and tagging and meta-data than I am, so give me your thoughts.

ETA: Come to think of it, MediaWiki's categories are not that different in functionality from LJ's tags. (The hierarchal model is an okay parallel for users who have LJ tags of the type bandom:fic, bandom:meta, bandom:squee, sga:fic, sga:meta, spn:fic, and so forth.) Just tossing that out there as food for thought.

*I'm not sure I've ever said anything on the internets that is more stereotypical of a math major. My biases, let me show you them.

What happened?

Date: 2008-04-23 09:36 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Hello, my name is Simon Koldyk and I'm from ScribbleWiki, just wondering who you decided to use in the end?

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just a girl who's afraid of the dark

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