CS 181 - Electronic Publishing on the WWW * ~ CLASSROOM SUPPLEMENTS

WIKIS +++++

http://osdev.ito.umt.edu/cs181

user: itoadmin
pass: itopass

More notes on pages of my notebook perhaps ---

wikis1

wiki2

wiki3

wikis4

basic wiki screen

search for pages

toolbar editing

A wiki is a collection of web pages that anyone can edit.

This leads to the questions: what's on those pages? who is included in this community? What will those folks be doing when they edit the pages? Are there any rules for how the ownership of the content is shared?

A precise defintion is hard to come by. Besides, when Ward Cunningham developed the wiki concept, he set down the basic ideas and let the world run with it. The world ran in so many different diretions that each wiki engine (the program the runs a wiki) works a little differently.

One of the cultural aspects that wikis embraces is the value of unfinished or half-finished content. Links to wiki pages can serve as placeholders for later thinking. When you move through capturing an idea, you can write about the idea or you can just put a link to a wiki page that you plan on creating and continue... Wabi-sabi is a Japanese expression that roughtly translates to the "beauty of things imperfect, impermanetn, and incomplete." It is the beauty of things humble and non-standard.

Imagine a stack of index cards as wiki pages. What can you do with the stack of cards?

add new cards
write informtion on the cards (plain text or text with formatting)
link cards to each other (this is one of the most important aspects)
sort through the cards and search through them
copy the cards
keep track of the changes that you make to them

Now imagine this stack of cards in a central place where anyone can go and look at them and, most importantly, change them to add their own ideas - this is the secret power of the wiki.

How are wiki's different from:

email - email lacks the central place where everyone can work at once; and email doesn't allow many authors to work on the same page or for pages to be linked. Email are also usually short whereas wiki pages can be as long as needed
blogs - blog= set of pages on which short entires are posted - usually with most recent entires on top. Comments can appear attached to each posting. Wiki pages can be made to look like blog pages but they aren't really the same. Blogs are one to many while wikis are many to many.
bulletin boards or forums - bulletin boards are more focused on many-to-many comm thanblogs but in a way that is more structured than wikis. Wiki pages can be used like bulletin boards in a style dcalled thread mode - in which new comments are added to the bottom of a wiki pages, but this is a style (not a sturcutre) that is enfoced by the wiki.
content management or Web puglishing systems - general purpose tools for creating all sorts of Web sites.

Formal definition:

pages must be stored in a central, shared repository
anyone should be able to edit pages
editing should be easy and accessible and not require special tools
formatting information pages should be much simplier than using HTML
a list of recently changed pages should be available

Since the first days of wikis (1995) several innovations have been created:

versioning - saving a version of each wiki page
attaching files
backlinks - allowing easy browsing of all pages that link to a certain page
notification of changes - alerts sent when a page has been changed
searching - some way to enter words to search for in wiki pages
printable pages - creating a printable version of a page that takes out the navigation

Glossary:

sandbox is a practice page on a wiki where you can go to play around and become familiar with the ways of the wiki
camel case - using capital letters in the middle of the word to indicate that the word is a link to a page - MyTestPage or TestPage ...

Wikis can be content focused or process-focused; community wikis bring togehter groups of people based on a shared interest

Basic wiki skills

navigating wiki pages
creating and editing pages (using wiki or html markup)
linking pages (adding vital links)

general strucutre of a wiki pages:

a page body that displays the content of the page
navigation between webs on the wiki and between parts of the web that you might be on (almost always on the left)
a list of tools for edtiing and doing other things to change the content of the page you're viewing.

Most wikis are organized into many different webs - all webs are simply different groups of wild pages - webs are the highest level of organization of a wiki. If a card is in two different webs, it is two different cards. each web has its own set of names for cards. The nerdy name for a set of names is a namespace. You can have sub-wikis. If a wiki represents a book; sub-wikis would be the chapters.

Navigating - you can move from web to web in a web section ... or use jump to move right to a page.
Breadcrumbs help also as you traverse the wiki

Mark up:
---+ heading 1
---++ heading level 2
---+++ heading level 3
etc.

---- horizontal rule
* bullets

Browse a few wikis:

DokuWiki - wiki engine created for writing and publishing documentation
www.socialtext.com - combines blogs, wikis and other features
www.jot.com - jotspot - applicaiton wiki --- e-mail and database-like fucntionality ... google bought this in oct 06
www.atlassian.com --- confluence an enterprise wiki ... most popular in corporate environments