Category Archives: Wiki

Wiki

Contents
Give this man a job building a wiki
wiki spam goes human powered
Combining Wikis and forums
Free link love with every comment
Lulu
Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators
The world wide web is shrinking

Give this man a job building a wiki

Posted on 29/09 by Andy Roberts

I wouldn’t mind a job myself facilitating wikis for communities of practice but this is about building a new piece of wiki software, a platform if you like, and Tom knows what exactly what he wants to make:

Tom Smith’s the OTHER blog

what I really want to do is create a fork or version of MediaWiki that has all the features I’ve blogged about previously. Yes I want WYSIWYG but I want it to integrate with the wiki when it comes to making links. I want to be be able to create (orphan) pages without creating a WikiWord, saving, clicking to create the page. I want a great design(s). I want a beautifully clean syntax that I never actually use. I want a GUI editor that can interface via XML RPC. I want a super simple installation that asks me what sort of wiki this is to be, personal, shared. I want this wiki also to be a blog (or bliki). I want another million small improvements I’ve developed to do with information design, usability and IA.

In short I want to make MediaWiki for the masses and I want someone else to pay me to make it and give it away for free.

I think it would be great if somebody is willing to put up a bounty for Tom Smith to build the wiki software he’s been imagining for years. It only needs one viable project to make it worthwhile, and then after that it would be open and available for improvement and implementation on any number of others. One possible implementation could be an open community for microjobs exchange.

Posted in Tools, Wiki | Tagged |

wiki spam goes human powered

Posted on 22/08 by Andy Roberts

Wiki spambot fighting is an occupational hazard, but not something that bothers me too much these days. I try not to over react and avoid locking down pages as much as possible. There’s no need to make a whole wiki login-to-edit or install annoying captchas and so on. My approach is usually based on banning keywords in the type of sites spammers are promoting. So if you tried to add text and links with references to viagra or lotto onto the cider wiki for example, you’ll find that the page doesn’t get saved. The only downside is that the cider makers might want just possibly want to write something about viagra and lotto on the cider wiki . In a broad topic based wiki such as wikipedia, that would not be the solution.

Now via Facebook, Colin Donald of Futurescape has told me of a new scourge – human powered wiki spammers.

Internet Futures: Chinese human-powered spam

Automated responses won’t work nearly as easily when there’s a real intelligence on the spamming side, rather than a bot. Yet the cost of using people to defend against this on the receiving end would very quickly be disproportionate.

I suppose it’s all part of the co-evolution of a predator / prey ecology but unfortunately it seem to be one in which if there is any weakness on behalf of the wiki techologist, then the predator, against advice from the lessons of population simulation software, is all to often willing to kill the prey it depends upon.

Posted in Wiki |

Combining Wikis and forums

Posted on 15/08 by Andy Roberts

Zbigniew from Wiki Wednesday has some interesting ideas about combining wikis and forums. A bit mad Combining Wikis and forums icon surprised , but very interesting!

In Brudnopis: Wikis and fora – other ideas

For example, the suggestion to allow some wiki functionality in the middle of threaded discussions, which to me seems like a license to rewrite history, except that there would be revision control over the various versions of a conversation.

  • ‘overwrite’ a part of the conversation with a summary that would be a wiki page, editable by all the participants in the overwritten part of the conversation with the expectation that it will contain a consensus between them on what was written, the overwritten text could be available behind a link

I don’t warm to the prospect of ever having to take part in such a consensus, in fact I’m strangely attached to the notion of leaving archived conversations to stand where they took place but it strikes me this technique could become a useful part of the workflow in a close working team or managed community.

Posted in Wiki | Tagged |

Free link love with every comment

Posted on 11/08 by Andy Roberts

Inspired by Tino Triste, I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag from the comments links in this blog, to reward people who leave relevant comments.

The world wide web was designed precisely to to be made out of of sites linking to each other and this principle is used to determine the strength, relevancy, and popularity of a site by Google’s page rank algorithm. Then due to blog comment spammers and robots, Google and other search engines decided to introduce the rel=”nofollow” tag, which basically means that a link with that tag has no weight for search engine rankings at all. Wikipedia took up this option readily, and unfortunately so did WordPress in the default state. But comment spam did not decrease significantly, in fact it has probably increased regardless, so it seems unnecessary to penalise the genuine comments, or for that matter the useful external references on Wikipedia.

So I switched it off.

How? I thought I could just edit the comment module of the theme but it’s embedded far more deeply than that. So I used Kimmo Suominen‘s DoFollow 3.0 plugin

Posted in Wiki, wordpress |

Lulu

Posted on 04/08 by Andy Roberts

I’m very interested in Lulu, so even the slightest mention in one of the RSS feeds I read is worth noting:

Engineers without Fears: Open Publish (1): The Keynote Cops
Then there was Andrew Pate from Lulu. AP told us about Lulu – on-demand publishing and its role in the Long Tail. Lulu is an interesting service so hence AP’s talk was interesting. Two comments:

* AP noted there is a growing interest in self-published material by book sellers whereas 5 years ago they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
* From an audience of over 100, only 2 of us had bought anything off Lulu.

Posted in web2.0, Wiki | Tagged , |

Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators

Posted on 02/07 by Andy Roberts

Like a previous post, ( and this one and this one ), this is another blog post inspired by conversation on a listserv (email discussion group).

The discussion was sparked off originally by a request for advice on dealing with repeated disruption in an online community. The e-Mint community responded with some suggestions, including technological measures. Then I invoked an ethical dimension to the topic and the scope continued to broaden. Participants started to append little notes of congratulation to their contributions, in appreciation of the discussion and then we agreed to capture the main points onto a wiki page which is currently hosted on DARnet, here.

Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators picture 3

I was going to reproduce my own point of view in this post, since I have some quite clearly differentiated attitudes in comparison with other practitioners, but I think I’ll just post a link to the wiki page which is a collaborative effort and contains a pluralistic approach to the collection of tips and the art of summary.

Tips_on_community_behaviour_issues_for_moderators

If you are a facilitator or moderator then I’d appreciate it if you’d have a look and let us know if this kind of thing is of any use beyond the context within which it arose or not. If it seems worthwhile, then do please bookmark the page, share it, edit it and add in your tuppence worth wherever you like.

Posted in Community, Wiki | Tagged , , , |

The world wide web is shrinking

Posted on 18/05 by Andy Roberts

The world wide web is shrinking says Nicholas Carr in today’s Technology Guardian

Nicholas Carr: The net is being carved up into information plantations | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology

but he’s only referring to the distribution power law which is making popular sites more popular.

In the end, though, the internet seems to be following the same pattern that has always characterised popular media. A few huge outlets come to dominate readership and viewership and smaller, more specialised ones are consigned to the periphery.

I’m just not sure this is the inevitable conclusion from the observation that Wikipedia is eating Google
Ho hum.

Posted in web2.0, Wiki |

Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Wiki on the DARnet Blog