Hello,
I'm very pleased to learn that my university department has put in place a MediaWiki server for use in our courses, IT support, etc. However, I'm writing to ask for advice about a good "pattern" for name spaces in such an environment, as our technicians prefer to just let us "have at it." I have seen a few live wikis at universities, and there doesn't seem to be a set pattern, per se, on how to do this.
As an instructor, I've already set up a few wiki pages for use in the context of one of my courses, using MediaWiki on a free web site. During this trial, I realized a few problems. First, certain terms have definitions that are relative to my course. For example, I teach an intro to software design (LOG120 is its course code), and I expect my students to learn the very basic concepts of "coupling" and "cohesion". If one looks up the global (wikipedia) definitions for these terms, they may or may not be useful in the context of my course (not to mention that software engineering is a "young" field and we don't all agree on terms). So, this means I have to prefix my pages with a context of my course (project). Second, I had to be very careful while rapidly creating my pages on this site not to "steal" the global definitions (which happens if I forget to prefix a link with my namespace and I accidentally create it.)
So, the pages for Coupling and Cohesion I'd like to have for my course have a particular context, which implies I need to have a name space that's unique to my course, e.g., LOG120, so I'd have LOG120:Coupling and LOG120:Cohesion.
Here are the problems I see with this approach, and I'd like to get some feedback from this list before we spend too much energy in the wrong direction:
1) From what I understand about MW software, there are only 16 name spaces allowed, and my department has more than 30 courses. Assuming every professor jumped on board with the wiki approach (which is unlikely), it seems we'll run out of name spaces with this strategy of one per course. If we don't use course-specific contexts, I can foresee disagreements about content on pages for different contexts. It could be interesting perhaps to have one context, but with course-specific information separated on that page. Professors aren't going to be agreeing on definitions, because of the principle of academic freedom.
2) On a given page, most of the links will have to be prefixed with the course's name space. This seems to be a lot of redundant prefixing, and runs the risk of an errant global page being created when done hastily. Is there a way in MediaWiki pages to define a "default" name space prefix?
3) What about the basic concepts of "Talk:", etc. for MW layout? It seems like if I use a name space convention as stated above, Talk:Cohesion would not be about my course's version of Cohesion, but rather the general meaning. This is ambiguous.
An obvious alternative configuration would be a wiki server for each course, but that seems like overkill for the technicians to maintain. The opposite is to not have any course-specific namespaces, and use prefixes with a "." like LOG120.Coupling - again, this seems like less user-friendly from the standpoint of editing of the links.
Looking forward to any feedback, advice or examples of well designed MW sites used in a teaching context. Regards,
Cris Fuhrman