Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
I agree. That's why I'm anxiously awaiting the stable release of SemanticWiki ( http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) If you're not running a production system, you may want to use the current release candidate
On 12/7/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
That's a great idea. But now we are back to an even more fundamental difficulty. I'm trying to convert users from their current paradigm of sharing information via attached WORD DOCs in email to large lists of readers, to keeping their shared documents in the wiki. The barest hint of trying to learn any new markup is a stumbling block to begin with. Attempting to enforce semantic markup conventions in a random group of users seems impossible without a dedicated team of annotators.
It is really tough trying to get folks to share information.
--Hiram
Kimon Andreou wrote:
I agree. That's why I'm anxiously awaiting the stable release of SemanticWiki ( http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) If you're not running a production system, you may want to use the current release candidate
On 12/7/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
I ran into the same issue and did the following: * For those migrating existing documentation on Word, I have them using OpenOffice 2.3 and use the MediaWiki export filter * For those entering new content, I have them enter the text and not worry about formatting. There are others that come in later and fix it.
On 12/7/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
That's a great idea. But now we are back to an even more fundamental difficulty. I'm trying to convert users from their current paradigm of sharing information via attached WORD DOCs in email to large lists of readers, to keeping their shared documents in the wiki. The barest hint of trying to learn any new markup is a stumbling block to begin with. Attempting to enforce semantic markup conventions in a random group of users seems impossible without a dedicated team of annotators.
It is really tough trying to get folks to share information.
--Hiram
Kimon Andreou wrote:
I agree. That's why I'm anxiously awaiting the stable release of SemanticWiki ( http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) If you're not running a production system, you may want to use the
current
release candidate
On 12/7/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
That's a great idea. But now we are back to an even more fundamental difficulty. I'm trying to convert users from their current paradigm of sharing information via attached WORD DOCs in email to large lists of readers, to keeping their shared documents in the wiki. The barest hint of trying to learn any new markup is a stumbling block to begin with. Attempting to enforce semantic markup conventions in a random group of users seems impossible without a dedicated team of annotators.
It is really tough trying to get folks to share information.
--Hiram
Yes, the barriers are very low, but pick the average person, and they are very high indeed. Most wiki users are self-selected. Asking a group of a thousand to do it the wiki way gets you about 10 folks. And the damn DOC files don't do well when you paste them into a wiki. If they are employees, give a 1% pay raise to those who use the wiki, and leave it up to them which they use. Everyone should have a choice in life...
Fred
On Freitag, 7. Dezember 2007, Kimon Andreou wrote:
I agree. That's why I'm anxiously awaiting the stable release of SemanticWiki ( http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) If you're not running a production system, you may want to use the current release candidate
Yep, we are running late. I hope to get a feature-complete RC3 out before the holidays ...
Anyway a note on "finding things easily in a wiki": Many users complaining about not finding things in wikis expect some kind of miraculous wiki intelligence to find things for them. But organising stuff often also needs much work, and someone making an effort to set up initial structures and to maintain them in spite of all user attempts to mess things up again ;-)
After that, you can in principle have all kinds of search interfaces, though SMW mainly provides simple browsers, and a query language that knowledgable editors can use to pre-create queries for normal readers (by just inserting them into the wiki). But there are many more options, e.g. as Yaron Koren just did in his "Semantic Drilldown" extension [1] (which focusses on the strongly structured end of the semantic wiki spectrum, but is quite cool already [2]; especially when considering that this whole site works like a custom DB-based content management portal, but is in fact just using MediaWiki+extensions and a few well-built templates and queries; not sure whether it already supports the recent SMW-RCs).
Cheers,
Markus
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Drilldown [2] http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:ViewData
On 12/7/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
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We use 2 or 3 extensions which really help.
DiscussionThreads; allowing for 'treed' discussions on the talk pages CategoryTree; allowing visually seeing all categories in a tree format SelectCategory; allows selecting the specific categories for the article ArticleToCategory; Allows definition of a new page from a category page
These help us organize all our articles into specific category(s) as needed.
Searching works well etc. I don't think you need to learn new syntax, as such, other than wikitext .. it is challenging enough <G>
DSig .. Just Chillin'
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Hiram Clawson Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 11:21 To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: [Mediawiki-l] how to organize wiki content
Good Morning MW Fans:
Does anyone have any pointers to discussions of how to properly organize a wiki so that things can be found easily by users ? I'm getting the impression one needs to have special wiki pages to act as content guides to various subjects in the wiki. The category system seems to break down rapidly as categories proliferate, or articles become too numerous in a single category.
--Hiram - http://genomewiki.ucsc.edu/
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
You can insert the content of a page to another page with the following:
{{:Title of the page)}}
2007/12/7, 65s.mg@atlas.cz 65s.mg@atlas.cz:
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