Hi Kake
yup, Wikisym is a conference for folk into wikis :-) as far as I can see, there are two
academic conferences out there on wikis, WikiSym and WikiMania. WikiMania is in Taiwan
this year in August -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2007 . I think (though I
may have got this wrong) that wikimania is much more closely aligned with Wikipedia/the
Wikipedia Foundation).
There's more of a hacker vibe gig as well "Recent Changes Camp"
http://2007.recentchangescamp.org/RecentChangesCamp_2007_--_Portland%2C_Ore…
WikiSym is associated with ACM and costs rather more to turn up to - a discussion of
lively debate at WikiSym amongst the hacker crew late at night last time - I think
it's seen as more of an academic style gig, but it did have people with a broad range
of real building skills and interests. I think WikiSym and WikiMania have agreed to circle
the planet, putting themselves on different continents each year, so as not to iclash.
Myself I'd be keen to see Open Guides pitching in at all of them, they seem like a
nice crowd across all of them and receptive to hearing what people are doing. We (as the
Open Guides community) certainly have some solid things to show folk and issues to engage
in.
Usability and wikis - oh yeas, don't get me started! I am all for discussing this :-)
I totally agree wikis are too tricky to get into.
There was a session on at WikiSym on Wiki Creole- the attempt to develop a common
simplified set that could be used across as many wikis as possible so casual users could
contribute more easily:
http://www.wikicreole.org/
I waver between simplified wiki-markup, html, and WYSIWYG editors. I could be argued that
far more people are exposed to word processors than html. I really don't know about
the amount of HTML usage but I think that in some cases even this is too much to ask. I
think it depends on the audience you are trying to encourage to contribute to the wiki. In
the Milton Keynes Open Guide I'd say we see very little evidence of HTML usage by
contributors, mainly just plain text entries. Love to hear everybody's opinion on
this!
cheers!
Mark
Mark Gaved
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes, UK
MK7 6AA
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mark
-----Original Message-----
From: openguides-dev-bounces(a)lists.openguides.org on behalf of Kake L Pugh
Sent: Tue 4/24/2007 11:27 PM
To: OpenGuides software developers' list
Subject: Re: [OGDev] other things going on
On Tue 24 Apr 2007, "M.B.Gaved" <M.B.Gaved(a)open.ac.uk> wrote:
I think I've mentioned it before, Kake, but after
me turning up and
waving the flag for the Open Guides at WikiSym in Odense last year
(and meeting Evan), I've been asked to be on the program committee
for WikiSym2007 in October this year - reviewing papers and helping
put together the list of papers to be accepted.
Ah-ha, yes! I think I failed to register that previously because I
wasn't sure what WikiSym _was_ - but it's basically a conference for
people interested in wikis, yes?
I'm interested in the mention of usability at the URL you gave. I'd
like to see what the wiki people make of that topic. Something I've
found very difficult in participating in different wikis is that you
always have to figure out the local wiki syntax, because every one is
slightly different.
This may, of course, be a very old and overly-debated idea, but
basically, I think it's a shame that wiki syntax has always been so
jammed-in with the whole idea of wikis. I think the "read, think,
click, edit, publish" thing of wikis is utterly fantastic, but I hate
being forced into using the local language when there's a universal
one available. With the advent of livejournal and similar services,
most people who're willing to contribute user content have at least a
basic working knowledge of HTML - why can't we just let them use this
HTML that they're familiar with? Why are we so convinced that our own
made-up markup language is going to be easier for them to use?
(By the way: this is not an idea that came to me out of thin air; it
comes from talking to people and observing them as they try to use
OpenGuides and other wikis. You don't actually have to be observing
them in real life; you can learn a surprising amount about what people
find hard by looking at a page's edit history. "I hate wiki markup"
is a surprisingly common edit/changelog comment.)
Relatedly, I think one of OpenGuides' strengths (again, this came from
listening to naive user comments) is that it gives definite boxes to
put things in. Wikipedia's "template" functionality is powerful, but
it's an entry barrier. This, for example, is quite terrifying:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_Kent_Line&action=edit
Kake
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