On Thu 26 Apr 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:

That would be excellent if you can make it.

OK, I've signed up!

I thought I'd give a brief description of OpenGuides and then talk about the wiki things that we've found to be useful and those that we've found to perhaps be less useful. (I don't want to just go stand up there and go "hi, we made a thing, it's dead cool"; I want to give people a reason to want to listen to me.) It would be great if people could chime in here with their own experiences. I'm thinking here of the aspects of wikis that are "standard", not necessarily things specific to OpenGuides - the talk needs to be accessible to people who have no idea about OpenGuides.

Useful: - the rapid publishing cycle - see a mistake, click the "edit" link, fix the mistake, click "save", you're done - many eyes make light work - even the most trivial comment becomes useful as a page builds, e.g. "They also serve Leffe" - not worth making a page on its own, but very very useful when added to an existing page.

Less useful: - wiki markup, as is currently being discussed in the other thread - lack of structure; again, as discussed in the other thread, I think our approch to structured data is one of our strengths

Anyone else got anything to add?

Kake

I dunno if it's useful or not useful, but the wikinature means you get obviously biased reviews, written by the owner of a place trying to increase their pagerank. I'm nver sure how to edit these!

s

ooh! controversial! grin - "but what is neutral?" :-)

As an aside - I've put up the powerpoint presentation I gave to WikiSym06 Kake, feel free to grab anything from it that may be of value (and others welcome to read). This was to an audience of wiki developers/ wiki-academics so our angle was "how is the Open Guide different from other wikis?" we stressed that it was a wiki for a community of locality rather virtual communities, and some findings on types of users and issues of sustainability.

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mark/wikisym/Gaved_wikisym.ppt

OG to Milton Keynes is just in the middle of a "taxi company war" at the moment, we seem to have a couple of taxi companies laying into each other, we're quite close to having to lock down entries to do with taxis for a while till they calm down. We had the same thing a year ago between two pizza companies :-)

The social side is indeed intriguing if the purpose of your Open Guide (I know we all have different motivations) is to encourage an unknown local community to add content. After a couple of years the MK OG is starting to see a trickle of unknown contributors. We started as two university students and threw a workshop in the university and then heavily plugged it amongst fellow students so I'd say the majority of contributors until recently were "known" (or at least one connection away), but now we're picking up people across Milton Keynes who we clearly don't know and have stumbled onto the site somehow. For us this is good news as it feels that we're actually engaging more people than our immediate social circle but of course as people have pointed out this means we have more work to do. One of our concerns is sustaining the guide if it does take off longer term, we need to find a way of encouraging other people to be active contributors, editors, and possibly eventually admins.

regards 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@lists.openguides.org on behalf of Earle Martin Sent: Thu 4/26/2007 12:06 PM To: OpenGuides software developers' list Subject: Re: [OGDev] wiki wednesdays.

On 26/04/07, Stephen Gower socks-openguides.org@earth.li wrote:

I dunno if it's useful or not useful, but the wikinature means you get obviously biased reviews, written by the owner of a place trying to increase their pagerank. I'm nver sure how to edit these!

I generally try and spot these and edit them into something approximating "neutral point of view" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NPOV) while letting honest reviews through.