MediawikiWiki as Medium

Randy Thornton

rwthornton@ups.edu

The Wiki Way

Wikis are collaborative web sites where anyone with the proper permission can edit

the pages in place.

In practice, the Wiki Way is about building on-line knowledge-bases

by a community of contributors through collaborative editing.

The Wiki Way: form follows function / content is king

The original context of the web

A group of professionals in the same discipline who already have a culture of information sharing with well established procedures for

Group editing & authoringAttribution and creditAuthority citationPeer reviewLevels of publication

The basics

basic properties

hypertextualasynchronouscollaborative unstructured

emergent properties

Pioneers become settlers / process becomes product

Rapid change :: rapid response

Contribution: the 1 to 999 ratio

Stylistics and readability

Systemic bias of users: geographic, linguistic, technical

Scalability is not technical but administrative & organizational

The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)

Wikis are textual but not fixed like print“A characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another medium” -MM

I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movieWikis in Plain English

The best place to read more about wikis isthe ‘wiki’ article on Wikipedia

pedagogy

Wikis work best where the goal is the accumulation of knowledge about discrete subject(s) over time, and where the contributions are collaborative in nature; they emphasize the ongoing process of knowledge accumulation.

Wikis are not well designed for projects where the attributions and authorship of individual contributors is paramount (as in traditional publishing), or where the goal is the presentation of perfected final product that does not need feedback (as in the traditional web site).

AuthorAuthor-ity

The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)

The Fountain and Source of Knowledge (and Power)

The wiki knowledge model privileges content over authorship

and is conducive to constructivism

Knowledge Base

Multiple, Independent, Varying Sources of Knowledge

“[A]uthorship data is irrelevant and sometimes even

detrimental to the creation of truly communal repositories of

knowledge”

Holloway, Bozicevic, Börner (2005) re GNU Free Document License

wikiphobia

Middlebury

A necessary but not sufficient

response

You

You tell me…

Imposing order

– Structure• Editorial style and control must come from the

culture of the users• Because it doesn’t come from the software

– Attribution• Wikis are fundamentally about the end product• So methods of attribution must be made explicit

– both citation to external sources– and internal authorship attributions

• Especially over time with multiple generations of students editing each others work

Some pedagogical issues

Learning outcome assessment

How do we assess whether this is an effective way to learn ?

Student assessment

As in other group activities, how do we measure and grade individual student contributions ? (Other online social software systems such as blogs and forums still maintain authorship modes so that reputation can be assessed. Wikis in general, and Mediawiki in particular, do not make this easy, nor have the tools to do this as easily as the traditional LMS, for example.)

Discipline specific issues

How do wikis fit into the corporate and group authorship that is a norm in some fields, especially the sciences, and some social sciences, e.g. psychology ?

Probably pretty well

How does a non-sequential, disruptive technology such as a wiki fit with the notion of a course as a graduated series of knowledge and abilities that build on one another ?

The course

“Homer” and the Homeric traditionHerodotus

The Aristotelian commentatorsServius and the Vergilian tradition

PlinyVarro

Martianus Capella and the 7 Liberal ArtsIsadore of Seville

Jewish TorahIslamic hadith

Tales of 1001 NightsIranian epic and dastans

Mediaeval epicCarmina Burana

Dante commentatorsVeda

Upanishads & commentatorsDharmashastras and law texts

Sutras & commentariesBuddhist Pali canon

MahabharataRamayana

Kalidasa & commentatorsSpring and Autumn Annals

Confucius tradition“Lao Tzu”

Chuang Tzu tradition

Text and AggregationIntertext and Commentary

Beyond the compendium model:some examples that work

– Production• Oberon – group design and management of

a full scale theater production

– Collaborative writing• Penguin Wiki novel

– The commentarial wiki• Pynchon• Hitchcock

Technical Issues (Pro)

• Getting one up and running is quick, cheap and easy – Almost all popular wiki software runs on the LAMPP platform, some on Windows

– Hardware requirements for smaller wikis are minimal

• The Open Source advantage– If it doesn’t do something you want, check that someone else has already done it, or just add it yourself

Technical Issues (Con)

• $upporting $omething el$e $yndrome• Policies

– How well can standard user policies apply?– User accounts & roles– Who decides who has rights to what– Retention & data management

• External Security• Wiki spam and grafitti• bots• Software exploits

• The Open Source disadvantage– If it doesn’t do something you want, check that someone else has already done it; if not and you can’t fix it yourself, you suffer

Best Practices

Accounts– Non-anonymity encourages responsibility– Limit your editors

Define editor groups to edit main content

Grant editorship as you would in a paper based system

Consider allowing all user to leave comments

Policies– Define and publish explicit editorial & content policies– Plan for the future of the data

“The message of print: the principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity.”

And…finally, wiki as a medium…

“It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally."

Marshall McLuhan