As an update to my earlier post about videos introducing wiki, I found some more wiki-related videos/screencasts online. John Hubbard from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has a four-part online video course which will introduce you to the benefits and disadvantages of wiki. I watced the fourth part which is about “other wikis”. It covers Wikipedia’s sister projects, Citizendium, Memory-Alpha, and various library wikis. John briefly discusses options for getting your own wiki at the end of the video. He concludes by saying he would “eventually like it to be true that the Muppet wiki … is not more developed than the library wikis out there”. :)
Andrew (aka Tawker) has published the first of a series of flash-based tutorials which covers very basic MediaWiki editing techniques.
If you know of other useful wiki-related videos, screencasts, etc, please add them to my wiki.
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In collaboration with IBM, The University of Arizona is launching what looks like a very interesting course on Managing Online Communities. Rawn Shah writes on the course’s wiki that it will cover “the needs, issues, and operations behind running social software systems in a business environment”. It would be interesting to know how managing a community in that sort of environment differs from the public environment of running a Wikia site. Wikia are trying to build up best practices on the Central Wikia, with tips for wiki founders on building, promoting, and maintaining their wikis, but it’s based only on our own experiences with Wikipedia (Wikia staff now have over 40 years Wikipedia experience between them!) and not on any formal courses such as this one.
The reading list for the course in interesting too - there’s no one set textbook, but instead includes books I’ve been meaning to read and not gotten round to yet, like Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds“.
Unlike Harvard Law School’s course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion” where virtual attendees can participate via blogs, wikis, and Second Life, (related post), you’d need to be in Arizona to participate in this one. Hopefully Wikimedia’s newest project, Wikiversity, will provide something similar in the not too distant future. Wikibooks has a very rough beginning to something like this in its “Wiki Science” section.
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I’ve gotten completely behind on Wikimedia news over the last week, and I’ve not had time to read Andrew Lih’s blog posts about the partial unblock of Wikipedia in China, nor time to listen to the first episode of the newly launched Wikipedia Weekly which apparently includes a discussion about the unblocking. Wikipedia has an article on this, as will this week’s Wikipedia Signpost.
Tim, on the other hand, has been following the developments of this since the first blocks occured in mid-2004, so I was very happy to hand over my interview requests to him this week. He gave a great interview for ABC’s Connect Asia. You can download the MP3 to listen to it. It lasts 3 minutes and starts about 3 minutes into the recording of the 2nd half of the show.
Here’s a rough transcript…
Read the rest of this entry »
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If users on your wiki are claiming to use Opera and asking why they can’t view images, I suggest you ban them.
It might sound a bit harsh for asking a question, but the “question” is actually being asked by a spam bot.
I got a little suspicious when I saw this question for the third time today when checking Wikia sites. The same IP had asked the question on 45 of my wikis. It turns out the posts are some sort of test run or dysfunctional spam bot.
Google has 822 hits for the question. It’s mostly being asked on forums, but also on wikis. On Wikia, the question is being asked on pages that are frequently edited only by spam bots and not by real users, like [[Talk:Main Page/]]. The extra / at the end is presumably a bug in the spam bot since the actual discussion of the main page would be at [[Talk:Main Page]]. This page, and dozens like it, has had a run of similar comments made with no links added, mixed in with posts where actual spam is added. Other posts there have asked for diet tips or just added junk like “asdasda”.
It’s especially annoying since it’s wasting people’s time far more than regular spam because people are assuming good faith, as you should on a wiki, and answering the question.
If you find something like this, make sure you put the page on your watchlist after deleting it since it’s likely they’ll return with real spam on the same page. [[Talk:Main Page/]] on MetaCollab has been deleted 10 times in the last 2 months.
Update: The anti-spam site Chongqed suggests that this is a spam bot designed to work on blogs. When it posts to wikis, there’s no “URL” field, so it doesn’t leave one, but it is leaving one on blogs.
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Wikia
WikiChix
Freedom defined
