From Zero To Wiki In the Time It Takes to Eat A Burrito
Recently I've become pretty involved with The Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization which runs wikipedia) the wikimedia commons (where Ardvark lives) and wikinews.
I'm fascinated by collaborative writing and once you get familiar with using a wiki, they're really brilliant things. Even the syntax is elegant: to link to another article in a wiki you don't have to stop what you're doing, look up the link, make the href in your html, etc etc... All you have to do is wrap a word in double square brackets, and [[viola]] - it's now a link to the article of that name.
The first wiki I used was the AudacityTeam.org project wiki, and while I was using it I got the idea that there were massive applications for that type of communal collaborative environment outside the open source world. Instead of documenting and discussing an open source audio editor, we could be using the knowledge management potential of a wiki at Common Ground to develop our projects and staff.
I've been toying with the idea for weeks, and this friday I had an hour to kill while waiting for lunch and took the plunge.
Around the time my burrito arrived, I had found the source for wikimedia and was downloading it. I idly clicked away, going through the extremely easy and straightforward setup, and by the time I was done with my burrito, Common Ground had its very own wiki.
If you've already got a LAMP server, installing mediawiki is as simple as
- download
- untar
- point your browser to the directory you just made (which you may want to rename to just "wiki")
I was excited. Too excited, perhaps, but I love it when an idea comes to fruition so easily. I immediately began to tweak it to be CGC specific and added some starting point articles, happily double square bracketing any word that I thought should be filled in later.
The brilliance of a wiki is that those square bracketed words create red links, which means that there's no article under them yet. When a reader clicks on the link, it asks them to fill in whatever information they know. They write a bit and create more links, which invites more people to write.
The entire system is one giant open invitation to users to get involved and add their input.
I've now spent a big chunk of my weekend filling in what I know about Common Ground in an effort to get the ball rolling. There's a lot of writing to be done to really make this a useful tool, but I think there are a lot of people itching to take some ownership of the projects they work in, and sharing their knowledge and expertise is a great way to do that.
In interest of full disclosure, the burrito was from Burritoville, so that thing was HUGE.
