I’ve been teaching myself how to wiki. It’s intersting the way links are made. You can create a link to a page that doesn’t exist. Just put [[around]] something. The word in brackets becomes a link to a page that is named whatever that word is. When you click on a link that has no target (red-colored text), instead of showing an error, you navigate to a blank page that is ready to edit.
I made a couple of dozen old pages that document my learning process. Nothing gets thrown away, old pages simply move farther back in the chain. I made a redirect page from the default page. I learned that it’s a good idea to use the edit summary box so that you can remember what each of the edits was for. I copied some of the other wikicities’ pages and pasted their stuff so I could see how it worked before I ended up dumping them. That was a bit easier than reading the tutorial. I found out that the link to the [[about]] page is in the footer – and that I don’t have to create that link. I learned about the discussion page for each of the content pages. I learned about the user pages. There’s a lot more to learn, and it’s pretty fun. It seems as if wikis can be more social than blogs simply because everybody can write everywhere. To get anything done, you would have to let people know what you are trying to accomplish.
I’m not sure what direction to encourage the development of an Alaska wiki to go. I want to think about that. The lack of precedent leaves the universe of possibilities quite large. Information architecture should be addressed, I think. I had a notion about setting up a site map menu tree for a navigational model. But I decided that might be the WRONG thing to do to get a wiki project to grow and develop into something useful to people. Still, it seems to me that there should be some kind of structure, and there should be examples that suggest possibilities to other potential users – possibilities that nobody has considered. But what that structure and those examples are…I can’t say. As in teaching, there is an art to finding the right balance between freedom and authority. Too much authority, and you squelch creativity. Too much freedom and you get worthless garbage.
One possibility is that civic organizations, clubs, and families that live in Alaska could use a wiki to coordinate acitivities and publish events they are sponsoring. All of the interest groups around the state could use the wiki to conduct business.
I want to think about the ways that a wiki could be
- useful
- entertaining
- expressive
- irritating
- confusing
I have some research to do.
