I’m glad that I got involved with the Wikicity project. But it’s different than working on a small, intimate site like the commweb wiki. I’ve had some contact with the sysops from the BIG WIKI this week. Just a reminder that I’m not there all by myself like I thought.

A few members from the class have expressed interest in doing projects there, and so I wasn’t feeling quite so lonesome anymore. But the other night when I was showing Rosie how to add a category tag to her wikicity user page, so that we could create a users index, I didn’t know that we had user pages all over the wikicity universe.

When you sign up for a wikicity id, you end up creating an account that follows you where ‘ere you roam in what now feels to me like the beginnings of a very cosmopolitan environment. These user pages have a discussion tab, and when people leave you a message on one of them you are notified of that when you sign in to your account. Radar and I have been communicating about the need for a logo. The necessity to have one is becoming clear to me.

I met someone the other day named GreenReaper. He was patrolling the recent changes pages and noticed that I had “blanked” Rosies user page in the Wikicities wiki. What happened is that the other night in class when I was showing Rosie how to add that category tag, we didn’t know that we weren’t in the Alaska wiki. Since we don’t have a different logo yet, one user page looks the same as the next if it has your name on it. So we put an Alaskans tag on her Wikicities wiki page and moved on our way. A few days later I noticed that we had created an Alaskans category in the main Wiki. It didn’t link to anything, and since it was an error, I thought that someone might not want it there. So I removed it. But GreenReaper straightened me out.

    I learned some things:
  • Blanking someone else’s page is a no-no, even if you mean well. (sorry, Rosie).
  • I now have over two hundred user pages at Wikkia.
  • People are paying attention to what is going on.
  • I need to keep an eye on the recent changes pages.
  • We need a new logo so that I can know where the heck I am in there.

I’ve had a little bit of contact with Angela, whose presence seems to be ubiquitous. That’s fine with me. She’s pleasant, but she is making sure that the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. I’m glad to know that someone is keeping an eye on me because I know I’ll learn something.

I loaded an image from a family vacation onto the front page of the site to dress it up a little. On the page it is store in, I wrote ‘tidewater glacier’ as a descriptor. But that wasn’t good enough for Angela. She asked me to provide some license details today. It took me quite a while to figure out how to write that link and find the place where the description was. IT WAS ON THE TALK PAGE FOR THE IMAGE. All I had to do was click the “edit” button for the image page. It took me a long time to realize that there are edit buttons for the content, and edit buttons for the discussion pages. They all look alike. Very confusing, but I’m getting oriented.

The best part of all of this is that these other people are showing me the ropes about working in the wiki. I’m going along doing what I can find the time to get done, and when I bump into someone, they (so far) politely redirect me. I’m impressed with how much there potentially will be for them to do. Right now, most of the wikicities are barren. But if they ever start to hum it’s going to be a busy little hive.