IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content†on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online.The article discusses the challenges of trying to "encompass every aspect of human knowledge" versus including including everything no matter how "trivial". Does anyone else think that the restrictions on Wikipedia are getting tighter and tighter than advertised and originally planned?
Create a Wiki based platform for places, organizations, and events to be easily accessible to the Cleveland area, primarily through Google Maps.A couple of years ago, I tried to organize the creation of wiki.cleveland.com. It generated some interest, and I talked to some people about it. But I ultimately wasn't able to attract the attention of the people necessary. Focusing on events, though, is a crowded area. Upcoming and Meetup.com have the most people. The Cleveland Web Standards group cross-lists their events to both ( here and here) and the Cleveland Bloggers group uses meetup.com here.
MathSciJournalWiki is a freely-editable resource for information on scholarly journals, especially in mathematics. It aims to be a central resource for understanding the journal system, both in its academic and economic aspects.
It lists the price history and numbers of pages for many of the journals used in mathematics and physics. It also highlights various news in the math and science publishing industry.
.3x release according to
Kwiki's changelog, but I remember using the
.1x version (when it was
CGI::Kwiki) for quite a while before leaping to the completely rewritten codebase of the
.3x series. There's no history of the
.1x versions on the
Kwiki website or the
Kwiki CPAN page. The
Wayback machine helped me nail it down to a closer date because I remember doing the upgrade from
.17 to
.18.
.17 was released on June 10th, 2003 according to this
wayback page.
.18 was released on September 10th, 2003 according to
this wayback page. So I'm going to estimate that the internal wiki was first in use circa July of 2003. Since that time, we've switched to
DokuWiki.As the article further mentions, last year my legal writing students collaboratively authored a Legal Brief Writing Checklist. It isn't all that bad; it contains a lot of useful information and advice, and links to a lot of useful online resources. More importantly, the students learned a hell of a lot. And you know what? You -- whoever you are -- can revise, edit, and add to it. Hell, import it into Wikipedia if you want. In legal writing, we're all waiting for the definitive legal writing text. Maybe instead of waiting for some contemporary Aristotle to write a modern Rhetoric, we should all, together, be writing it instead.
A while ago
Chris added a
login method to the
CAS module in
CaseClasses. It returns a
mechanize Browser object so that you can programmatically surf the web as if you had logged into CAS in a real web browser.
CaseClasses also has a Codes module that has the abbreviated codes for majors, departments, and buildings. I combined these two features to tackle the Building codes project on the Case Wiki.
P.S.: There is a MediaWiki API that would normally be used to do this kind of stuff, but according to Greg, editing is not fully functional yet.
Think you could add a lot to the wiki with some automated task? Here's how it was done.
First, you'll need mechanize and CaseClasses:
$ sudo easy_install mechanize
$ sudo easy_install http://opensource.case.edu/svn/CaseClasses/python/trunk
Now log into CAS with mechanize:
import Case
from getpass import getpass
username = 'bmb12'
password = getpass() # Enter a password without echoing
cas = Case.CAS()
browser = cas.login(username, password)
You can open any page with
browser and interact with it as a logged in Case user. So let's go to the Case Wiki and log in:
browser.set_handle_robots(False)
browser.open("http://wiki.case.edu")
browser.follow_link(text_regex='Log In')
Editing can be done like so:
browser.open("http://wiki.case.edu/User:Brian.Beck")
browser.follow_link(text='Edit this page')
browser.select_form(name='editform')
browser['wpTextbox1'] += " Also, this guy sucks!"
browser.submit()
Automating the building code edits was done like so:
for code, name in Case.Codes.buildings.iteritems():
url = "http://wiki.case.edu/%s" % name.replace(' ', '_')
try:
browser.open(url)
except:
print "Didn't find %r." % name
else:
browser.follow_link(text='Edit this page')
browser.select_form(name='editform')
source = browser['wpTextbox1']
add_text = "The building code for %s is [[building code:=%s]].\r\n"
add_text %= (name, code)
if 'code:=' not in source:
insert_at = source.find('{{Building')
if insert_at != -1:
new_source = source[:insert_at] + add_text + source[insert_at:]
else:
new_source = source + add_text
browser['wpTextbox1'] = new_source
browser.submit()
print "Added building code for %r." % name
Happy automating!
Update: The same has now been done for the Street addresses project. Check out the discussion to see how.Chris Craft, on his weblog Open Source Classroom, wrote a length entry on choosing a wiki engine for his class.
A few days ago I got a pretty good idea for a collaborative learning "project"... We began with the question, "Should the United States let people in," just for the asking. Well the reason I am posting this here is I have been investigating ways to collaborate. I divided my class (rather, they divided themselves) into two sides, the Pros and the Cons. Some did not necessarily agree with their chosen side, but wanted to explore the reasoning behind it. So, how do I make this open source and web 2.0 tasty?
Here are my wiki-based thoughts...
1. Since I know teachers in Peru, I could easily have my kids post to a Wiki and then have the professors and students comment to it.
2. I could have other teachers from other classes around the world, from San Fernando, CA (maybe Marco Torres ?) to Shanghai (Jeff, you listening?) have their students read and comment.
In the end, he chose Wikispaces. But in the process, he ended up taking a look at MediaWiki, JotSpot, Drupal, phpNuke, DokuWiki, and a handful of other third-party hosted wikis; and he included his thoughts. I will quote heavily.
I began with Mediawiki, made famous by Wikipedia, of course. I found it to be feature-rich and enjoyed its full range of extensions. The trouble is simply that it requires too much knowledge of WikiText, and my kids are doing well if they can handle even basic WYSIWYG commands! Wikimedia is full and robust, but not a great choice for the type of Wiki I want for my class. I am aware that it is possible to integrate FCKEditor into Mediawiki, and I have done so for some of my other Content Management System installs, but the security risks were too much for me to handle. I need an easy solution for my kids.
I found [ Jotspot] to be a little tough to use... given the lack of a quality WYSIWYG editor integrated. I just know my kids would get confused by exclamation points and the like. Remember, these students leave me on October 20, so that cancels the teach-them-and-it-will-be-ok argument. I have 9 classes left with them, I need a turnkey solution.
I like the Wikispaces idea, it was a really clean environment and I like the natural feel of the WYSIWYG editor for my kids. I think it would seem native to them and reduce the learning curve. I would prefer a little more ability to categorize the pages, but I can deal without it.
DokuWiki is mainly aimed at developers and small companies trying to create documentation on something... Troublingly, there was very little in the way of access control (outside of the standard .htaccess) and no commenting ability built it. There is a plugin manager, but I quickly hit roadblock after roadblock that I could not justify overcoming with Wikispaces luring me back with a siren's call. So Dokuwiki went out the window