Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: sample document library: laying the groundwork

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Dirk Herr-Hoyman <hoymand [at] danenet.org> is the author of the message below.
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
after combining 3 replies from him on the same topic and deleting
excessive quoting.  Dirk's 5 replies on this topic (2 will be approved as
it shortly) were all held due to being over the 8K bytes (they had html
versions of replyas well).  Html combined with long quotes and the
alligator gets ya.  Fred

--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------
I'm going to chime in here, partly out of experience in my day job
at University of Wisconsin-Madison working for central IT.

Running a wiki for this purpose would be a GREAT addition to
cohousing.org
You do need to find a home for it, organizationally.
This will help alot with credibility and continuity.
It's easy to get this sort of thing going, not nearly as
much fun to keep it going.  Can still run this with volunteers...

Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is the obvious choice.
There's a lot of experience in using it, we all know Wikipedia.
Free and fairly straightforward to get going.

Here's one example of using Mediawiki I ran across just the other day
at Austin Cohousing:
http://www.kvaustin.org/wiki

I've got many examples of using Mediawiki for various projects
in the open source software realm, each one of these has successfully
dealt with the "vandalism" issue.  I'd not get stuck on that.
For example, there is Moodle
http://docs.moodle.org

Back at my day job, we are using Mediawiki for a "campus wide"
discussion
about the next "Engage Adaption theme" for the coming year.  It's a bit
of a grant program meant to seed the use of some up and coming
technology
for instructional use, and has been going for 12 years now.  This is
the first year we are trying out this wiki stuff.


On Feb 13, 2007, at 4:58 PM, Bud Tillinghast wrote:

> There seems to be a wiki-plus web site
> http://www.citizendium.org/
>
Yup, that's a Mediawiki based site.

These are sprouting like invasive weeds :-)

On Feb 13, 2007, at 2:42 PM, Stuart Joseph wrote:

> The only problem that I can see with a Wiki, is that anyone can edit or
> change the entries, unless there was a way to link to the PDF documents
> from the Wiki page.

What you can do with Mediawiki is have new users register for user
accounts and then they get approved by someone.  If there is abuse,
their account can be revoked.

However, the real thing that happens is that "self-correction" occurs,
which is basically consensus building in action.  That too is a feature
of Mediawiki, where you can get email alerts of changes for a particular
section.  Those that care, will look at the changes and "make
corrections".

While this sounds chaotic, in does work pretty well in practice.





> Regards,
> Andrew Netherton
> Laurel Creek Commons (plunging in head first)
> Waterloo, ON, Canada
>

--
Dirk Herr-Hoyman
Member of Arboretum Cohousing
Madison, WI
http://arboretumcohousing.org