Intro to Wiki (Activity)

Wiki Activity

Preparation:

Description	Provides an overview of wikis and teaches basic skills for creating and editing wiki pages.
Source	Greg Hislop
Prerequisite Knowledge	None.
Estimated Time to Completion	30 minutes minutes
Learning Objectives	Upon completion, you will be able to: 1) Describe typical uses of wikis, 2) Create and edit a wiki page, 3) Discuss use of wikis in FOSS projects.
Materials/Environment	Access to the Web via a web browser.
Rights	Licensed CC BY-SA
Turn In	A wiki page with a short biography and (in a later assignment) a link to your blog

Background:

According to Wikipedia: "A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively." [1]

The Need for Web publishing

• Quick publication via the Web
• Decentralized control
  • But room for recovery
• Web page creation without HTML knowledge

The Solution - Wikis

• Access via a Web browser
• Simple text editor
• Character based formatting
• Built-in change tracking and roll-back

Wiki History

• Predecessors
  • Memex, hypertext, hypercards
• Wiki Wiki Web - 1994
  • Ward Cunningham
• Today: Lots of Wiki systems
  • Major platforms include: Media Wiki, Docuwiki, Tikiwiki, MoinMoin
  • Wiki text syntax is generally similar across platforms but with enough variation to be confusing
  • Wiki Creole attempts to provide a standard but has not been completely adopted

For our learning activity we will focus on Media Wiki, the wiki software that powers Wikipedia.

Directions:

Part 1 - Introduction to Wikis

1. Read the overview article about wikis. (After all, what starting point can there be for wikis other than the Wikipedia article?)
2. Read basics of MediaWiki page creation and page editing

Part 2 - Creating a wiki page

As part of your introduction to other POSSE participants, please create a short bio page for yourself in foss2serve.org. Do the following:

1. Go to the Foss2serve wiki.
2. Login and change your password. You should have received a user ID and temporary password by email. If you did not, please contact Greg Hislop at hislop@drexel.edu.
3. Create a new "User" page in the wiki for your user ID. You can see an example here and begin to create your page by modifying the URL of this example, changing the user ID to your own user ID.
4. Edit the participants page for this POSSE and add your own name and link your name to the User page you created in the prior step. Please keep the names in alphabetic order by last name. In a later activity, you will create a blog and add the link to your blog here too. The participants page is here

Part 3 - Wiki Examples

1. Browse several example wikis and try to define the role that they play. Starting points:

• Wikipedia is most widely known and used wiki. With over 4 million articles, it can be overwhelming. On the other hand, it contains lots of material about writing wiki pages, organizing wikis, managing large wikis, and using advanced features of MediaWiki. You might browse by starting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
• The Fedora Project Wiki is an example of a relatively large wiki used to support a FOSS project. The wiki provides a home for much of the technical documentation, and other materials related to operation of the Fedora project.

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