CSL Wikipedia Presentation

A Quote to Start With

The quote by itself

“Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.”

Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

A Bus

• WikiWikiWeb was the first site to be called a wiki.
• Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995.
• It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki" shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals.

MediaWiki is a Foundation

Wikipedia Meta-Wiki Wiktionary Wikibooks Wikiquote Wikisource Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Incubator Wikispieces Wikinews wikiversity

MediaWiki is software

• GPL = FREE + Open Source

• MediaWiki server best on LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php), but also Windows and Mac

• Scalable

• Small: 36 MB of PHP pages once installed

Customization

• Skins & Customization

• SOME SKINS
• 

  Skin 1

• 

  Skin 2

• 

  Skin 3

• 

  Skin 4

• 

  Skin 5

• 

  Skin 6

Editing

• Demo Page
• Yes, we can do math!

Searching

• Search for keywords
• Create new pages

Versioning

• driver.c C Driver for Assembly Language

Access Control

• .htaccess
• Config files

Backup

• Cron
• MySqlDump
• rsync

Setting up one's own Wiki site

• Wikia
• Third parties, e.g. http://www.siteground.com/mediawiki-hosting.htm

Research on Wikipedia

• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
  • studying conversations dominance
  • investigating pedagogical aspects of Wikipedia from an evolutionary, complexity science perspective. For example, one of their research questions relates to whether the Wikipedia model leads to pedagogically strong content.
  • Wiki as a collaborative tools in school
  • examining antagonistic knowledge production of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Wikipedia
  • mining for automatic Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction (IE) and Question Answering (QA)
  • Civil particitpation in virtual communities? A systematic analysis of the German Wikipedia-project.
  • wikis and content management systems.
  • collaberative culture
  • writing thesis on quality in the german Wikipedia
  • international survey about the motivation of participants in Wikipedia
  • examining the Green Party of Canada's use of a wiki to create their last platform
  • is writing on the Wikipedia and the democratisation of human knowledge, looking both at the structure of the Wikipedia and the interaction of its community of editors
  • working on automated question answering against Wikipedia.
  • working on changing conceptions of knowledge and their relation to technology.
  • doing research on Social Software, online learning communities and communities of practice in the context of Global Software Development.
  • Wikipedia as a case study in participatory journalism.
  • writing a PhD thesis on collaborative opinion forming and deliberation with wikis.
  • working about multimedia content distribution schemes in large wikis, like Wikipedia
  • The application of a Wiki as central instrument of communication for the Thesaurus maintenance at connected libraries in separate locations
  • is writing a master's thesis about the Wikipedia in the context of the Enlightenment
  • teaching in collective writing using wikis and a rhetoric of wiki, investigating effective composing strategies, page patterns, linking, refactoring.
  • writing on the power structure, the economy and the ethical outcomes of the Wikipedia
  • extracting structured information such as infobox data and multi-lingual abstracts from Wikipedia
  • studies wikipedia as a social network, from both points of view of social and computer sciences.
  • transforming Wikipedia from a content base into a knowledge base.
  • He is developing WikiTrust, a reputation system for wiki authors, and a trust system for wiki text.
  • is it a social movement? how is power structured on it? are there nationalisms on Wikipedia?

A Parting Quote

You work your labyrinthine ears,
those perfect disciplines,
registering all that hums, ticks.
O you encyclopedia you [...]

Spencer Reece
The Clerk's Tale.
at the Poetry Center at Smith on 9/30/08, 7:30 p.m.