Wiki

Many moons ago, my friend Hannibal and I were tasked with making a project Wiki for the Naval Academy's CDX  team.  Every lesson learned, every tool used had to have the appropriate documentation added to the Wiki.  By the end, I felt pretty savvy on the Wiki stuff.

That was then, this is now, however. Revisiting the MediaWiki software, I was quickly reminded about some of the quirks of the markup language and all the various ways an administrator has to customize the interface to get it up to a familiar level of Wiki functionality.

The biggest markup issue I had was with the image alignment. Somewhat counterintuitively, the markup language built into MediaWiki does not add breaks after images. More counterintuitively, the standard html "<br />" doesn't do the job either.  As a result, this was our article:

All that was left, of course, was to dig waaaaay into the documentation and I finally found--sandwiched between all sorts of other image format code a single sentence that provided a "<br style="clear: both" />" snippet. I'd never seen this before. It worked, however.

Finished page: http://www.english.digitalodu.com/courses/fa10/539/wiki/index.php?title=The_Joshua_Tree_Epiphany

That said, I still find MediaWiki extremely easy and user friendly.  It is still my favorite Wiki software out there and I appreciate that the Wikipedia Foundation folks are still willing to distribute older versions of their software for free. It really is a great example of why Open Source products can work.

Purpose:  

WikiMedia is an environment that allows users to publish Wiki articles in private domains. It produces a Wiki product that is similar in look and feel to Wikipedia.org's pages. 

Product: 

About as good as it gets. I know that the Wikipedia folks use a newer version of this software, and that it has additional functionality that I looked for when developing our page. The version of WikiMedia that we used was appropriate for the task.

Process:

Generating pages in groups is always ideal.  Having multiple users working on the same page provides a QA and often deepens the depth of the information presented. Larger groups make for better groups. I'm sure there is a number of diminishing returns, but Wiki software is by it's very nature collaborative. I think doing one article as an entire class would have been a more interesting exercise.