What's in a News Wiki?

By Daniel Bachhuber and William Davis

June 25, 2009

Examples We Spotted

Recent photos >

Duke Wiki

Campus information portal - http://www.duiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

Wiki entertainment

Organization directory

Might be useful to automatically generate this with the category function that MediaWiki offers

Organization profiles

Could include past history, meeting date and time, current members and officers, list of articles/posts about the most recent events

< RSS FEED

EDIT LINK >

< WIKI-GENERATED PICTURE< AND CONTENT

LINKS TO OTHER TOPICS >

< IF THERE IS MORE THAN JUST A DESCRIPTION, A LINK TO MORE

< ALL ARTICLES ON THE TOPIC

 

http://mainecampus.com/campus-currents

http://wiki.mainecampus.com

< AUTOMATIC LINKS TO TOPICS

< THE TOPICS THE ARTICLE IS TAGGED WITH

When there's no content...

THE CODE

GETWIKI PLUGIN

Tools you can use

 

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWikiPros:• Very popular, widely supported• Wikipedia is based on the MediaWiki structure• Well-established feature set with plugin architecture

Cons:• Difficult to integrate with WordPress• Doesn't share the same user permissions• Has a rather complex theming system• Requires a fair amount of technical know-how to install and

make changesWhat are some use cases where this might be the best option?

http://wp-wiki.org/Pros:• Integrated with WordPress, easy install• User permissions are based on WordPress roles• Email notifications to admins upon page edit

Cons: • Very, very simplistic• No "stub" concept and uses HTML instead of wiki markup• Would be a different approach to topical landing pages to

have to create a page for each one• Poor method for tracking contributions, etc.

What are some use cases where this might be the best option?

Enabling a page to be a wiki is just a checkbox

Anyone can edit if they're logged in, although versioning is based on how WordPress normally does it

Dashboard widget

http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwikiPros:• Easy install, runs db off text files

Cons:• Daniel didn't like it when we played with it

Things to consider• Who will be allowed to edit?• Who will be required to keep topics up to date? How will it fit

within the workflow?• What type of wiki will it be? Resource, topical, or otherwise?• What type of markup do you want?• Compare different options: http://www.wikimatrix.org/

Ideas for using the wiki

• Campus blog directory• Organization directory• Information on classes and different schools within the

university• Entertainment guide• Background information and context for different on-going

stories• Teacher and notable student biographies• Intrastaff note-sharing space

Ideal feature list?

• Track revisions to specific users; limit contributions to different user groups

• Email and RSS notifications with the ability to "watch" certain pages and topics

• Wiki-links and a sophisticated markup• Ability to associate images and other media with any page

o Rather than, say, embedding images, you'd associate the images with the page and it would automatically create a gallery

•