1 is A | 2 is B

As I mentioned in another post, I have been learning what it means to be a wiki administrator. MediaWiki is a blank canvas. It comes with some powerful tools, and some themes, but the power of the software is really in it’s flexability and extensibility. The software itself is quite small, but can easily be used to create a massive, highly organized, and interactive website. This comes at the price of possibly intensive administration requirements.

When I first began the PostAnarchism Wiki, I opened it up to the community for development shortly after it was installed. I realized that I could not generate interest by presenting an entirely blank canvas and started to think about the responsibilities a wiki administrator (or SysOp) has to the community.

It was hard for me to find examples of wiki’s that were similar to my project. I trust the community that will be working on it, because it is small and mostly my friends. The bigger projects have much too much beaurocracy and rules than is needed for a small wiki. Often, however, smaller wiki’s are used as websites rather than traditional wiki applications (centralized documentation development). They have highly customized themes, and it’s hard to even recognized the underlying software. These do not have much community moderation policies because they are so locked down and are meant for many more people to be reading than editing (sometimes just a few editors).

A good example that I did end up taking a lot of ideas from is the Urban Dead Wiki. Urban Dead is a MMPORPG about zombies and survivors in a city that I used to play a lot. It is a lot of fun and the community is great, espcially the wiki community. I learned a lot about how a healthy wiki functions and the steps that can be taken to ensure ease of scalability.

I developed a help section, with some templates and policy documents on how the wiki should run. all of this is encouraged to be enhanced and changed by the community as they see fit and as it grows. I then came up with a list of categories, ideas, articles that should be included and organized them into a simple hierarchy. I stubbed a lot of pages and created the basic category structures and what they should include. Then I broke for lunch…just kidding this took a while.

I also added a few features of my own. I created a pseudo-namespace called Blog: which a user can carve out a piece of the wiki for developing personal projects. Blog:Username is differs from User: Username in that it’s purpose is for development of articles that will seek publication rather than just information about yourself or internal-wiki project development. So the idea is to post a draft of an article and seek community feedback and corrections; when the user feels satisfied he/she can seek publication of that article or publish it in the “full articles” section of the wiki.

Wiki’s are only as good as the people who develop them. As the administrator of this wiki, I realized my job was a lot bigger than installing the software and setting up a database. I hope these steps I took in developing this wiki will inspire the community to develop content for it. MediaWiki is a very interesting application, and is almost limitless in what you can learn about it.

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