Concept and Structures for the 52°North Wiki

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This page is currently under development. All ideas and structures have NOT yet been decided or put in place.

Goals

To make the wiki more useful and more usable, the 52°North communities and staff members need a coherent concept for the contents of the wiki and how it is organised. Ideally, a user who know one community web also quickly understands another one. The wiki must be practically usable for both first visitors who seek information and support on a specific software product, as well as for experiences contributors who use the wiki for project management.

Motivation of a wiki

Why should we use it at all? Collect arguments (and counter-arguments!) here.

• Easy collaborative editing of documentation
• Online and always up to date
• External lists
  • http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Use_a_Wiki
  • http://www.slideshare.net/webworks/why-use-a-wiki-an-introduction-to-the-latest-online-publishing-format > also great arguments how to run a wiki successfully
  • http://www.edutopia.org/blog/wiki-classroom-audrey-watters
• Maintaining a wiki is less work than regular websites
• ...

Measures to ensure wiki usability

Technical measures

The wiki's design and technology shall first and foremost allow easy reading of all contents on desktop devices by information seeking users. Only then shall requirements of heavy users, authors/editors and mobile users be met.

These measures are conducted by 52°North IT-support team as much as possible as part of their existing technical maintenance.

Organisational measures

All known issues with the wiki are due to a lack of editorial work. We cannot enforce the wiki but can try to make it as useful as possible for community members (see also here for a good document about using wikis).

Therefore a fixed number of hours, e.g. 3 hours per month, are provided to a specified group of 52°North staff for editorial work on the wiki.

Tasks are as follows:

• Maintain a wiki page with rules and guidelines about using the wiki: guidelines
• Offer help to maintainers of a page/the community in the form of online courses. These courses are provided as online meetings and effectively go through the respective sections of the WikiGuide. Estimated work for initial preparation of the content for this courses: 5-6 hours.
  • "Wiki quick intro", 30 mins., once per quarter on a fixed date, focussed on using and simple editing
  • "Wiki editor", 1 h., once per year, focussed on (advanced) editing
• Editorial work on each wiki web (in turn, one web per month)
  • Directly fix minor issues:
    • add introductory sentences
    • archive outdated pages
    • improve language
    • fix spelling mistakes
    • contact authors for clarifications of unclear content
  • Apply guidelines
  • Contact page maintainer with suggestions or offer re-structuring of pages.

Potential editorial team: Ann (language, understandability), Eike / Daniel / Henning (technical perspective, experienced wiki users, wiki admin)