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Universal Wiki Edit Button version 0.1: a work-in-progress

19 October 2007

How cool would it be if there was a shared symbol on every wiki, where people got to know that any place they see this symbol, they can click it and edit the page? How great would it be if we came to agreement on such a symbol in a bottom-up, wiki-way? We can have such a symbol.

The idea of a Universal Wiki Edit Button began at RoCoCo in Montreal. This inter-wiki project to first adopt version 0.1 involves participants from several wiki communities and wiki engines (more are welcome!). We think version 0.1 will define the metaphor to use, and that subsequent versions will expand on the visual appearance of the icon. If individual wiki communities can come together, with some symbolic unity (a common brand, in a way), intended to makes all stronger. More than that though, through shared actions and decision-making, the larger wiki community can become more self-aware. The strength of this larger community is also demonstrated though our ability to self-organize for a common aim. The following two sections are from the actual work-in-progress UniversalWikiEditButton document. Please join us!

Purpose

Just like the weblog community has the orange "radio waves" RSS icon , we want an easily-recognizable universal Edit This button. This is a movement to start the ball rolling. When this process succeeds, the participating wikis will include this edit button in some way. Just as the RSS icon evolved over time (......), we recognize that the UniversalWikiEditButton will also evolve over time. Rather than struggling to create a perfectly evocative button for version 0.1, we recognize our primary objective is quickly getting to wide deployment of a single icon that is good enough. This exercise will be a success when we can demonstrate the ability of the wider wiki community to self organize for collective action.

Principles

The following principles guided our selection of the 0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton and will inform our selection of version 0.2

• Compatible
• Language-independent
• Wiki-engine-independent
• Evocative of Edit
• Metaphorically Rich
• Professional
• Simple
• Skinnable
• Re-taskable

Sunday, 21st through Tuesday, the 23rd of October is WikiSym, an ACM conference co-located with OOPSLA in Montreal. WikiSym will be an ideal place to work further on the UniversalWikiEditButton, to unleash some wiki-creativity to move the process forward, hopefully concluding with a v0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton that wiki developers can add to their wikis.

Contributors: TedErnst, Obed Suhail

Returning and New Readers

15 October 2007

Recently AboutUs started doing something in the vein of Richard K Miller's post last winter about his Seth Godin inspired plugin which tries to distinguish between new and returning readers to a WordPress weblog. Here is our attempt to help new readers to the AboutUs wiki, heck, really any wiki.

First off, we are in a continuing phase of understanding WhoWeAre and how we exist in this new emergent internet. We realize many of you are discovering wikis and that they initially can be confusing. Hey we are here to help you with that, teach TheWikiWay, and other exciting things about wiki.

To help us explain this, we have set up messages (currently for non-logged in people) at the top of our site, which try to help readers by providing a clearer message.

For example, the message on the AboutUs home page and what folks see when you click around the website:

Another example is the message for people who come to AboutUs via an external site, such as a search engine like Google:

These two sets of messages are an attempt to serve up better messaging based on where you are on AboutUs and how you got here. In that spirit, please check out WhoWeAre and AboutUsTagline for other ideas. If you have any thoughts on possible messages, feel free to add them here: AboutUs PossibleMessages.

Contibutors: MarkDilley, Vinh Nguyen, TakKendrick

WikiWednesday wrap up

4 October 2007

David McCabe gives a presentation on his new LiquidThreads extension.

Portland Recap

In Portland, the group discussed quite a few things, including getting a presentation from David McCabe, a developer who's created LiquidThreads, an extension allowing for threaded discussion on TalkPages in MediaWiki installations (like Wikipedia, AboutUs, Wikia and wikiHow). The LiquidThreads is currently being tested on WikiEducator.org; the demo received rave reviews from all in attendance.

Llywrch shows off his WikiWear.

In addition to McCabe, the Portland WikiWednesday consisted of a number of Wikipedians, AboutUs staff, Charles Radley of Lunarpedia.org, Chuck Kisselburg from ICANNWiki and a few other area enthusiasts.

The next WikiWednesday in Portland will be held on Nov. 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the AboutUs offices, 107 SE Washington St., Suite 520, Portland, OR 97214.

Ann Arbor Recap

NOTE: Ann Arbor notes courtesy of BrianKerr and taken from ArborWiki.org.

Ann Arbor's Wiki Wednesday, a last minute affair, was lunchtime (the 3rd of October 2007), 12:15pm at SilviosOrganicPizza.

4 people in attendance for lovely pizza and conversation. Topics included:

• Google Analytics for ArborWiki -- 'fake click' integration of revision numbers, etc., as a way to link user agents and other info to edits
• weird spambot behavior on ArborWiki:
  • one-line nonsense word spam
  • ampersand truncator spam
  • recaptcha work Matt did, how this is helping
• wiki-library, wiki-map, wiki-blog integrations
• The-Communicator.org [1] versus the Ann Arbor News