AoIR Wiki Was: A suggestion for reading lists and syllabi
Oh, good to know! And boy does this wiki need an update. I'm surprised we don't have regular "add it to the wiki" messages when people ask to compile reading lists and syllabi! How do we go about getting accounts for the wiki? My guess is the "transitioning the membership system" message is pretty outdated... On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Kelly Quinn <kquinn8@uic.edu> wrote:
Hi All,
We do have an AoIR wiki (http://wiki.aoir.org/page/Main_Page)--but some of the material is no longer available. As I recall, there were sections for digital research tools and teaching resources. Perhaps we can start an new section for syllabi/reading materials. Not sure when the new info will be up (Alex, any comment?).
Looking forward to seeing many of you in Denver!
Kelly Quinn
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Not as dated as you may think. Some context and history, for what its worth. I believe strongly that a wiki would be a useful thing. So do many others. For several years I carefully extracted the bibliographic discussions from AIR-L and put them on the wiki. If you look back you will find my periodic "put it on the wiki" messages. I was the only one editing the wiki. Well, that's not entirely true. When the wiki was open to the public, I and every spammer on the planet were the only editors. Wiki gardening takes a lot of time, particularly on the despamming side. For some time Jeremy also was kind enough to track on this. With the previous membership system, I linked accounts so that signed in members could edit. Eventually, someone still spammed it (MediaWiki is a nice target and unless carefully maintained gets easily exploited). But it was a bit moot, because there seemed little interest--it basically got near zero hits. Moreover, we now have transitioned to a maintained membership system (Wild Apricot) that makes such shared authentication near impossible. For the last few years, there have been calls to resuscitate the wiki. I'm very happy for this to happen (and I would actually suggest we do it through a pbworks or Wikia site, for a number of reasons that I would be happy to elucidate if anyone cares), but not alone. Three people have volunteered to act as maintainers in that time, but none have followed through. I cast no stones--it's something that I have myself have failed to prioritize, in large part because of the lack of contributors and visitors. Spread around, it's not as much work, but someone has to keep it up--and read it--or it's not worth the time. To move this out of the realm of the virtual and into the actual or something (paging Prof. Lévy?), I went ahead and started up a Wikia page: http://aoir.wikia.com/wiki/AoIR_Wiki I will further do an effort-matching pledge. For each of the next 50 edits to the site, I will match with my own contribution. - Alex On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, good to know! And boy does this wiki need an update. I'm surprised we don't have regular "add it to the wiki" messages when people ask to compile reading lists and syllabi!
How do we go about getting accounts for the wiki? My guess is the "transitioning the membership system" message is pretty outdated...
nicely done, Alex! I hope to challenge your edit-matching contributions! Speaking of wikis, AOIR has another wiki devoted exclusively to ethics issues. So we should definitely do some cross referencing, especially regarding syllabi and course reading suggestions, which is an area we do not (yet?) have on the ethics wiki. If anyone wants to add to or edit the aoir ethics wiki, they can sign up for an editor account. Or, if you just want to wander over there and admire the efforts of our ethics committee, please feel free to visit: http://ethics.aoir.org/ Annette ***************************************************** Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics & Communication, Aarhus University Guest Professor, Department of Informatics, Umeå University, Sweden Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago amarkham@gmail.com http://markham.internetinquiry.org/ Twitter: annettemarkham On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:35 AM, Alexander Halavais <halavais@gmail.com>wrote:
Not as dated as you may think.
Some context and history, for what its worth. I believe strongly that a wiki would be a useful thing. So do many others. For several years I carefully extracted the bibliographic discussions from AIR-L and put them on the wiki. If you look back you will find my periodic "put it on the wiki" messages. I was the only one editing the wiki.
Well, that's not entirely true. When the wiki was open to the public, I and every spammer on the planet were the only editors. Wiki gardening takes a lot of time, particularly on the despamming side. For some time Jeremy also was kind enough to track on this. With the previous membership system, I linked accounts so that signed in members could edit. Eventually, someone still spammed it (MediaWiki is a nice target and unless carefully maintained gets easily exploited). But it was a bit moot, because there seemed little interest--it basically got near zero hits. Moreover, we now have transitioned to a maintained membership system (Wild Apricot) that makes such shared authentication near impossible.
For the last few years, there have been calls to resuscitate the wiki. I'm very happy for this to happen (and I would actually suggest we do it through a pbworks or Wikia site, for a number of reasons that I would be happy to elucidate if anyone cares), but not alone. Three people have volunteered to act as maintainers in that time, but none have followed through. I cast no stones--it's something that I have myself have failed to prioritize, in large part because of the lack of contributors and visitors. Spread around, it's not as much work, but someone has to keep it up--and read it--or it's not worth the time.
To move this out of the realm of the virtual and into the actual or something (paging Prof. Lévy?), I went ahead and started up a Wikia page: http://aoir.wikia.com/wiki/AoIR_Wiki
I will further do an effort-matching pledge. For each of the next 50 edits to the site, I will match with my own contribution.
- Alex
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, good to know! And boy does this wiki need an update. I'm surprised we don't have regular "add it to the wiki" messages when people ask to compile reading lists and syllabi!
How do we go about getting accounts for the wiki? My guess is the "transitioning the membership system" message is pretty outdated...
The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Great Job Alex, I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit... is a pretty good version of the prior wiki. On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso
Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue. Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting open-source software, and 3) no ads. Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new accounts on our own wiki...). I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new accounts for people that need them. --- Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit... is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Hello all, I, too, would support the wiki. I'm always encouraged by the discussion on this list, but I was looking for a better way to access information from some of the discussions. Having recently gone through the process of combing the MediaWiki manual, I can tell you that the current anti-spam extensions are quite good. Spam on my site was reduced to practically nothing. The current version of MediaWiki being used for the AOIR site (1.16) is a bit outdated. We could simply update the install, and then install the necessary anti-spam extensions. The current AOIR install has no extensions to prevent spam. Let me know how I can help! Ben Birkinbine Ph.D. Candidate, Media Studies University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication On 2013-08-06 9:24, Alex Leavitt wrote:
Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue. Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting open-source software, and 3) no ads.
Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new accounts on our own wiki...).
I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new accounts for people that need them.
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit... is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Alex et al, I think you list my main pluses for a hosted solution. And I acknowledge the main advantages to self-hosting with MediaWiki. As I noted, many have volunteered to maintain the wiki, and many have failed to follow through. I'm not naming names, because there is no blame to be taken up here--but it's work that generally gets pushed to the back of the queue, particularly when people have to be going up for tenure ("I owe my tenure to my awesome wiki gardening" said no one ever), or looking for a job, or breathing. In other words, we are not more reliable than outsourcing the work, and so we've looked for managed solutions in a number of areas. If there is a very strong feeling among a community of contributors that we should be using MediaWiki over something like Wikia, we could look a managed solution like Cloudways. But I think it makes more sense to go with a platform that is more user friendly to those without experience editing a MediaWiki (e.g., Wikipedia). If the ads are an issue, we could buy our way out of them. But for me, they aren't *enough* of a problem for that. Frankly, I don't want to be a pessimist, and I am excited by the enthusiasm around building the wiki. I also am weighing the present enthusiasm against many years of people saying they wanted to work on the Wiki (content-wise) but few actually contributing. My suggestion would be that we build it on Wikia. If there are people regularly contributing, and there is consensus that it makes sense to bring it back under local control, and someone on the Executive is willing to agree to take on the burden of managing it, then I'll be happy to migrating the content. But until there is the commitment to the content, I think Wikia is a good interim measure that allows us to test the waters. Best, Other Alex On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue. Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting open-source software, and 3) no ads.
Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new accounts on our own wiki...).
I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new accounts for people that need them.
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit... is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- -- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net // // Please attribute any stupid errors above to autocorrect on my phone. // (But I probably was typing on a keyboard.)
I want to express my strong preference for the organization to have its wiki on aoir.org domain, controlled by us, and not monetized (and web-bugged) by third parties. Currently on http://aoir.wikia.com/ I'm confronted by a Skylanders advertisement, Mazda banner, and a "Naked and Afraid" video commercial. And that's just on the top of the page.... There are also 8 tracking bugs/cookies being added to by browser. I don't understand why we can't host MediaWiki and lock down editing so it doesn't get overun by spambots. I've had MW on my own site for years, and by requiring a user account to edit (and I control who gets user accounts), there's zero spam. $0.02, Michael -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org On Aug 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Alexander Halavais <halavais@gmail.com> wrote:
Alex et al,
I think you list my main pluses for a hosted solution. And I acknowledge the main advantages to self-hosting with MediaWiki. As I noted, many have volunteered to maintain the wiki, and many have failed to follow through. I'm not naming names, because there is no blame to be taken up here--but it's work that generally gets pushed to the back of the queue, particularly when people have to be going up for tenure ("I owe my tenure to my awesome wiki gardening" said no one ever), or looking for a job, or breathing. In other words, we are not more reliable than outsourcing the work, and so we've looked for managed solutions in a number of areas.
If there is a very strong feeling among a community of contributors that we should be using MediaWiki over something like Wikia, we could look a managed solution like Cloudways. But I think it makes more sense to go with a platform that is more user friendly to those without experience editing a MediaWiki (e.g., Wikipedia). If the ads are an issue, we could buy our way out of them. But for me, they aren't *enough* of a problem for that.
Frankly, I don't want to be a pessimist, and I am excited by the enthusiasm around building the wiki. I also am weighing the present enthusiasm against many years of people saying they wanted to work on the Wiki (content-wise) but few actually contributing. My suggestion would be that we build it on Wikia. If there are people regularly contributing, and there is consensus that it makes sense to bring it back under local control, and someone on the Executive is willing to agree to take on the burden of managing it, then I'll be happy to migrating the content. But until there is the commitment to the content, I think Wikia is a good interim measure that allows us to test the waters.
Best,
Other Alex
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue. Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting open-source software, and 3) no ads.
Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new accounts on our own wiki...).
I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new accounts for people that need them.
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit... is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- -- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net // // Please attribute any stupid errors above to autocorrect on my phone. // (But I probably was typing on a keyboard.) _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
There really is no reason we can't. Alex's main criticism was loss of people over time willing to maintain it. If someone's willing to give me access to the wiki backend tonight/tomorrow, I'll be more than happy to update it (given Ben's optimism that the updated infrastructure will be spam-proof) and start setting people up with accounts. --- Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Michael Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I want to express my strong preference for the organization to have its wiki on aoir.org domain, controlled by us, and not monetized (and web-bugged) by third parties.
Currently on http://aoir.wikia.com/ I'm confronted by a Skylanders advertisement, Mazda banner, and a "Naked and Afraid" video commercial. And that's just on the top of the page....
There are also 8 tracking bugs/cookies being added to by browser.
I don't understand why we can't host MediaWiki and lock down editing so it doesn't get overun by spambots. I've had MW on my own site for years, and by requiring a user account to edit (and I control who gets user accounts), there's zero spam.
$0.02, Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Aug 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Alexander Halavais <halavais@gmail.com> wrote:
Alex et al,
I think you list my main pluses for a hosted solution. And I acknowledge the main advantages to self-hosting with MediaWiki. As I noted, many have volunteered to maintain the wiki, and many have failed to follow through. I'm not naming names, because there is no blame to be taken up here--but it's work that generally gets pushed to the back of the queue, particularly when people have to be going up for tenure ("I owe my tenure to my awesome wiki gardening" said no one ever), or looking for a job, or breathing. In other words, we are not more reliable than outsourcing the work, and so we've looked for managed solutions in a number of areas.
If there is a very strong feeling among a community of contributors that we should be using MediaWiki over something like Wikia, we could look a managed solution like Cloudways. But I think it makes more sense to go with a platform that is more user friendly to those without experience editing a MediaWiki (e.g., Wikipedia). If the ads are an issue, we could buy our way out of them. But for me, they aren't *enough* of a problem for that.
Frankly, I don't want to be a pessimist, and I am excited by the enthusiasm around building the wiki. I also am weighing the present enthusiasm against many years of people saying they wanted to work on the Wiki (content-wise) but few actually contributing. My suggestion would be that we build it on Wikia. If there are people regularly contributing, and there is consensus that it makes sense to bring it back under local control, and someone on the Executive is willing to agree to take on the burden of managing it, then I'll be happy to migrating the content. But until there is the commitment to the content, I think Wikia is a good interim measure that allows us to test the waters.
Best,
Other Alex
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue. Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting open-source software, and 3) no ads.
Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new accounts on our own wiki...).
I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new accounts for people that need them.
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?tit...
is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
Great Job Alex,
I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in 2003-2005. It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside, and yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url. It would be good to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the new site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki by one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers and a few other things. Those sorts of things were handy and drew some traffic at the time. However, they slowly became dated i guess. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech
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participants (7)
-
Alex Leavitt -
Alexander Halavais -
Annette Markham -
Benjamin J Birkinbine -
jeremy hunsinger -
Jeremy hunsinger
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Michael Zimmer