Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Class Wiki

We need some sort of organization for the class wiki, no doubt about it. I feel like a good place to start is breaking up the wiki into certain categories, assigning a group of people to each category. Last week when we attempted to create our class wiki, it was out of control. One person would create an entry, and two minutes later someone would delete it or overwrite to their desire. People also edited entries and added their own personal opinions. By assigning particular people to particular topics, it would make the process of editing entries and adding entries to our class wiki less chaotic.
I feel that another important factor in creating a successful class wiki is making sure all entries are neutral. An entry should not promote or demote a particular topic, group, building, etc. Instead, the entries should only contain information from other reliable sources. That is a big cause of all the chaos last week, people disagreed with the opinions in an entry, deleted it, and wrote in their opinions. A wiki is not supposed to be based on opinions, rather than factual information. If however, opinions are wanting to be expressed, the wiki as a whole should be consistent. By this I mean that the class as a whole should decide whether or not they want to include opinions and go through with it. This leads me to my next discussion. If we were to add opinions on our class wiki, we should, in fact, cite our sources for our reliable, factual information.
The wiki should flow properly. There should be several topics, with other topics branching off on them. They shouldn't all be on the home page of the wiki because that is very unorganized and makes it difficult to navigate from topic to topic.
In conclusion, the main key to make our class wiki successful is organization. If the wiki is organized, it is easier for people to obtain the information they are looking for quicker, which is more effective. Also, the wiki must be consistent throughout. Lastly, each person should be assigned to a topic. This prevents chaos and controversy between the classmates.

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