Draft Wiki Contributions
Learning Objectives
This class, Information Technology in Business, is
supposed to deal with thinking through how business should adopt new information
technologies. Wikis are a new form of publishing and communicating, and they are
being rapidly put to use in many business areas. Some implementations have been
successful -- others have failed. This makes a perfect test case
area for us to study about how and when to apply new technology in business.
While completing this activity, you should:
- Learn how to build new pages, add sections to existing pages, insert
internal and external links, and track changes in an evolving wiki.
- Become comfortable using basic formatting and editing procedures to
create well organized content within a wiki.
- Work cooperatively with others to build high-quality content pages.
- Provide constructive criticism and improvements to an ongoing
collaborative effort.
- Conduct original research to determine what to write, and contribute to
a growing body of intellectual knowledge.
- Help build a sense of shared community at Oregon State University and
elsewhere in a "pay-it-forward" type of activity that
benefits everyone.
Requirements
For this Draft Wiki activity, you are to make enough contributions (either in
quantity or quality) so that your mentors can see what your
Final Wiki contributions will be like.
This assignment is quite open-ended.
Your grade will be based on how useful your wiki contributions are. Thus, I plan
on having only two simple requirements:
- You need to edit a wiki to add value. An obvious wiki to edit is
the
OSU wiki--and
I think that approach will be simplest and most appropriate for most
students. On the other hand, you should not feel limited to editing the
OSU wiki. For
example, if you have expertise or knowledge about a specialized area of life
(such as the behavior of bark beetles), then you might create or extend an
entry in
Wikipedia. Or you might edit or extend any wikis at Oregon State
University or elsewhere. The choice is entirely up to you. My only
requirement is that you add value to a publicly accessible wiki.
If you have good ideas for content but a weaker ability to write well, post
your ideas and trust that others are likely to clean up and edit your
submission. On the other hand, if you have fewer content ideas and an
ability to write well, you might focus on revising and editing other
people's submissions. The choice of how to participate is up to you. Your
goal should be to add value to a wiki by helping fill it with lively and
useful content for your colleagues -- either in BA271 or elsewhere on the
planet. Overall, your goal should be to make a positive contribution to the
overall body of knowledge stored in publicly accessible wikis.
- I dislike the idea of telling you how much to write, because I think
quality is a lot more important than quantity. Nonetheless, you should write
at least 750 words of original content as part of your Wiki Draft and Final
Wiki contributions. Please consider this a minimum, not a
recommendation.
Note: What you write in your MyTalk page or what you write to the
people you are mentoring does not count toward this 750-word requirement.
Suggestion: One way to know how much to write is to copy a block of
text and paste it into Microsoft Word. Then give a Tools-Word Count command.
Another way is to compare what you have written to this page which as about
1250 words.
 You need to describe your wiki contributions.
Your MyTalk page should have a structure similar to the screen-captured
image on the right:
- The first section should be your original My Wiki Plan
- Next should be Overview of my Wiki Contributions. This
section should describe what the theme of your contributions has been.
Use this section to sell or explain what you want your contributions to
accomplish.
- Underneath the overview, create a subsection titled Individual
Contributions that uses a bulleted list to organize links leading to
your wiki entries. You can create a subsection by entering a heading
with three equals signs, as in: === Individual
Contributions ===.
- Next will come all of your mentors comments.
This picture may be
clearer than the previous paragraph:
- You need to properly cite material that you copied from elsewhere.
For example, one of your colleagues asks:
"For the OSU Wiki, can we post pre-written information from another
website as long as we give them credit? I'm working on the scholarships page
and I want to add information about OSU's scholarships and information about
federal and private scholarships. If we are allowed to copy and paste
information, how do you want us to note that?"Answer: Some
information inherently belongs in the official OSU website. As an example,
the OSU Catalog and Schedule of Classes (available at:
http://catalog.oregonstate.edu/)
contains official information about how and when classes will be offered. It
would be wrong to copy this information from the official site just to place
a copy in the OSU Wiki. If changes were made to the official site, the copy
would be out-of-date and incorrect.
On the other hand, you may have good reasons to copy information into the
OSU Wiki. If you wanted to describe specific strategies for applying to a
scholarship, then you might want summary information about the scholarship
in the OSU Wiki. In this case, the summary information should include a link
back to the original, official source.
All these ideas raise the question of how you should document that you
have copied material into the OSU Wiki. I recommend a two-prong approach:
- First, include a link back to
the original source in the page that received the copied material. Thus,
if you build a Scholarship page in the OSU Wiki and you copy information
about scholarships into it, then you might include a link similar to
OSU’s Financial Aid and
Scholarships inside the Scholarships page of the OSU Wiki.
- Second, your MyTalk page
should clearly describe what you wrote yourself versus what was copied
from elsewhere. This description is required even if you rephrased or
rewrote material. For example, assume you are writing about the ASOSU
student government, and you had the official ASOSU website next to you
while you were writing. In that case, you should describe that the ASOSU
website provided ideas, but that your contribution to the OSU Wiki was
written in your own words.
Special instructions if you make
contributions to a public wiki.
Some people will make their contributions to the
OSU wiki, and this wiki automatically keeps track of contributions quite
well. If all your entries are made to this wiki, you can skip this section. But
if you will be making contributions to
Wikipedia,
WikiTravel, or some other
publicly available wiki, you will need to take a couple of extra steps to
document your work.
Step 1: Consider creating an account.
 I strongly
recommend creating an account on the wiki you intend to edit. Nearly all
public wikis let you do this, and it only takes a minute or so to do. Simply
look for the Sign in / create account page (or its
equivalent), select a Username and enter a password twice (similar to the
screenshot shown to the right). Once you have an account on the wiki, then
your entries will automatically be labeled with your UserName. This gives
you credit for the entry and makes it easier for other people to talk to you
about your work.
Step 2: Make an entry.
Simply click Edit and add or revise content just as you would in the
BA271 wiki.
Step 3: Find the "Diff" page for your entry.
Each publicly available wiki operates in slightly different ways, so the
instructions here must necessarily be a bit general. Click on History and
then click on Diff or Compare selected versions
so that you can see a side-by-side, before-and-after view of what the page
looked like before and after you began editing it. The page you are trying
to find will look similar to the one shown below:
Step 4: Copy the address for the "Diff" page to the Windows clipboard.
This step is easy. For the image above, it merely requires highlighting
the address line and giving an Edit-Copy command to put, "http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Coos_Bay&diff=220083&oldid=220052"
on the clipboard.
Step 5: Describe your entry in your "My Talk" page and include a link to
the "Diff" page.
This step is just the same as for students who are making changes to the
BA271 wiki, except that you need to include a link to the Diff page showing
your entry to the publicly available wiki. Once again, I suspect an image
will help make things clearer:
Closing ideas
- When writing, take your time and edit carefully. I care
about writing quality. Poorly worded ideas and editing bloopers tell
other people a lot about your mental abilities and attention to
detail. Don't convince me or your colleagues that you either have
fuzzy thinking or sloppy habits.
- When completing the Wiki Activities, do some research, bring
innovative ideas, and put them in the right context to make sense
with the rest of the wiki. A substantial portion of your grade
will be determined by whether you add real value to a public wiki.
Just posting a bunch of out-of-context ideas or point-of-view
opinions in a wiki is likely to detract value from the wiki -- and
that will result in very poor grades on this portion of the class.
Grading
This Draft Wiki portion of the overall wiki collection of activities will not
be worth a lot of credit, and it will be graded in a fairly mechanical way. I
expect to look to make sure your My Talk page is well organized and
describes what you have done so far. I also
expect to validate that you have actually been making contributions to a wiki. |
