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 -- many others have failed entirely. 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 about how wikis can be used successfully in
business or educational contexts -- and when they are likely to fail -- and
in this way, contribute to a growing body of intellectual knowledge. To help
you think about how to do this, you might want to read
How can you make a
useful contribution to the BA271 Wiki?.
- 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.
I've never asked students to contribute to a wiki before, so I am not
entirely sure what to expect. As a result, I do not want to be overly
prescriptive about how you should complete this activity. Unlike most other assignments this term, 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 BA271 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
BA271 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.
- You need to describe your wiki contributions. Use the following picture as a guide for how to document what you have done.
Thus, you should create a section titled "Overview of my wiki
contributions" in which you write a description of what you have
actually done. Underneath the overview, create a subsection titled "Individual Contributions"
that uses a bulleted list to links with your wiki entries. I suspect the following picture will be
clearer than this paragraph:
Special instructions if you make
contributions to a public wiki.
Some people will make their contributions to the
BA271 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 myTalk 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:
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 mytalk page contains an Overview of my wiki
contributions section that describes what you have done so far. I also
expect to validate that you have actually been making contributions to a wiki. |
