Wiki-Tastraphy

June 27, 2008 11:00 AM

What program can I use to help my department compile information that needs to be put on wikipedia?

I belong to a small and specific field which does not have much information about it on Wikipedia. In an attempt to make the information in our field more available to the average person searching for it me and a few other individuals have decided to strenthen wikipedia information about our field. The problem we have is that without help it will take quite some time. We decided to put out an all call for theories etc that we might miss but dont want people sending us the same theories over and over. So we want to find a way where there is a list of items we have that people can acess easily online and add what they see we dont have yet. I am wondering what the easyist and best way to go about this woudl be. BAsicly I am looking for any ideas that people have that would help make this easyer for the group of us compileing and connecting all the items.

posted by elationfoundation to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Sounds like you want to set up a wiki.

No, really.

For that matter, why not just put out a call for people to help add to wikipedia directly? You can made the additions you know about right off the bat, and people can make the edits directly. So you know about Theory A and B, and the guy who believes firmly in Theory A1 can go in and add a reference to it, and the Theory A2 people can follow behind, and soforth. Your team can then do any fleshing-out that seems necessary.
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:14 AM on June 27, 2008

I'm with Tomorrowful. If you want to sort and organize through stuff before putting it up on Wikipedia then you might want to consider setting up your own Mediawiki installation. Then when stuff is "finalized" (is anything on a Wiki ever really finalized?) you could just copy and paste it to Wikipedia (and upload any necessary files).
posted by crios at 11:50 AM on June 27, 2008

You could just create user subpages off of one person's main user page. Although theoretically those are open for anyone to see (which you may not want), in practice I think it's pretty rare that people go poking around other users' subpages if they're not linked to from the main user page. And it's not uncommon for people to use user subpages for things that are being worked on but not ready to "go live" yet.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:15 PM on June 27, 2008

I recommend you set up simple and brief stub pages for wikipedia for each of your topic areas of interest, and then invite people to review and expand at their leisure. If you look at the history of virtually any page on wikipedia, that's how it got started and populated. Very few topics spring forth fully formed from their creator's brows.
posted by jenkinsEar at 2:36 PM on June 27, 2008

Sounds like you should start a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject

You can do whatever you want to encourage and include your friends but since wikipedia is a public forum / resource it could be counter-productive to try to organize a private system to do the work. If your field is obscure most likely no one else will show but maybe they will and be helpful. If they're not helpful you have to work through the public process anyway.
posted by Wood at 5:16 PM on June 27, 2008