How to use a wiki

What a wiki is

A wiki is a website that its community of readers can edit! See Wikipedia's article on wikis for more information. Wikis are a type of groupware, software to mediate interpersonal collaboration electronically. Interest in wikis has been growing exponentially.

Why we use a wiki

By integrating the ability to write as well as read, the level of skill required to edit a wiki-style website is dramatically reduced, at modest cost in design flexibility.

By socially respecting (or cybernetically enforcing?) addtional protocol, wiki pages can be "subclassed" (i.e. specialized) to reproduce older groupware modalities - like the traditional bulletin-board (consisting of a series of time-ordered inalterable contributions from multiple authors), today called a group [We]blog.

Unrestricted wiki custom is good for the collective creation of "encyclopedic" content - stuff on which there is likely to be broad ultimate agreement by the community of joint authors. Bulletin boards are a better groupware form when the purpose is the frank debate of potentially discordant points on view and there is little which all parties agree is objectively true they can publish jointly.

Wikis and other tools for the read-write Web are examined in a graduate student paper [here].

How to use this wiki

The OLPC wiki uses a wiki "engine" called MediaWiki. Writing wiki pages is typically much easier than coding in HTML, the native design language of the World Wide Web. To learn how to edit this wiki, please visit this link always found in a menu at the left of any page: Help using the site. A beginner's tutorial is given in Wiki getting started.

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How can the wiki framework be improved?

There are some pages which should be easy to find wherever you are in the wiki. Surely someone is responsible for revising the content of the navigation bar on the left. Perhaps another person has the authority to change the boilerplate text at the bottom of each page and in particular at the bottom of every editing page. These are places to put things that everyone needs to know. Links to etiquette and methods articles would be appropriate, in my view.

Where should we provide feedback about the wiki itself?

Use the Talk page of Help:Bulletin board