Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages
Feel free to share & remix! These slides are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) by Gretchen McCulloch & Lauren Gawne.
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View these slides at: bit.ly/lingwiki-colang3
CoLang 2016 - Day 3
Creating and managing a wiki for your own project
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Contents
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Why & how to use wikis
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Why would I want to do that?
A wiki allows a group of people to work collaboratively on a project:
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How do they differ from Wikipedia?
Remember the principles of Wikipedia (day 1)
(Neutral, Verifiable, No original research)
These don’t apply to creating your own wiki, but the many of the good behaviours do (small edits, save often, don’t delete lots, leave comments on your changes, etc)
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Things to think about
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If you’re using a wiki in teaching
Contributing to a wiki (or Wikipedia) allows students to summarise knowledge, and demonstrate clear writing skills
Don’t grade students based on what stays in Wikipedia
See: Wikipedias tips for grading students' Wikipedia contributions
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Some of the wiki options
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Wikis everywhere
There are over 100 different wiki tools available
Choosing a wiki: www.wikimatrix.org/wizard
There’s also a Wikipedia page comparing tools
If your institution has Blackboard or Moodle you may be able to set up a wiki within that for a specific class
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Not all wikis are equal
Some of the ways they differ:
Some don’t offer free accounts at all
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Three we like
We’ll look briefly at:
We have not used any of these except 3
Disappointingly, no one has given us money to recommend these products
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We also tried
We also tried Wikidot.
Advantages:
We won’t look at them today because they don’t have a visual editor
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PBworks
Free option gives you:
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Wikispaces
Their “classroom” option is free for educators:
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Host your own wiki
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Getting people to contribute
It's not a matter of "build it and they will come"
You need to motivate people to contribute
Students can be motivated by grades
Other groups of people often motivated by in-person editing events (edit-a-thons), especially with food
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Alternatives
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Not all projects need a wiki
Maybe you can:
These will all suit very different projects
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Wikipedia page
If the project is small perhaps working on the relevant Wikipedia pages may be sufficient.
This option is obviously not useful if you’re working on original data as you’ll have nothing to cite!
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Wikibooks
Intended for the creation of textbooks, manuals, and other instructional texts
No private pages, only useful for some projects.
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Google Docs
(Or Dropbox is a similar option)
A blog (e.g. Wordpress, Tumblr) can be a good idea for sharing information if you want to make it clearer who wrote what
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LD&R software
Wikis are just one form of collaboration - there are lots of tools designed specifically for language work (and many of the experts in these tools are at CoLang)
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View these slides: bit.ly/lingwiki
Our plans for today
Get these slides at bit.ly/lingwiki-colang3
Go check out PBworks and/or Wikispaces
AND/OR
Keep working on editing your Wikipedia article from yesterday
Survey if anything changed since yesterday
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