Editing Publisher:Beyond-Social (section)

== Hybrid publishing ==

The design and implementation of the Beyond Social wiki skin is commissioned by the Hybrid Publishing research group and driven by a research question around the term 'hybrid publishing'. The development of the Beyond Social skin was hybrid in the sense that it balanced between user &amp; software: between accessibility, expectations and editorial choises &amp; a strong, stable MediaWiki platform full of functionalities. The Beyond Social skin is a product of an aim to make working with a MediaWiki more accessible while exploring and using its built-in features in a more prominent way.

In the last few years I had become familiar with the MediaWiki software already, and to be honest, both in a visual and structural way, it was a learning curve before the wiki started to function as an interesting platform to me. Interestingly enough, as not many online platforms offer an option to not only read but also write within the same interface, this function appears to be quite non-intuitive for many users. I've seen the surpriseness on faces of students when they clicked on the 'edit' button on Wikipedia for the first time: the option to do so seems not to be obviously present. As a beginning wiki-user, it can be a bit of an adventure to navigate through the large amounts of options and special pages and find the ones that are useful for you to access the content that sometimes seems so deeply sunk into the wiki. Working with the wiki can be a learning curve, but it offers a large set of possibilities and interesting tools once this curve has been climbed. After having worked in wiki's now for a few years, i really feel that the effort of familiarizing with the wiki pays back at the moment it found its place of use.

MediaWiki software comes with many built-in features. It took quite some time browsing the software files on the server, special admin pages on the wiki and documentation on mediawiki.org before i actually started to find my way and see how and where the wiki operates. It reminded me of some social situtions and meeting new people where it normally takes me quite a bit of time to adapt to the rythm of the other, which requires a bit of extra attention but once it's there you both fall into the same pace. This moment of getting to know eachother resembled the type of collaboration i felt with the wiki in a way. It made me realise that it creates a different type of collaboration when a cms system offers you a lot of options by one-click-on-a-button, but you're not really sure how to deal with it further (something i experience while using Wordpress for example). I really appreciated it that the wiki was not automatically doing things for me, and it felt oke to take a bit of time to understand the system. Also important: when things where not so clear, there was an extensive [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki documentation] available.

Working with a wiki more intensively in this period of time, revealed how Mediawiki software actually is a sort of programming platform in itself. It has its own built-in language, functions and specificities, such as the automatic ip-address implementation of authors that don't have an account, markup codes such as the &quot;~<sub>~</sub>&quot; code that translates into a personal signature plus timestamp, and the transclusion tool that enables you to include parts of an article into another article. During the Beyond Social developments, we promoted to 'listen to the wiki' by seeing what specificities, functions and modes of collaboration it could offer to the mode of publishing within the Social Practices of the Willem de Kooning Academie.

* written by [http://template01.info/ Template] (Marlon Harder &amp; Lasse van den Bosch Christenson), as part of the previous [https://github.com/wdka-publicationSt/BeyondSocial wiki2web workflow].

=== Transclusion ===

This transclusion function has been very helpful for the development of the BS wiki in a practical sense. It turned out to be a useful way to work with a Main Page that we wanted to structure and style, but therefore became quite fragile and difficult to read in terms of many html elements and strict break lines. Within this fragile structure, we wanted to include a few sections on the Main Page that would need curation and therefore writing access, such as the highlighted articles, the category selection and the list of upcoming events. By transcluding single pages into
<div>
elements on the Main Page, the Main Page can be edited by not touching the Main Page itself: the curated sections are edited in a set of other (normal) pages. To do this, we used standard wiki templates. In order to transclude a short 'about' description of the Beyond Social project on the Main Page, we used this template markup

<pre>{{:About_Beyond_Social}} </pre>
to include the page &quot;About_Beyond_Social&quot; into the Main Page. By default, this line trancludes the full page into the Main Page. But as we only wanted to have the first paragraph of the page, we added <noinclude> tags around the rest of the text. These no-inclusion tags mark which text should never be transluded into another page, and make sure that this text will still be visible when someone visits the page &quot;About_Beyond_Social&quot; itself. Another way to include a specific part of text is by using the <nowiki><includeonly></nowiki> tags. For us these tags were less useful, as these tags mark which text should be transcluded, but will make this text invisible when visiting the page itself. Visit the MediaWiki documentation pages to read more about on [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion transclusion] and [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates templates].

A second type of transclusion that we wanted to include for the Main Page were the listings of recent user activity that are built-in wiki functions, such as recent files, new pages, wanted pages (red links) and listings of articles using the Editorial template. Some of these lists can be transcluded into other pages using standard wiki templates, such as the recent files list that can be queried like this:

<pre>{{:Special:Newimages/12}} </pre>
For the more specific lists that we wanted to use, such as a list of all the pages that use the Template:Editorial for example, we needed a few more transclusion options . MediaWiki software comes with many functions, but there is also a large amount of plugins available, called extensions, of which some are more stable then other. (See [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:All_extensions this page] listing all available extensions in the MediaWiki database.) We decided to use an external plugin called [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList_%28third-party%29 DynamicPageList] (DPL) that offers specific transclusion options to create lists of a specific category or query the last batch of activity from a special page such as all the pages that use the Template:Editorial. A DPL transclusion to do this looks like this:

<pre>&lt;DPL&gt;

  uses=Template:Editorial

  ordermethod=firstedit

  order=descending

  count=10

&lt;/DPL&gt; </pre>