Courses/Wikis-Publishing Platforms

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Wikis as Publishing Platforms - 3 x 3 hours course

Wikis-Publishing_Platforms/synopsis and goals

Day 1

Getting to know wikis: what are wiki. wiki syntax, pages, categories, Extensions.

Context: wikis as (hybrid) publishing platforms

• Publishing
  • what is written on wikis is public;
  • Low threshold for publishing - click the edit button

• (Hybrid)
  • wiki content can easily be published under different formats or context.
  • Examples: Wikipedia Export book function; Toneelstof, Beyond Social, or this presentation (both wiki content and slide show)

Ward Cunningham Wiki Wiki Web

In 1995 Ward Cunningham creates the first wiki, naming it Wiki Wiki Web (Wiki in Hawaii means quick!).

• Interview with Ward Cunningham
  • links between pages, as ways to connect information
  • links to non-existing, encourage the creation of the new pages
  • read-write system - writing is as natural and expected as writing
  • the wiki territory expands as a result of contributions
  • anonymous editing - collaborative writing.

Wikipedia, Wiki Media Foundation, MediaWiki

• 2000 - Jimmy Wales attempts to create a free online encyclopedia - Nupedia.
• Nupedia fails.
• 2001 - After hearing about wikis Wales and Larry Sanger decide to build Nupedia on it, calling it Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia was first build using a software called UseModWiki (a sibling of Wiki Wiki Web). UseModWiki was slow and didn't support the scale Wikipedia was growing into.
• A new wiki software for Wikipedia, starts is developed, based more efficient and scalable web technology: PHP programming language, MySQL database. The software got the name of MediaWiki.
• 2002 - Wikipedia switches to using MediaWiki.
• 2003 - Wiki Media Foundation is created.
• MediaWiki currently power many wikis, including Wikipedia and subsidiary project, as well as other wiki such as this one.

Wiki software

• MediaWiki - PHP, MySQL, Webserver
• Docuwiki - similar to MediaWiki
• MoinMoin - Python, relies on plain text files & folders
• Zim - Desktop wiki, relies on plain text files & folders.
• TiddlyWiki - another Desktop wiki, based on HTML files and Javascript

Comparison of wiki software

Running a wiki: 2 options

Install and set up a wiki in your PC or server.

OR

Use a wikifarm (wiki host), such as Wikia. List of several wiki farms.

Users

To edit a wiki you need most wikis to register as user.

Different user's groups have different privileges:

• user: can edit and create pages
• administrators: can delete pages, put other users into a different group
• bot

Wiki Markup language

Wiki Markup: structured text, simplified version of HTML, easily converted to HTML.

• Wiki Markup Cheatsheet
• Tutorials/wiki_tutorial
• File:Cheatsheet-en.pdf File:Cheatsheet-nl.pdf

Pages Creation

Pages can be created by:

• creating an empty page link, clicking it, and start editing. The following [[my empty page]] will translate to my empty page
• adding the page name to URL bar, you'll be directly to the empty page, and start editing http://publicationstation.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/index.php/my empty page

• Red link = previously non-existing page.
• Blue link = existing page.

Talk Pages

Every Page has its respective Discussion or Talk page.

Talk pages are the site of discussion and conflicts that go on to the making of an article.

An example: Talk page on Invisible Pink Unicorn Wikipedia article

Experiment:Edit User Pages

Create and edit your user page.

Include internal (to pages on this wiki) and external (to web pages outside this wiki) links.

Include an internal and external image.

Files and Images

To include non-text media (images,pdfs,audio-video) on the wiki, a File page needs to be created as a place-holder for the file

• [[File:myimage.png]]
• the page must be saved
• click on the red link, of the file you want to upload
• Follow the instruction to upload your file

Pages' Revision History

The history of versions or revisions of a page is stored.

They can be accessible via "View History"

Each revision shows its author, time, action, and at times summary.

Revisions can be compared, edited and undone.

Artworks exploring Wikipedia's Revision History

The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs by James Bridle, collects the history of changes from the Wikipedia's article on The Iraq War between 2004 and 2009.

Epicpedia by Annemieke van der Hoek transforms Wikipedia's revision history into a theater script.

Cramer, Florian. 2011. “A Brechtian Media Design: Annemieke van Der Hoek’s Epicpedia.” In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 221–26. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-point-of-view-a-wikipedia-reader/

Works that:

• present other interfaces to Wikipedia,
• placing in the foreground the revision history:
• question the neutral point-of-view and unified nature of Wikipedia articles.

Experiment:History

Rewind the history of edits from your user page to a previous stage, and back to the current.

Structuring a wiki

What situations require an overall structure, more elaborate than its "flat" systems of pages?

Subpages: simple hierarchy

Subpages are useful for organizing information hierarchically, as parent/child/grandchild

A subpage of a given main page, is create by adding a slash, followed by the sub-page's name, to the main page name.

[[main page/subpage/sub-subpage]]

Example: this very page Courses/Wikis-Publishing Platforms is a sub page from the Courses page

{{Special:PrefixIndex/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/}} can be placed on a parent page to display all its children.

Namespaces: separate spaces

Namespaces are container for specific content.

• Example: the Namespace Wrecks in this wiki was created for material dedicate to Wrecks project and not a part of the Publication Station Wrecks:Main_Page and FIN:Main_Page

• Note: Namespaces need to be created in the configurations of the wiki.

Categories: Tags, Hierarchies, Spaces, States

Categories are (the only) ways to tag content.

[[Category:courses]] a page to the courses category

Problems: No limit to the categories that can be added to a page.

For next week

Install Pandoc on your machines. We'll use it to convert wiki content on other formats.

Day 2

The Importance of Being Markup

Converting wiki content into other formats.

Markups

Wiki syntax is a markup language. Markup languages are exclusive to plain text formats (as opposed to rich text or binary formats). In plain-text file text-formating is applied to the text through a series of "marks" or tags. The marks or tags are like instructions, on how each marked segment of text should be interpreted or rendered.

Markups: write/interpret

You have be doing been using the wiki Markup during this workshop. You've probably noticed how, when in writing mode, symbols as =heading= bold Page are interpreted and given a specific meaning or style when the wiki page is rendered, or in other words, is in read mode.

Like the markup of the following segment, originates a styled and structured page.

= Revenge of the Text =

There is a room in the '''Musée d’Orsay''' that I call the ''room of possibilities''.

That room contains:
* a snow flake
* the end of a cloud
* a bit of nothing

Markup: explicit structure

One of the advantages of markup languages is that they imply an explicit text structure.

In order words, markups force you to declare:

• "this sentence is a section heading": =section heading=
• "this word is bold": bold word.
• "this hyperlink has x as URL and" [x-URL title]

You are not allowed to give meaning or structure to the text by visually styling (like you'd do in inDesign or Word).

Meaning or structure can only be given to the text semantically. That means adding marks to the segments of text we want to format.

Markups: interchangeable

One advantage of this explicit semantic formating is that conversions between different markups (Wiki, HTML, Markdown, LaTeX, etc) are made easy.

In most cases markups have HTML as a reference, allowing only formating options that are available in HTML.

Consequently converting between markups is easy.

A markups converter software has to only to know the meaning of all the meta-characters in a markup and what are the corresponding meta-characters in another markup.

If the software knows that it can convert =title= to

title

, # title, \section{title}

Examples: the same text in different Markup

HTML:

<h1>Revenge of the Text</h1>
 <p>There is a room in the <strong>Musée d’Orsay</strong> that I call the <em>room of possibilities</em>.</p>
 <p>That room contains:</p>
 <ul>
  <li>a snow flake</li>
  <li>the end of a cloud</li>
  <li>a bit of nothing</li>
 </ul>

Wiki markup:

= Revenge of the Text =
There is a room in the '''Musée d’Orsay''' that I call the ''room of possibilities''.

That room contains:
* a snow flake
* the end of a cloud
* a bit of nothing

Markdown:

# Revenge of the Text
There is a room in the **Musée d’Orsay** that I call the *room of possibilities*.

That room contains:
* a snow flake
* the end of a cloud
* a bit of nothing

LaTeX

\section{Revenge of the Text}\label{revenge-of-the-text}

There is a room in the \textbf{Musée d'Orsay} that I call the \emph{room
of possibilities}.

That room contains:

\begin{itemize}
\itemsep1pt\parskip0pt\parsep0pt
\item
  a snow flake
\item
  the end of a cloud
\item
  a bit of nothing
\end{itemize}

Pandoc

One popular software for converting between markups is Pandoc

Working with Pandoc

Pandoc is a command-line tool. This means that instead of a GUI it uses a command line interpreter or shell, where the interaction with it is based on text commands.

There a few web interfaces to Pandoc, such as http://pandoc.networkcultures.org/hybrid.html but they are not as flexible as the command-line interface to Pandoc.

Notes on scripts

students should have to understand python to generate "derivates" from wiki content.

Instead they can be given a script that allows them to play with different arguments and allow different "derivates" to emerge from the same content.

Some guidelines:

• each script deals with only one type of content: users, text, revisions, images, subpages

the principal should be similar to epubtrailer where the user can choose: background-color, color, source (wiki, page),