MediaWiki workshop curriculum

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Presentation

Intro 2 min

Why are you here?
What are some of the jargon terms you have heard?
Establish wiki's context in terms of internet technology. Eg web 2.0, blog, wiki semantic, google, social network.

Why should you care? 2 min

How this intro to wikis will help you:

a primer on a better way to communicate (in your office, with your customers, you customers with you)
new skills
contribute to something you are interested in

Wiki Quotes

Wiki puts an “Edit” button on the intenet.
Putting up a wiki page is like tossing a ball of yarn into a basket of kittens. -- Peter Merel
Wiki takes you out of the arm chair and puts you in the pilots seat

What are some issues you are interested in ? 5-10 min Wikipedia….then

might want to have some local "hook" for the audience. I also asked the audience what they cared about, did a sample search on google to show how "high" wikipedia scored in the results for their subject of interest, and then showed them how to "edit the internet" in an area that they care about most. examples were:
watercolor
skiing
renewable energy

A wiki is the easiest way to add what you know to a place where other people care about what you care about.

Problem: 4 min

Communication is where everything starts. And stops. Problem: communication is the #1 problem in business. Just this morning I was waiting at the doctor’s office, and the lady sitting next to me showed me some paperwork her doctor had sent her, complete with an address, social security number, and a detailed description of the health problem…of a person that she didn’t even know! Wiki’s don’t fix that kind of problem, but it illustrates the types of problems we have in business with communiation.

Email is a solution that everyone uses to communicate. Why? Because it is so easy. But have you ever sent a message that you wish you hadn’t? Email is easy, but think of all the problems it can cause. I worked for the University Of Colorado Health Science Center. Mr. Anschutz, the former CEO of Qwest and Denver Billionaire, had just donated a huge sum of money to the university, and they were going to name the new campus after him. So a press release was sent out via email. Usually, spell check is a good thing. But this time, everyone got word that Mr. Auschwitz had donated a large amount of money, and the new campus would bear that name. (OOPS!)

wiki vs. email

Wiki’s don’t fix that kind of problem, but it illustrates the types of problems we have.

Wikis put everyone on the same page. Literally. Here is a good example…

Show youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Types of communication.

(have them give examples)

One to many
Many to one: election process/democracy.
(Many to many
- forum
- Blog

How many of you have heard about a Blog? (some of these terms sound like a 3 year old talking! Did you read my blog about google? Do you think google googled my blog yet? )

Wiki

Examples Wikipedia

So, to recap…

Wiki takes you out of the arm chair and puts you in the pilots seat
A wiki is the easiest way to add what you know to a place where other people care about what you care about.
Wiki puts an “Edit” button on the Internet.
Wikis put everyone on the same page. Literally.
Wikis are one of the many imperfect way to address communication issues. Blogs are another.
Which do you think is better? Optional: Show blog vs. wiki video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsFU3sAlPx4

Open up for questions…

we don’t know where this is headed…

History of Internet in 2 Minutes

Communication is the key term. Break the word apart: Community. Communion. Togetherness. Understanding. Technology just gets us to the bottleneck quicker.

1.0 (90-2000) The Techy People could write, everyone could read. Email is lowest common denominator, the "killer app" One to many communication in the form of the web browser.
2.0 (2000-2005) Wikis, blogs, facebook etc anyone can contribute. many to many communication
3.0 (2005-?) The "semantic web". Data will start to organize itself intelligently, beginning of a new era in data. There is no "killer app"! web3 is the ability for the many diverse applications to dynamically "mash-up" in response to demand.

Everyone is talking about how to represent massive amounts of data that we have collected. The new internet will probably be more like a video game than the flat static web pages we are used to. Look how quickly youtube has taken over. I watch LOST on the internet now! You can watch a ball game on your PHONE!

4.0 (P2P) the decentralising of the web using open source grid and distributed computing technology.

How a Wiki works

A wiki engine is hosted on a computer server and uses the internet protocol http to allow many people to collaborate online using a web browser on their own computer.

See also Client-server software architecture

Web browser
- currently, least common denominator in computer technology
Makes it easy to change the "recipe" for process or update information.
Tracks changes
Makes it easy to correct mistakes

A paradigm shift:
- Open Source - anyone can make improvements. Example-
  - internet itself
  - OpenOffice
wiki has caused the concept of a "file" be replaced. The "file" now has all this

historical information intertwined with it and it is never "final" (now called "nodes", metadata)

- People have access to specific information

*Wiki is a "killer app" for the internet, like Lotus 123(Excel) was back in the 80's

effectively combines social networking, forums, email, blogging, and information (?)

What might be any reason not to bother using it?

Why should I care?

To enjoy life and your job more
To familiarize yourself with new technology

A better way to do things

Who would use it?

Anyone who has access to the wiki website that wants to collaborate with other people from anywhere

Who is using it?

cutting edge companies
mostly small business < 25M in revenues
Some big companies: Nokia, Yahoo, Michelin, etc.
heard of wikipedia? one of the highest trafficked sites on the internet.

Readers

There are many ways to use a wiki. The most common is to just use it to find information you are looking for. People who use it on this level are referred to as readers. You typically do not need a user account to access content at this level.

Contributors

Readers often become contributers.

Recommended Resource: Help

The big picture: Web2.0

This big pitcure view is emerging from a number of technologies and generally refers to the newly emerging collaborative internet which is being dubbed Web2.0. Wiki's have become a major aspect of this new arena with MediaWiki leading the way due to the huge popularity Wikipedia and its sister projects.

replace email
replace word
replace excel
replace quickbooks
or at minimum will be an integral component of the above.
may change how meetings are run.
use it the same way that you would a social network site such as myspace.

The Future

The problems with the current wiki paradigm will be the main driving force of its evolution. The main problems that wiki users experience are:

Thin client: Currently nearly all processing is handled by the server, so most operations involve communications with the server which makes the environment sluggish compared to normal applications.
Wikitext: Users would rather have an applicational means of handling layout of objects and their properties than having to remember syntax. This is currently impractical since for true WYSIWYG the renderer must be tightly integrated with the parser, not an external addon.

might want to mention the fckeditor extension --Phalseid 14:04, 28 December 2007 (NZDT)

Web server: The web server paradigm doesn't fit with the new paradigm, it's inefficient on bandwidth and creates reliance on corporate sponsorship and donations rather than utilising the resources of the client-base.

In the future, we can expect to see the wiki methodology showing up in the peer to peer application arena which is currently still in its infancy and contains only static files rather than dynamic applicational content such as collaboration tools.

Collaboration

general: good summaries with links to relevent articles
For the most part we should just link to existing docs for these general concepts, but add our own points which are specific to wiki organisation and development.

Article History

As discussed in the introduction, every edit made to an article is stored in the database (as an item called a revision). This means that one can view any article as it was at any point in time since it's original creation. If user's are in the habit of making good meaningful edit summaries then the history tells a detailed story of the articles creation and progress. The history of an article can be viewed from the "history" link at the top of the page when viewing an article. The link takes one to a special page which lists the last 50 (or 100, 250 or 500 depending on preferences etc) revisions of the article in question with the most recent at the top.

Diff

Historical items and differences between them all have specific URL's so they can be referred to from other documents

One useful feature of this is that articles which undergo a lot of change such as ongoing discussions or todo lists can be kept current without needing to archive any old content, out of date items can just be removed and then referred to from the history if needed.

When using a wiki for organisational purposes (i.e. not only for managing content, but also for workflow and collaboration), article history brings two extremely important aspects into the system. Firstly it provides an audit trail for all changes made to important documents such as contracts, job details, operating procedures etc.

Any articles which are ongoing works in progress can be difficult to get back in to after a long period of focussing on other work. If edit summaries have been maintained well, then the history provides an excellent means of re familiarising ones self with the most recent activity.

Changes

There are other special pages in the wiki which display the historical information for many articles instead of just the currently viewed one. These are similar in look to the history of a single article, except that there's also a "title" column in the table to indicate the article to which each revision in the applies.

The recent changes special page displays the list of revisions which apply to any article in the wiki. The watchlist special page displays them only for the articles which the current user has added to their watch list (the user can manage their watch list by click "watch" or "unwatch" from the links at the top of the page). And the contributions special page is the same but only listing revisions made by a particular user.

Discussion

Talk pages, user-talk pages

Organising content & work

finding information: search, changes, contribs etc
general organisation of content using navigation lists and trees

Redirects (move)

Namespaces

Workflow

Roles
Projects/job categories: proposed, authorised, current, complete

Advanced wiki concepts

Security

The MediaWiki software was designed from the outset with openness in mind and for this reason not much consideration went into the design with respect to content restriction. The general problem with implementing a proper security solution is that although most of the actions one can perform on articles can be restricted easily, the ability to read content cannot be easily restricted on a per-title basis. The reason reading is difficult to restrict is because it's an operation which is not just performed via one action, but rather that many different actions, special-pages and extensions access article content and display it in diverse ways. To make matters worse, many of these diverse means of article access are done by querying the database directly rather than going via the Article class.

To allow restrictions on the reading of article content requires a hook at a very low-level in the programming which is common to all the kinds of operations involved in the retrieving of article content. We use the SimpleSecurity extension which adds these low-level hooks into the code dynamically and uses them to extend the native MediaWiki permissions system to include a "read" action in the restrictions list. Following is a description of the specific functionalities which are added or extended and how to use them.

"Read" restriction added to protect tab

It seems that the main code-base development won't have a solution to the read problem for some time, but the current method of article protection already allows for restricting edit, create and move actions by group, and allows for the possibility of other actions to be handled, so the approach that Simple Security 4 has taken is to add a new restriction to the existing protection page called read which you can see in the images below which show the protection page with and without Simple Security installed.

Protection form without SimpleSecurity		Protection form with SimpleSecurity

The image on the right shows the additional read restriction has become available. Also the tick-box which is used to allow adjustment of the restrictions individually is changed to be more general so it will be appropriate for any number of additional restrictions.

Extra groups added to protection tab

To have extra groups available in the select box for each action (like "Security test group" in the picture above), add them to the $wgSecurityExtraGroups array in your LocalSettings.php file, for example:

$wgSecurityExtraGroups = array(
    'foo' => 'Foo group',
    'bar' => 'Bar group'
);

The index should be the internal name of a group (as seen in the user rights special page etc), and the value is a more friendly name shown in the protection form. There should not be any actions specified in that array it's just for adding groups into the protection form.

In Mediwaiki 1.13.x you can only assign extra groups that you belong to. Extra groups that you do not belong to will show up as blanks in the group selection boxes. (disc)

Restriction by category & namespace

Category-based permissions are now be handled from LocalSettings.php for efficiency reasons and will not inherit more than a single level. Namespace permissions are now also be supported, both will be defined in the $wgPageRestrictions array which uses a format as follows:

$wgPageRestrictions['Category:Foo']['action1'] = array('group1', 'group2');
$wgPageRestrictions['Namespace:Bar']['action2'] = 'group3';

This example restricts article in Category:Foo such that only members of groups group1 and group2 can perform "action1". And "action2" can only be performed by group3 for all articles in the "Bar" namespace.

Restrictions set in $wgPageRestrictions can be overridden by those in the article's protect tab.

Security-based conditions

SimpleSecurity adds two parser-functions for rendering content conditionally based on security permissions or group membership. Here's a couple of examples,

{{#ifusercan:edit|Main page|Check the homepage editing [[todo list]]!|check the [[latest news]]!}}

This example renders a link to a todo list if the user has permission to edit the main page, otherwise a link to the news is rendered instead.

{{#ifgroup:sysop|Check the homepage editing [[todo list]]!|check the [[latest news]]!}}

Here's the same example again, but this time the conditions is whether or not the user belongs to the sysop group. A comma separated list of groups can be used for the group parameter in which case the condition will evaluate to true if the current user belongs to any of the groups in the list.

Notes

The last parameter is optional and defaults to an empty string if not supplied
The TreeAndMenu extension can be used with these options since it doesn't render nodes with no content

Security information

Articles which exhibit restrictions either from the protect tab or from $wgPageRestrictions can optionally have the information displayed by setting the $wgSecurityRenderInfo global variable to true. A link will be rendered entitled Security information which when clicked will reveal (or hide) the list of restrictions exhibited by the article. The show/hiding link is of the CSS id security-info-toggle, and the list of restrictions is contained in a div of id security-info, so a custom style can easily be applied by adding some CSS rules to your MediaWiki:Common.css article. For example the following rule gives a border and background to the listed rules when they are visible.

#security-info-toggle {
    background: transparent url(/wiki/skins/monobook/lock_icon.gif) no-repeat scroll left center;
    padding-left: 16px;
}
#security-info {
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
    background: #eee;
}

Unreadable links

Still has some bugs to iron out

If the $wgSecurityAllowUnreadableLinks global is set to false (default), then links to local articles which the current user does not have permission to read are rendered as plain text rather than a hyperlink.

The image above shows a small fragment of a recent changes list. Notice that the Sandbox article title and its diff and hist show up grey and are not links, their style can be set in CSS by addressing the unreadable class attribute.

Using HTML and CSS in articles

and other non-wiki content like SWF and Media

Dynamic variables & functions

magic words
parser functions
parameters, named and numeric

Templates & transclusion

syntax, default namespace
using parameters with templates
named parameters (and the affect on parameters with "=" in the value)

Skinning

User wiki skins
Web skins
Skinning methods, incl. wikitext skin
OD template skins to work from in flouzo site - we should make these into a proper portfolio of options along with robs skins

Notes

Characters
Sandbox
Legal issues for editors (copyright)

What is the strength of wiki

Collaborative writing using easily accessible protocols such as http, and https
History and change control through a simple interface
Articles link to each other analogous to a neural network
Workflow organisation of articles in a tuple space using templates and categorization (see also set theory)
"Google Search"...find relevant information instantly
A wiki's functionality is only limited by the programming skills and financial/time resources of the person who implements it.
Simple compact backup via database backend

Limits of wiki

Currently http protocol corrupted post requests can cause loss of upoaded data -use client side editors
Doesn't handle numerical information particularly well - partial solution Help:Table
GIGO
only as good as the structure that you set up
- you have to actively participate. Wiki will become bigger and better the more you feed it and pet it.
- if you find a mistake, FIX IT! (bonus/incentives? they are all tracked)
you have to use it for it to be useful.
only as good as the search engine behind it (ours is good, see below)
The number one complaint I hear is "I can't find it" on the wiki.
- If you can't find it, its not there,
- If it is not there, do something about it.
  - Don't expect it to get there by itself
  - Let somebody know, immediately. You spending a minute now will save an hour later.
- Use the following Search Tips to increase your skills
  - searching...must be >= 4 characters
Currently Built for Writers, not Readers-How this Affects a Small Company
spell check, formatting, producing documents, etc.
- not designed for that--yet.
- Can be called Naval Gazing
  - but things that are measured, improve.
counter intuitive to write a sentence describing changing a simple spelling mistake.
need to use "markup" (wiki or html) to create documents
- this will go away as programming continues to progress towards natural language.

How

How would this look look explained as a diagram?

Visualize a neural network of key value pairs where key=Article name, value=content, and associations linking article content to other articles

Other concepts

Wiki space versus filesystem (hierarchical rooted tree)

Wiki Organisation

The modern concept of an organisational system is ideally suited to a wiki environment. For example a category-based workflow model like Wikipedia use is essentially a simple means of implementing the blackboard system. Semantic MediaWiki in conjunction with Semantic Forms brings a new level of "web3" structure to the article environemnt. By combining this structural aspect with a spreadsheet-like way of selecting lists of structured articles and editing their proeprties, the wiki environment will be able to support a flexible system of organisation encompassing workflow, scheduling and automation and will be able to integrate more tightly with foreign applications.

The specific structure we have in mind is to structure the workflow categories as a tree of organisational activity which covers the whole organisation for example

organisation → departments → roles → procedures

This is the tree of active working components from highest to lowest scale. Each of these components is represented by an article which acts as its "home page" and contains dynamic lists of their current work, research, messages and other specific resources. Instead of being viewed in the style of a category page, workspaces are more appropriately rendered as a list like a spreadsheet or email inbox, the items of which can be sorted, filtered, queried and properties edited in-place, including mass-updates.

Ontology

The basic structure of the generic wiki organisation system is an ontology representing the organisation as a whole. The organisation is divided up according to its departments/divisions and/or roles and maybe into various branch offices etc. We then have a number of classes which are the aspects such as resources, people, places, procedures and best practices which appear in various places throughout that tree. The individual items contained within the occurrences of the classes throughout the tree may change dynamically as work flows through the system and are made accessible through department/role portals which have specific information as well as creating a dynamically queried portlet for each of the classes within its context. The ontology is shown in the wiki's sidebar tree and goes down to the level of the classes within the departments/roles, the dynamic items within those are only shown in the portals which are linked to from the department/role nodes in the tree.

Workflow

Wiki workflow summary

MediaWiki workshop curriculum

Contents

Presentation

Intro 2 min

Why should you care? 2 min

Wiki Quotes

Problem: 4 min

Types of communication.

So, to recap…

Open up for questions…

History of Internet in 2 Minutes

How a Wiki works

Why should I care?

Who would use it?

Who is using it?

Readers

Contributors

The big picture: Web2.0

The Future

Collaboration

Article History

Changes

Discussion

Organising content & work

Redirects (move)

Categories

See also

Namespaces

Workflow

Advanced wiki concepts

Security

"Read" restriction added to protect tab

Extra groups added to protection tab

Restriction by category & namespace

Security-based conditions

Security information

Unreadable links

Using HTML and CSS in articles

Dynamic variables & functions

Templates & transclusion

Skinning

Notes

What is the strength of wiki

Limits of wiki

How

Other concepts

Wiki Organisation

Ontology

Workflow

Scheduling and time management

Reports

Navigation menu

Search

Navigation

Blogs

Recent activity

Site map