What's in a News Wiki?
By Daniel Bachhuber and William
Davis
June 25, 2009

Examples We Spotted

Recent photos >

Duke Wiki
Campus information portal - http://www.duiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

Wiki entertainment

Organization directory
Might be useful to automatically generate this with the
category function that MediaWiki offers

Organization profiles
Could include past history, meeting date and time,
current members and officers, list of articles/posts
about the most recent events

http://mainecampus.com/campus-currents
< RSS FEED
EDIT LINK >
< WIKI-GENERATED PICTURE
< AND CONTENT
LINKS TO OTHER TOPICS >
< IF THERE IS MORE THAN
< ALL ARTICLES ON THE TOPIC JUST A DESCRIPTION, A
LINK TO MORE

http://wiki.mainecampus.com

< AUTOMATIC LINKS TO TOPICS

< THE TOPICS THE ARTICLE IS TAGGED WITH

When there's no content...

THE CODE

GETWIKI PLUGIN

Tools you can use

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Pros:
• Very popular, widely supported
• Wikipedia is based on the MediaWiki structure
• Well-established feature set with plugin architecture
Cons:
• Difficult to integrate with WordPress
• Doesn't share the same user permissions
• Has a rather complex theming system
• Requires a fair amount of technical know-how to install and
make changes
What are some use cases where this might be the best option?

http://wp-wiki.org/
Pros:
• Integrated with WordPress, easy install
• User permissions are based on WordPress roles
• Email notifications to admins upon page edit
Cons:
• Very, very simplistic
• No "stub" concept and uses HTML instead of wiki markup
• Would be a different approach to topical landing pages to
have to create a page for each one
• Poor method for tracking contributions, etc.
What are some use cases where this might be the best option?

Enabling a page to be a wiki is just a checkbox
Anyone can edit if they're logged in, although
versioning is based on how WordPress
normally does it
Dashboard widget

http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
Pros:
• Easy install, runs db off text files
Cons:
• Daniel didn't like it when we played with it

Things to consider
• Who will be allowed to edit?
• Who will be required to keep topics up to date? How will it fit
within the workflow?
• What type of wiki will it be? Resource, topical, or otherwise?
• What type of markup do you want?
• Compare different options: http://www.wikimatrix.org/

Ideas for using the wiki
• Campus blog directory
• Organization directory
• Information on classes and different schools within the
university
• Entertainment guide
• Background information and context for different on-going
stories
• Teacher and notable student biographies
• Intrastaff note-sharing space

Ideal feature list?
• Track revisions to specific users; limit contributions to
different user groups
• Email and RSS notifications with the ability to "watch"
certain pages and topics
• Wiki-links and a sophisticated markup
• Ability to associate images and other media with any page
o Rather than, say, embedding images, you'd associate the
images with the page and it would automatically create a
gallery
•