Wikimedia, MediaWiki & Education in IT discusses Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia that run on MediaWiki software. It explains that Wikimedia's mission is to develop free educational content. MediaWiki is an open-source wiki software originally created for Wikipedia that is now widely used. The document discusses wikis and their use for collaboration in education, with examples like a student wiki at Hong Kong Shue Yan University. It concludes that wikis enable instant reference, common knowledge, two-way learning, and mass collaboration compared to traditional methods.

1. Wikimedia, MediaWiki & Education in IT
By Jérômy Y Chan
for MIT6108, CUHK
with presence of Mr LAM King Man,
President, PC of Wikimedia Hong Kong
The Wordplay of the title
 Wikimedia is a collaboration of projects that runs by Wikimedia Foundation, ike
Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikinews, etc.
 MediaWiki is software which Wikimedia Projects runs on, & a typical Software
that powers a wiki.
WikiMedia 101
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is
 Wiki+encyclopedia
 The so-called “Free” Encyclopedia
 Encyclopedia containing more than 7 million articles in 250 languages
 English edition launched 5-Jan-2001
 as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia
 Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales was one of the founders of Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia(維基百科)…
 Established along with 12 other Wikipedias in May 2001
 24-Oct-2002 User:Mountain created the first page, Main Page
 27-Oct-2002 A software update for Chinese input & domain  zh.wikipedia.org
 17-Nov-2002 First real article: Computer science (計算機科學)

2. Wikipedians’ Community
 Hong Kong
 First gathering 18-Sept-2005
 CWMC 2006 Aug-2006
 Gathering & Expedition
 Wikimedia Hong Kong will be established in Summer 2007
 Worldwide
 First Wikimania in 2005
 Wikimania 2007 in Taipei
Current Usage of Wikipedia
 Reference
 Research
 Extensive reading
 Entertainment & Infotainment
 Writing & Translating Exercise
 Community & Socializing
Gollum Browser
 A browser designed for Wikipedia by Harald Hanek
 Originally for kids reading the site
 Hide the tools for editing & administration
 Might be good for presentation
 Link: http://gollum.easycp.de/en/
Compare with counterparts
 Britannica online
 MSN Encarta
 Have to pay for premium
 Citizendium
 opened in Mar-2007 by Larry Sanger
 Article will be reviewed by experts
 Baidu Baike (百度百科)
 hosted by search engine Baidu
 Pro-CCP point of view
 Plagiarism of content on Chinese Wikipedia

3. Wikimedia
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world
to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to
disseminate it effectively and globally.
From Article II of Bylaws of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia Timeline
Nupedia  Wikipedia  Wikimedia
Mar-2000  Jan-2001  Jun-2003
Wikimedia Projects
 Wiktionary
 Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations.
 Wikibooks
 Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials
 Wikiquote
 Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways.
 Wikisource
 Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain texts.
 Wikimedia Commons
 Repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing more than
1,000,000 files.
 Wikispecies
 Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and
all other forms of life.
 Wikinews
 News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many
countries
 Wikiversity
 Courses, course materials, tests. Announced to go into beta testing, little has been
officially decided on its structure
Administrative Wikis
 Meta-Wiki
 Coordination between different Wikimedia projects
 Wikimedia Incubator
 Used to test possible new Wikimedia projects and new languages for existing
projects.
Wikimedia Foundation
 Not Wikipedia Foundation
 The Resolution of it affects everyone
 You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia...
 Because of the rules set up by the Foundation
 Chair: Florence Nibart-Devouard

4. Mediawiki & Education in IT
MediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by all projects of the
Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, including
some of the largest and most popular ones. Originally developed to serve the needs of
the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia, today it has also been deployed by
companies as an internal knowledge management solution, and as a content
management system. (Wikipedia, 2007)
Key facts
 written in the PHP
 can use MySQL or PostgreSQL Database
 Original Designed for Wikipedia
 Now used by
 Wikimedia Projects
 Wikia
 One of the most popular Wiki System
Key Features
 Interlinks ([[John Smith]])
 Namespaces (Talk:)
 Subpages (/)
 Categories (Category:)
 Sections (==Section==)
 Templates ({{template}})
 Media Content
 MediaWiki Gallery
 Editable interface
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content. (Wikipedia,
2007)
Brief History
 WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki
 Ward Cunningham, Its founder
 Started development in 1994
 installed it online 25-Mar-1995
 "wiki" is a Hawaiian word for "quick"
 Cunningham name the system after a shuttle bus line that runs between the
terminals in Honolulu International Airport

5. Types of Wikis
As the graph on the left
By KaurJmeb, used under CC 2.0 (by-sa)
Why wikis are so special
 Mass collaboration (D. Tapscott 2006)
 Openness
 Peering
 Sharing
 Acting Globally
 Logs
 Revision History
 Recent Changes
 Full of Interlinks
 New Style of Mark-up language
Current Usage
 Information sharing in Global scale like Wikimedia
 As Content management system in some institutions & communities-of-practice
 Some wikis developed their own communities-of-practice……..
 New Trends……
Wikis in Education
Wiki is…….
 Described as one of the most promising and rapidly emerging innovations in
knowledge management (Gordon 2006).
 Basically a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and
change all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for
registration. (Wikipedia, 2006).
 An information resource centralized online database nature and a powerful
collaboration tool because of its open editing characteristics (Naish, 2006)
 While good e-learning is about informing, collaborating and meeting Online,
Wikis do all these things well
HKNews of HKSYU
 Running by Journalism & Communication Department, Hong Kong Shue Yan
University
 setup in Feb-2006

6. Problems of HKNews
 Shared resources are not rich enough to create value for students to help the
different writing stages in planning, generating ideas, and taking references (W.K.
Ma & J. Y. Chan, 2007)
 The contents are very similar, because students are asked to write about the
weekly assembly on the site, mostly.
 resistance to using wiki
 A really new technology for the most
 Complains about the strange mark-up-language
 Complains about the not user-friendly interface
Considerations on introducing Wiki
 How many people…
 will be willing to use it?
 have already mastered it?
 have already known something about it?
 Do you have...
 time to watch out for vandalism?
 enough content for development?
 a technician to maintain it?
 enough storage to run a wiki?
Wiki-farms
A wiki farm is a server or a collection of servers that provides wiki hosting, or a group
of wikis hosted on such servers. (Wikipedia, 2007)
Major Wikifarms
 PeanutButterWiki
 runs by 3 graduates of Stanford since 2005
 Runs on their own software
 Socialtext
 Perl-Based
 Wetpaint
 Runs on their own software
 Since 2005, originally named Wikisphere
 PTTWiki
 Under a Taiwanese BBS system
 Powered by WikkiTikkiTavi, PHP Based
 Wikia
 One of the Major wikifarms in the world
 For Free, support multi-Language
 runs on MediaWiki
 founded in 2004
 by Jimmy Wales & Angela Beesley
 under the name Wikicities

7. Conclusions
Glossary
 Wikipedia (and not The Wikipedia) is the encyclopedia project by Wikimedia.
 The Wikimedia Foundation, based in the United States, is the nonprofit
corporation that maintains the project
 A wiki is the generic term for web site that anyone can edit, which may run
MediaWiki or any of many dozens of other wiki software packages.
 MediaWiki is the name of the software that runs Wikipedia, and many other
independent sites.
 Wikia is a commercial service, with headquarters in San Mateo, California.
Examples of proper usage
 RIGHT: "The university started a wiki for its students to collaborate."
 WRONG: "The university started a Wikipedia for its students to collaborate."
 RIGHT: "The Wikimedia Foundation announced a new project today."
 WRONG: "The Wikipedia Foundation announced a new project today.“
Changes brings by Wikis
 Instant Reference VS traditional Looking up
 Commons Sense VS Expertise
 2-Way-Learning VS Single-Way
 Mass collaboration (D. Tapscott 2006) VS Individual labour
 Openness
 Peering
 Sharing
 Acting Globally
The End
Reference
 KaurJmeb, Presentation materials for National Chung Cheng University, Chia-yi, 2006
 KaurJmeb, 維基百科攻略: 分享知識最前線, Pcuser, 2006
 W.K. Ma & J. Y. Chan, Student Journalists Acceptance on Collaborative Writing Wikis, IRMA, 2007
 D. Tapscott & A. D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything , Portfolio, 2006
 Wikimedia Foundation, Materials on its Projects, 2007
Note: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (3.0, by-nc-nd).