I’ve had a chat at the recent EAGx with Chris Watkins about his experience running Appropedia, a wiki devoted to sustainability, and asked him for some advice. Some points that I gathered:
To kick things off, the wiki should have at least one person that can commit to managing the project, someone who is technically skilled (perhaps paid), and about 5 people who can be counted on as core contributors.
It needs to be acknowledged in the community as a respected place to point to. Should be coordinated in advance with people who are likely to use it as a reference and to people who are interested in contributing to it.
Before starting a wiki, make sure that there would actually be enough users.
Work out the license in advance. Especially if importing materials from other sources (say previous wikis, or the forum).
It’s best to set a culture where people can just write things in without much formatting. Other people can take care of readability later. Also, promote editing whenever the user feels like something needs to be added/adjusted/deleted—it’s better to move fast and break things as it is easy to fix.
Chris offers to give more specific advice if we start related wiki projects.
I’ve had a chat at the recent EAGx with Chris Watkins about his experience running Appropedia, a wiki devoted to sustainability, and asked him for some advice. Some points that I gathered:
To kick things off, the wiki should have at least one person that can commit to managing the project, someone who is technically skilled (perhaps paid), and about 5 people who can be counted on as core contributors.
It needs to be acknowledged in the community as a respected place to point to. Should be coordinated in advance with people who are likely to use it as a reference and to people who are interested in contributing to it.
Before starting a wiki, make sure that there would actually be enough users.
Work out the license in advance. Especially if importing materials from other sources (say previous wikis, or the forum).
It’s best to set a culture where people can just write things in without much formatting. Other people can take care of readability later. Also, promote editing whenever the user feels like something needs to be added/adjusted/deleted—it’s better to move fast and break things as it is easy to fix.
Chris offers to give more specific advice if we start related wiki projects.
.Appropedia has a page on making new successful wikis
Also, I noticed that the post and comments thus far didn’t link to the interesting discussion about the PriorityWiki in this post.