[Air-L] AoIR Wiki Was: A suggestion for reading lists and syllabi

Wed Aug 7 20:21:47 PDT 2013

I want to express my strong preference for the organization to have its wiki on aoir.org domain, controlled by us, and not monetized (and web-bugged) by third parties. 

Currently on http://aoir.wikia.com/ I'm confronted by a Skylanders advertisement, Mazda banner, and a "Naked and Afraid" video commercial. And that's just on the top of the page....

There are also 8 tracking bugs/cookies being added to by browser.

I don't understand why we can't host MediaWiki and lock down editing so it doesn't get overun by spambots. I've had MW on my own site for years, and by requiring a user account to edit (and I control who gets user accounts), there's zero spam. 

$0.02,
Michael 

-- 
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
Director, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org

On Aug 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Alexander Halavais <halavais at gmail.com> wrote:

> Alex et al,
> 
> I think you list my main pluses for a hosted solution. And I
> acknowledge the main advantages to self-hosting with MediaWiki. As I
> noted, many have volunteered to maintain the wiki, and many have
> failed to follow through. I'm not naming names, because there is no
> blame to be taken up here--but it's work that generally gets pushed to
> the back of the queue, particularly when people have to be going up
> for tenure ("I owe my tenure to my awesome wiki gardening" said no one
> ever), or looking for a job, or breathing. In other words, we are not
> more reliable than outsourcing the work, and so we've looked for
> managed solutions in a number of areas.
> 
> If there is a very strong feeling among a community of contributors
> that we should be using MediaWiki over something like Wikia, we could
> look a managed solution like Cloudways. But I think it makes more
> sense to go with a platform that is more user friendly to those
> without experience editing a MediaWiki (e.g., Wikipedia). If the ads
> are an issue, we could buy our way out of them. But for me, they
> aren't *enough* of a problem for that.
> 
> Frankly, I don't want to be a pessimist, and I am excited by the
> enthusiasm around building the wiki. I also am weighing the present
> enthusiasm against many years of people saying they wanted to work on
> the Wiki (content-wise) but few actually contributing. My suggestion
> would be that we build it on Wikia. If there are people regularly
> contributing, and there is consensus that it makes sense to bring it
> back under local control, and someone on the Executive is willing to
> agree to take on the burden of managing it, then I'll be happy to
> migrating the content. But until there is the commitment to the
> content, I think Wikia is a good interim measure that allows us to
> test the waters.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Other Alex
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just to throw in a bit of discussion: Alex, I would definitely like to know
>> your thoughts on Wikia vs. our own install. Obviously spam is one issue.
>> Easy of use (ie., markup language) is probably another. On the our-install
>> side, I can think of three arguments: 1) not relying on a 3rd party (issues
>> of access, especially if Wikia goes defunct somehow) 2), supporting
>> open-source software, and 3) no ads.
>> 
>> Personally, I'm still for the wiki.aoir.org install, but by creating a Wikia
>> page without some kind of 'official' support of the org, I'm concerned
>> efforts will be divided across both wikis (well, that is, if we can get new
>> accounts on our own wiki...).
>> 
>> I'm happy to volunteer, btw, to be the point person for helping create new
>> accounts for people that need them.
>> 
>> ---
>> 
>> Alexander Leavitt
>> PhD Student
>> USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
>> http://alexleavitt.com
>> Twitter: @alexleavitt
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> http://web.archive.org/web/20080421002111/http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
>>> is a pretty good version of the prior wiki.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:45 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Great Job Alex,
>>>> 
>>>> I guess the http://wiki.aoir.org 's heyday was probably back in
>>>> 2003-2005.  It was and is a good idea to have a wiki, spamming aside,
>>>> and
>>>> yes i do still help maintain it sometimes on the old url.  It would be
>>>> good
>>>> to find a way to migrate some of the content from the old site to the
>>>> new
>>>> site though. I paid for some of of the content to be added to the wiki
>>>> by
>>>> one of my center assistants back in the day, the lists of researchers
>>>> and a
>>>> few other things.  Those sorts of things were handy and drew some
>>>> traffic
>>>> at the time.  However, they slowly became dated i guess.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://www.aoir.org/
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> jeremy hunsinger
>>> Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
>>> Virginia Tech
>>> 
>>> www.tmttlt.com
>>> 
>>> ()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
>>> /\                        - against microsoft attachments
>>> http://www.stswiki.org/  sts wiki
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>>> book series
>>> 
>>> I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how
>>> to
>>> do it.
>>> -Pablo Picasso
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>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> --
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> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
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> //
> // Please attribute any stupid errors above to autocorrect on my phone.
> // (But I probably was typing on a keyboard.)
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