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

Tue Aug 6 11:14:24 PDT 2013

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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>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> jeremy hunsinger
>> Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
>> Virginia Tech
>>
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>>
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>>
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>> to
>> do it.
>> -Pablo Picasso
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