Creating a wiki site at an educational institution

The history of creating a wiki site at an educational institution.

About planning a wiki site.

When writing graduation theses in technical specialties at various universities, you sometimes come across a range of topics: refurbishing a workshop, building a new rolling mill, increasing a converter's capacity, as I know from my experience studying at a technical university. That is why I decided to publish an article about how to introduce a wiki site into an educational institution.
There is an educational institution with the parameters listed above. In accordance with the requirements of government education-planning authorities, the website of an educational institution must contain several dozen indicators of targeted information needed by students, prospective applicants, graduates, and staff of these organizations.
In addition, there are regulations governing the organization of an educational institution's wiki site, which also contain a number of provisions.
The site's technical specifications include the site's size, the frequency of data backups, and the engine on which the site is edited.

THE HISTORY OF WIKI SITES.

In 1999, the online encyclopedia Nupedia was created. Over the following year and a half, it was filled exclusively by special contributors who were paid for the work. Several hundred articles were written. That is why Nupedia's owner, Jimbo Wales, decided to create an encyclopedia that almost anyone could edit. This is how Wikipedia came about. Initially it was an English-language site. Gradually, sites in other language versions were added, including Spanish, German, French, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. Freely editable dictionaries and a quotation collection also appeared. It ran on MediaWiki, one of the wiki engines. In 2003, Jimbo Wales handed all these sites over to the Wikimedia community so that it would continue developing them. In parallel, similar sites appeared, and not only on MediaWiki.
Under the community's management, the Wikimedia projects have been developing over these years. New sites were created — Commons (for storing audio files, video files, and images) — and in 2012 a new project, Wikidata, appeared.

The history of Wikipedia projects since 2004.

The author of this article began editing Wikipedia in 2004. At first I used wiki markup. When categories appeared in the autumn of 2004, I started using this feature. In 2006, bots appeared — special programs that made it possible to automate edits (involving the same types of data). The growth of Commons led to images being uploaded more often not to a language site but directly to Commons. Various templates were actively created. At first the number of articles grew exponentially, then the rate of article growth leveled off somewhat and became linear. By 2009, such concepts as bot-pedias emerged — Wikipedias in which most articles were created by bots. In the Russian-language Wikipedia, most bot-written articles are articles about rivers and populated places. As a rule, participants later expand them by hand. Since 2012, Wikipedia articles have been integrated with Wikidata.

Wikidata.

Originally, the Wikidata project was conceived as an alternative to interwikis — the mechanism for linking various projects across different language versions of Wikipedia. It is enough to place an interwiki in a newly created article, and a bot program will automatically add links to foreign-language versions of the article in several language versions. Sometimes this led to interwiki conflicts, when a single article in some foreign-language Wikipedia was assigned several different articles as synonyms instead of one, which caused various problems; to avoid this, the gradual rollout of Wikidata into Wikipedia's operation began in 2012, which is happening rather painfully.
As a rule, each word in Wikidata corresponds to some item, to which various properties are gradually added depending on the word. For people, these are date of birth, citizenship, and occupation; for geographical objects, these are coordinates, elevation above sea level, and dimensions. For a chemical element, these are its chemical composition, molecular mass, and the characteristics of the bonds between atoms. New properties are added to Wikidata on demand. Integration with Wikidata was built into the templates of various concepts.

The use of Wikipedia by various sites.

Very often, links to Wikipedia articles can be seen not only within the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but also in other electronic and print publications. Wikipedia articles are frequently cited by many well-known sites and many popular-science publications, such as, for example, Science and Life (using photos posted on Commons) that carry a license for free distribution

Similar wiki sites

Most similar wiki sites are sites running on MediaWiki. As a rule, a MediaWiki wiki site can also be deployed on a local machine, but to do so you must observe all the safety requirements.
The most common are city wikis, student wikis, and wiki sites on some particular topic. There are a great many wiki sites in the United States of America. The Spanish wiki encyclopedia Libre and the Chinese Baidu are also well known. They all run on MediaWiki.
In Russia, the largest wiki site is Letopisi, created for teachers and students. It has been running for about ten years now. The daily number of edits on Letopisi amounts to several thousand, which makes it one of the most important tools for teaching schoolchildren information technology.
In addition, a significant number of teacher professional-development institutes use wiki sites in their work. One can name the Kemerovo Institute for Teacher Professional Development, as well as similar universities in other federal subjects.

MY ACTIVITY ON WIKIPEDIA.

Since the author of this article began working on it, more than 11,000 edits have been made, of which 1,000 edits were in articles that were subsequently deleted. On average, several hundred edits in articles were made each year. In 2015, the number of edits in articles was increased.
The main edits made from November 2014 to October 2015. Articles about notable figures of the city of Novokuznetsk were created and are maintained; several templates were added (Higher Educational Institutions of Kemerovo Oblast, EvrazHolding, Heroes of Socialist Labor of Kuzbass) that contain from several dozen to a hundred different entries. Edits were made to the templates. In addition, various specific additions were made to articles, such as the number of people employed at enterprises, an object's coordinates, and specific data (financial information for enterprises, the economic situation in a particular populated place, technical information for various facilities)
In addition, the author started the process of adding useful information to Wikidata, as a rule these are various people whose articles were created in the Russian-language version of Wikipedia. Since 2013, in some cases, to add some piece of information to an infobox template, it is preferable to edit not only the Russian Wikipedia itself but also Wikidata.


How Wikipedia's experience is useful for an educational institution's site.

The involvement of several users while working on an article — under Wikipedia's conditions, one can say that some paragraphs of a single article were written by one user, another part by a second, and a third part by a third. As a rule, those who edit articles are ordinary people (ordinary internet users, even if registered to write an encyclopedia)

Multilingualism — Wikipedia has several hundred different language versions. It is enough to expand one of them, and after some time a translation may appear in a version in another language. However, the size of articles in a given language varies greatly. For example, the English Wikipedia, as of November 1, 2015, has 5 million articles; the Russian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Dutch ones have crossed the 1-million-article mark. So-called bot-pedias also have more than 1 million articles (the best known of them is the Waray one, written in one of the languages of the Philippines). The largest Wikipedias in the languages of the Russian Federation — Tatar, Bashkir, Buryat, Yakut, and Chuvash — have several tens of thousands of articles. At the same time, some Wikipedias, for example the Wikipedia in the Shor language, contain only sixteen articles (and even then only in the incubator). In theory, a bot could create several hundred articles for its further development.

I, for one, liked the idea of spoken articles, which occasionally appear on Wikipedia. Its essence is that some participant reads an article aloud, and a recording of this reading is posted right on Wikipedia. Some well-known people post recordings of their voices on Wikipedia. For several years now there has been a wiki-voice project between the national chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Echo of Moscow radio station to record the voices of the station's guests.

Another useful project for an educational wiki site is Wikibooks, where several articles are gathered, then included in a PDF file, and the result is a book. However, I have used this method very rarely. I find it more convenient to read articles directly on Wikipedia.

Another advantage of deploying a wiki site is its integration with Drupal and Moodle.

Problems in creating wiki sites.

Technical ones (the availability of a server, data security, technical matters), social ones (how to get potential wiki-site editors interested in taking part in its work). Financial ones (when an editor works for free, or when they work for pay).

Prospects for the development of wiki sites

As stated above, the most likely path for the development of wiki sites is the local option — creating industry-specific wiki sites, or sites tied to a particular enterprise or group of enterprises. A transition to document management using wiki technology is still premature. Various wiki encyclopedias may use updates from Wikidata analogs. The creation of personal student wiki sites during one's studies at a university is also promising.