University of Canberra/RCC2011/RecentChangesCamp Expanded/Sydney/notes

Notes from RCCx - made somewhat haphazardly (I find it hard to type and listen at the same time!) --Chriswaterguy 13:31, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

(Jutta talked before I started typing so this bit is rough...) Jutta spoke about her first wiki experience, about her current job which had "knowledge of wikis" as an optional extra thing her employers hoped for.

Nick Jenkins & Andrew Garrett talked about MediaWiki & bug-squashing.

Andrew & Jutta talked about wikis for clinical practice guidelines and for cancer research

Pending Changes (formerly FlaggedRevs) - the fundamental dilemmas (who can bless, who decides who can bless, do registered users & admins have their changes "auto-blessed"?), confusion and conflicting problems and

Isn't "screw the newbies" an official en.wikipedia policy?

Liam - learnt about open source through Wikipedia, ended up doing his thesis on Wikipedia.

Tim Rayner - "Coalition of the Willing" swarm approach to climate change. Working on cotw.cc, and part of the vision is a Green Knowledge Trust (a green Wikipedia).

Leigh Blackall - wikis in education. Advantages of using a public wiki on a tender - dialog started with the key party from an early stage because they could see when they were mentioned; this improved the quality of other tenders, which was positive as they were an altruistic project.

Alice from Cancer Council, works with literature searches. Cancer Council is working with a wiki to have more up-to-date info than a physical book. Jutta & Alice talked about tools/extensions/techniques for citations.

"Megawikis" - our new favorite word for the Wikimedia sites.

Liam: Prove-it gadget is available on Wikipedia.extension...?

Data wiki, & the idea of a centralized wiki for templates.

Funding that Wikimedia Foundation has received for specific work has issues, where there is a contractual requirement to implement something, and it turns out to (e.g.) not improve user experience.

Appropedia - funding issues the main current challenge.

Look of the wiki - wikifashion, perception that it needs to be beautiful - and it does look beautiful, but hard to see how to edit.

Matthew Clarke - Wiki Christian, vandalism issues (Andrew asked if they considered automated solutions) - corporate wikis -> open discussion, Liam mentioned that the US State Department put in a MediaWiki successfully, by pre-seeding the wiki, favoring the wiki in search results, and deprecating other platforms in support. #blog

Talk pages - Andrew: Make it easy to show appreciation for other people's posts...

Russian Wikipedia - rather than deleting, they move articles about Joe Blow's cat to a different "incubator" namespace.

Andrew: Rich text editing in MediaWiki is technically extremely difficult because of so many functions, from languages (Chinese, right-to-left languages...) to musical notation, mathematical functions, templates and parser functions. It's the Wikimedia Foundation's #1 priority, but it's a 3 year project.

Talked about future meetings - a regular monthly event?