[OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages

[Julius Lucks]

Hi All,

Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members  
to contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww  
community, and attract new members by pointing to high quality  
examples of content on oww.  One of the things that struck us is that  
there doesn't seem to be an easy way for a complete wiki novice to  
get into editing.  The existing welcome email is very long and has  
many links for people to follow and I think it is confusing to a  
novice.  Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW and it seems  
hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by just  
surfing around.

So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves  
automatically creating a 'home page' for new users when their account  
is created.  I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a  
good idea, but to see for yourself, please look at our mock home page at

http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ 
Outreach_chairs/mock_home_page

or the one I am playing around with for myself at

http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks

The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their  
account is created: the typical User page, a home page, and a sample  
project page (more about this one below).  The User page can be used  
to show more personal information, but the idea behind the home page  
is to give people a hands-on quick introduction to the wiki-way in  
terms of their own academic projects.  The home page is set up in  
such a way as to provide both an introduction, and an example system  
for how people might think about posting their academic content.   
Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's give too much  
freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting options,  
etc.  The home page would give users something to work off of rather  
than having to come up with a system on their own.

The home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for  
individual projects.  The third page automatically created is a  
sample project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of  
info it would be good to have in describing a project on the wiki.   
The idea is the same here - that people can just start to fill this  
out instead of having to come up with some system on their own.

I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these  
pages, but this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent  
suggestion of filling in the User page.  The benefits of this system  
we think are as follows:

* hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content  
rather than a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and  
then apply to a page they create
* having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to  
start editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info)
* having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle  
than having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize  
at any time
* the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of  
content on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find  
information easier because they would be automatically familiar with  
how other people structure their content from knowing how they do  
their own
* this is more along the lines of what scientists need.  Wikipedia  
works well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by  
everyone, and a simple User page suffices to identify someone.   
Scientists work on many projects and so need a place to put specific  
information about these projects in a place where they have at least  
semi-ownership to acknowledge that they are the principle person on  
the project, even though others may edit.  I think having a project  
page system like this is more along the lines of what people think of  
now in their non-wiki science and how they might use a private wiki  
if they have one.  This makes it an easier transition into opening up  
the data and might facilitate faster content migration from the  
private wikis to the public one.
* the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to  
easily hook into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone  
not affiliated with an OWW lab to get going easily

The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some  
good feedback on the general concept.

Cheers,

Julius and Vincent

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http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks
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