[OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages

[Reid Williams]

I think this is an excellent idea. There were a few phrases that
seemed too imperative to me ("Please add something about yourself
there") that I changed.

regards,
-reid



On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks <lucks at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
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