[OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages

[Jason Kelly]

Yeah, I like this idea a lot.  Thanks for the good work, guys.
Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple
instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on
editing for sure.

I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate UserPage
and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things
you described in the homepage.

thanks,
jason

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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