[OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages

Mon Apr 23 10:14:25 EDT 2007

Hey all,

I think I agree with Jason that I don't necessarily see a reason for a
separate homepage and user page.

Julius, what naming convention did you envision using for naming the
homepage?  i.e. what would my homepage be called?

One motivation for having the pages all linked from the person's userpage is
that it becomes quite easy to encourage good naming conventions...

[[Special:Mypage]] goes to the logged in user's page.
[[Special:Mypage/Projects]] goes to a page off the logged in user's user
page.

That way you're not relying on folks typing in a new name for a page by hand
and thus generally end up with better page names.  (You just say in the
how-to ... edit this page: [[Special:Mypage]]).

With regards to the issue of scientific content in the user namespace versus
the main namespace ... I am not sure that that matters so much.

-Reshma

PS I agree with Julius that scientific content is not easily browsable or
well-organized on OWW.  That's why I played around with the page
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli last week.  All the lists of
pages are generated dynamically from the dynamic page list extension based
on categories.  But this is a topic for a different thread.

On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks <lucks at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> Hey Jason,
> Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a separate
> 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons:
>
> * The User page can be used for more personal info like other
> interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww member behind
> the science.
> * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science.
> * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages:  the
> naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/project_page]] -
> i.e.,
> the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages.  Having a
> separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is more useful than
> having them all inside the User: namespace since the main name space is
> where we are having scientific content at the moment.  (I guess we could
> make a namespace for all of these Homepage and project pages.)  Also, having
> the project page fall under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership'
> or at least 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can
> contribute at any time.  This can be put to good use in advertising to
> potential new users as a way for them to keep some of the attribution for
> their work, since I imagine many new users are afraid of losing
> attribution.  Another way to put it is this structure is closer to normal
> authorship identification of work, and will be more familiar and thus less
> of a jump for new users to get used to.  (Note that of course one could
> always look into the history logs to see who created a page, but these logs
> are a complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential
> user.)
> * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]]  convention, then
> they automatically start to learn good page naming habits, which is
> non-trivial given that you can name pages almost anything.
> * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot of
> scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to work on.
> Just browsing through the site and only navigating through clicking on links
> (and not typing any URLs), it is non-trivial to get from the front page of
> oww to some scientific content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new
> user.  Having all this info in one place (with this naming convention)
> allows users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look for
> new content - given that they are used to the structure from their own
> [[Homepage/project_page]]  pages.  Having all the info in this structure
> makes it really easy for us to scrape content and create some navigation
> pages like: a page that lists all the user Home pages, a page that lists all
> the projects that are ongoing, etc.
> * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on a user
> level.  Labs can then just link their user Homepages to start to form the
> lab pages, and people are familiar with lab Homepages which will lessen the
> learning curve.
>
> Julius
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote:
>
> 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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