Project Proposal
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Student/Group: Antonio Pineda ID No 05021834
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Provisional Project Title WWW: Working the Wiki Way (Building an Online Community Together)
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Topic/ area of research What makes Caritas unique is its ongoing presence in communities, ... [so that it] can continuously adapt its strategies to an ever changing environment ... More importantly, it empowers people to participate fully in all matters affecting their lives ... Caritas promotes partnership: local autonomy is paramount in ensuring effective teamwork for the good of all. By pooling expertise and resources, Caritas is able to identify issues at the grassroots, analyse them at national and international levels, and then take action locally, regionally and globally.
From the Caritas Internationalis website (www.caritas.org)
For this project, I will build a Wiki website for former and current employees of Caritas Manila (CM), a Catholic charity in the Philippines and a sister organisation of England’s CAFOD. Former and current CM employees vary in age and social background but what they all have in common is the desire to continue and strengthen the bond they formed working for an organisation that exists primarily to help those in need. A social/networking website for CM staff already exists (www.cmbarkada.com) but it is static, offers very little in the way of interaction and relies on one individual (me!) to maintain it. The proposed Wiki site, on the other hand, will allow “the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and typically without the need for registration” (Wikipeda). In this way, CM staff will work together and make their individual contributions to build their online community. This is in keeping with one of the CM ethos: helping those who help themselves. By providing every CM staff the tools tool to make updates to the websites themselves, and therefore not having to rely on me, they are being taught to become self-sufficient. To use another Catholic analogy, they are being taught how to fish to feed themselves rather just being given the fish to eat. The project will cover the following areas of research:
Wiki sites: what are the benefits and drawbacks?
InfoAnarchy lists the pros and cons of Wiki sites, including: The benefits allows anyone to edit a page web-editable, from most web browsers, making it very cross-platform for end users. no special javascripts or plug-ins required less thought-time from looking at a page to correcting it. makes it "easier" to fix broken links, spelling, add insightful comments and other editing simple layout
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simple command structure, no special HTML knowledge necessary, although HTML is available for use in some cases. principle of voluntary co-operation allows for unfinished or incomplete work to be placed so it is shared and easily improved or added to by others at their discretion
The drawbacks If users can edit freely, this could lead to inappropriate content. The editing or rewriting an article might be considered almost impolite or even arrogant, especially in the Philippine culture. To avoid this barrier, it should be maintained that nobody has ownership of a topic, and that it is expected that there will be multiple authors all looking and contributing, even if that means correcting spelling or rewriting paragraphs. Many users are so used to viewing web content from a consumer-perspective that the only additions they make are comments. Users must understand that they are both a consumer (reader), and a producer (editor) and that while adding a comment is inspiring, editing the work directly has great value. As in real-life communities, there can exist conflicts of goals or personality. Politeness, patience and consideration must be observed at all times. The Wiki framework encourages a "post first, think later" frame of mind and a user may find himself subjected to peer review and criticism. Wikis are so vulnerable that data can be destroyed, disrupted or displaced by automated attacks. Security measures need to be in place and regular back ups are essential.
Online communities
In the mid-90s, CM had more than 130 full time employees. Now, as a result of various restructuring and cuts in funding, the organisation has fewer than 20 members of staff. Added to this is the fact that a large number of former CM staff are now based outside the Philippines, including the United States, England and other Asian countries. Fortunately, technology has made it very easy for a group of like-minded individuals to stay in touch and communicate with one another wherever they are in world. Over the years, the CM people have developed into an online community through the CM Barkada Website, or “a group of people that primarily or initially communicates or interacts via the Internet” (Wikipedia). There is of course no substitute for a real-world community or face-to-face interaction, but according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, a “large numbers of American Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities”. The survey found that found that 43% of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they "feel as strongly" about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities. Why this might be so might be explained by the three motivations for contributing to online communities, as outlined by Peter Kollock in The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace (1999). These motivations were: Anticipated reciprocity: a person will be motivated to contribute information to the group if he/she believes that he will receive useful information in return. So, in the proposed CM Wiki site, a member of staff now residing in the US might contribute updates on his new life hoping that former colleagues in the Philippines would do likewise. Increased recognition: contributors like to be recognised for their inputs and the more they are recognised for their efforts the more they would be willing to contribute. One of the benefits of Wiki sites is that the contributor’s name (or username) is automatically “stamped” on the page he or she creates. This means that if a CM member of staff posts a news item about a
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colleague’s recent birthday party, he or she will be instantly acknowledged as the writer. Sense of efficacy: individuals may contribute information because it gives them a sense of efficacy, or a feeling that they have had some effect on the community. Research (eg, Albert Bandura, 1995) has shown that making regular and quality contributions to the group can help individuals fell that they have an impact on the group and support their own self-image as an efficacious person.
Mark Smith mentions another motivation which is implicit in the above in his 1992 thesis, Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons. This motivation is communion, or a sense of community. People are social beings in general and they enjoy being responded to directly for their contributions. The website How Stuff Works (www.howstuffworks.com) has identified four roles in an online community: Readers: they visit the website for whatever reason and read one or more articles. Writers: some readers eventually become writers by adding a new section to an existing article or create a brand new article. Editors: readers become editors when they see an error on a page they are reading and correct it, often on the spot. Administrators: these are granted privileges that give them the right to do things like deleting and un-deleting pages, blocking and unblocking IP addresses, etc.
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Aims of Project This project aims to create a Wiki website that will encourage the existing CM online community to grow by giving them the tools and means to maintain their own website. I will attempt to do this by following the eight guidelines on building a successful online community as outlined by Matt Haughey in his article, Building an Online Communit: Just Add Water (Digital Web, 2001). “Make sure you really want to do this” Haughey advises that you should make yourself fully aware of what is involved in the creation and maintenance of a community website before jumping into the deep end. Fortunately, I already have a good idea of the time and effort involved in keeping a website going through the current static website. The new Wiki version will only make things easier for me as, in theory at least, the work load and responsibility for the site will be shared. “Have both a compelling idea and compelling content” The project already has a built-in audience. The Wiki website will simply replace the current site and hopefully the existing audience will stick with it. They already know what the site is all about and what content to expect but, as Haughey enthuses, “where community sites can excel over single person operations [is that] with a diverse enough membership, you can have an expert artist, fantastic writers, great photographers, and senior programmers to build the best community site imaginable”. Part of my role, therefore, will be to encourage the pooling of resources of CM staff for the benefit of the website. “Seed content sets the stage” Haughey states that: “In the early months of a community site, it's important that there is good content there, and that the comments or audience interaction are as close to optimal as possible, so that others reading the site can get a feel for how they are expected to act.” Content for the Wiki site will remain the same – what will change will simply be the process by which
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updates are made and by whom. I intend migrate contents from the existing site to the new site. The current site has been in existence for six years and so potential contributors will already have a good idea as to what content will be deemed appropriate. “Create some basic guidelines and be as fair as possible” As the site owner, I have the responsibility to set the examples to follow. By posting regularly and intelligently, I will keep a high profile so that others are made aware of my presence. Potential troublemakers will know that I will catch any misdemeanors very quickly. It is important to draft a set of fair and reasonable rules which should be placed somewhere on the site so that they can always be referred to. I must be diligent in enforcing these rules, but in a nice way. What any member of any community hates to see is an autocratic leader who bullies the majority into obedience while letting friends or long time members get away with everything. “Have a place to talk about the site, somewhere on the site” Like in almost any situation you can think of, communication is very important in a community. It is important to have a pace on the website where members can air their views, comments, suggestions, grievances, and so on. This should be separate from other discussion sections that the site may have. If it is not possible to have the facility for airing members’ views on the website on the site itself, alternatives should be offered such as an email list for interested parties. The important thing is that members get the sense that they have somewhere to go when they have something to say. “Spread the work out as much as possible” When the day-to-day maintenance of the site can be spread out among several people things will run more smoothly especially. I plan to “appoint” a few friends to act as moderators and/or administrators to achieve this. “Deal with troublemakers as quickly and nicely as possible” The problem with any community is that sooner or later one or two members will be tempted to disrupt the peace. “The bottom line is to stop unsavoury behaviour by difusing nasty situations as early as possible, in as nice way as possible,” states Haughey. He recommends emailing the offending person in the first instance, gently pointing our their erroneous ways while avoiding to sound threatening or patronising. If this does not work, the next thing to do is enforce some sort of penalty (eg, taking away posting or editing rights). I will email the person concerned to tell him/her what I have done, why I have done it, and what he/she can do to get the ban lifted. “Highlight the good, recognise the work of others” Good contributions can be encouraged by “recognising and highlighting the best your community has to offer” (Haughey). For example, if a member posts an item that generates a lot of enthusiastic feedback, I would highlight this fact to encourage further postings from that member and similar contributions from others. Similarly, it is a good idea to recognise the hard work of moderators regularly (say, annually) as it can become all too easy to take for granted the efforts of those working behind the scenes.
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Literature review and product research (this paragraph must be at least 1,000/1,500 words)
Literature review
Online Communities: Supporting Sociability, Designing Usability (Paperback) by Jenny Preece Paperback: 464 pages Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd (31 Aug 2000) ISBN-10: 0471805998
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ISBN-13: 978-0471805991 Author Jenny Preece is an expert on human-computer interactions. In this book, she suggests ways of improving virtual realities or online communities. She does this both by providing a sociological review and also offering something of a design manual and so the book strikes the balance between the theory and the practical. The content is comprehensive. It includes: basic concepts on online communities survey research on the use of virtual spaces techniques to design and build different online communities examples and case studies from actual websites
Wiki: Web Collaboration (Hardcover) by Anja Ebersbach (Author), Markus Glaser (Author), Richard Heigl (Author) Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K; Bk&CD-Rom edition (Sep 2005) ISBN-10: 3540259953 ISBN-13: 978-3540259954 This book provides a step-by-step introduction to Wiki philosophy, social effects and functions. However, those who are looking for a general textbook on Wikis should look elsewhere for this title focuses on two popular Wiki software, MediaWiki and TWiki. In fact, this book can be considered as a manual for these applications. This is fine for my purpose, for I am considering MediaWiki for this project. The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Paperback) by Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham Paperback: 440 pages Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; Bk&CD-Rom edition (April 3, 2001) ISBN-10: 020171499X ISBN-13: 978-0201714999 This book is intended for system administrators or managers who are looking into affordable content management solutions. It explains what Wiki software is and how to install and administer it. There are sections discussing the benefits of Wiki sites as well as stories of how companies in real life have successfully used Wiki sites for research, business and education. Although this book was published in 2001 and some of the information is out of date, it is still worth a browse to get an idea on how a Wiki site might work in practice. Web resources There is an overwhelming amount of information on Wiki sites and online communites on the Web. For this proposal alone, I found several websites that helped me with my research (see bibliography below). Worth singling out is Wikipedia, a Wiki site in itself which sets the standard to which Wiki sites should aspire. I have reviewed Wikipedia below.
Product reviews
Wikipedia Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and edit. It has become such a phenomenon that The Guardian has called it "one of the internet's most inspiring success stories". Its success has surprised everyone, including its founder Jimmy Wales who freely admits that the whole
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concept of an encyclopedia with no editor, proof readers, fact checkers and not full-time staff at all was a "completely insane idea" (The Guardian, 2004). What is not surprising is the fact that, as Wikipedia itself states, "there has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials". Interestingly, an article in a German technology magazine published in 2004, compared Wikipedia with two established, traditional digital encyclopedias: Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta. All three were tested on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content and Wikepedia emerged as the undisputed winner. Dan Gillmor, Silicon Valley commentator and author of We the Media, supports this finding. He says: "I don't think anyone is saying Wikipedia is an absolute replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. But in the topics I know something about, I've found Wikipedia to be as accurate as any other source I've found." And so it seems “large groups of people are inherently smarter than an élite few”, as New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asserted in his best seller The Wisdom of Crowds. Wikipedia fans argue that collaboration improves articles over time, in the same way as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox are superior in many ways to their commercial competitors because thousands of amateur programmers look at the code and suggest changes.
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Technologies employed and Resources I will use MediaWiki to create the website, the most popular Wiki software. I am currently not familiar with this software but I feel confident that I have enough time between now and August to be proficient with it. Here are my main reasons for choosing MediaWiki: It is a free software package licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). It uses PHP and MySQL, two technologies I learned in my Web Design and Usability module in the autumn semester. Pages use "Wikitext format", meaning users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily. When a user edits a page, MediaWiki retains previous versions, allowing reverts in case of vandalism or spamming.
I will keep the domain cmbarkada.com for the new site but will use a different host, SiteGround, which specialises in hosting Wiki sites. SiteGround promises "everything you need for your MediaWiki site in one all-inclusive Wiki hosting package with great features and secure servers, multiple free tools ..." Features include: 40,000 mb web space immediate activation MediaWiki installation and tutorial Wiki optimised servers unlimited MySQL dabatases
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Project plan Please see Appendix 1.
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If group work, outline of group members contribution This is an individual project completed solely by me.
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Methodology for evaluation To complete this project successfully, I need to keep in mind the following questions: And so: The new look and design should appeal to former and current CM staff, especially those who are already regular visitors of the existing website. The feature to add pages and edit content should work and the process should be easy enough for even non-technical users to carry out successfully. Why am I making this Wiki website? What is its purpose? What are the business goals behind this site? What has to work for this site to be effective? Who is the audience for this site? Can they use the site? What is the core functionality offered by this site? Can all users at least access this core functionality?
Testing The Wiki site will be tested at the alfa and beta stages. Testing involves measuring the ease with which real users can complete common tasks on the website and will also look into increasing the reach of the website and fulfil our client’s legal requirements. Testing will look at the following issues, as listed by Philisophe.com: basic adherence to an HTML document type definition links are not broken links point at correct targets adherence to a coding style guide or standard (eg, grahics should have ALT values) adherence to a content style guide or standard correctness of graphics (eg, does an image portray what it is supposed to portray?) correctness of dynamic content or includes application functionality (eg, can the pages be edited?) basic compatibility (eg, does the website work in all browsers?) basic performance (eg, do the video clips download fast enough even with dial-up connections?)
User testing will be carried out by users of the original site, I propose ten users, as follows: 5 from the Philippines 3 from the USA 2 from the UK
Testing should include but not limited to the following: finding specific information on the website (how quickly and easily is this done?) adding and deleting a page
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importing an image on a page editing an existing article adding internal and external links
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Bibliography Online articles LIGHT, A., 2007. Online communities as strong as real world, suggests study [online], UsabilityNews.com. Available from http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3600.asp. [Accessed 20 January 2007] HAUGHEY, M., 2001. Building an online community: just add water [online], Digital Web Magazine. Available from http://www.digital-web.com/articles/building_an_online_community/. [Accessed 20 January 2007] STERNSTEIN, A., 2005. Collaborative sites enable sharing of ideas, workload [online], USA Today. Available from http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2005-04-04-wiki-web_x.htm. [Accessed 20 January 2007] WALDMAN, S., 2004. Who knows? [online], Guardian Unlimited. Available from http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1335892,00.html. [Accessed 20 January 2007] TAYLOR, C., 2005. It’s a Wiki, Wiki World [online], Time. Available from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1066904-1,00.html. [Accessed 20 January 2007] AUTHOR NOT CREDITED, 2003. Online communities get reat [online], BBC. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2946188.stm [Accessed 20 January 2007] Websites Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) [Accessed 20 January 2007] Amazon.co.uk (www.amazon.co.uk) [Accessed 20 January 2007] Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) [Accessed 20 January 2007] CM Barkada (www.cmbarkada.com) [Accessed 20 January 2007] Caritas Manila (www.caritasmanila.org) [Accessed 20 January 2007] Caritas Internationalis (www.caritas.org) [Accessed 20 January 2007] SiteGround (www.siteground.com) [Accessed 20 January 2007] How Stuff Works (www.howstuffworks.com) [Accessed 20 January 2007] MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org) [Accessed 20 January 2007] InfoAnarchy (www.infoanarchy.org) [Accessed 20 January 2007]
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