43rd Annual Meeting- Workshop, May 13, "Using Wikis to Collaborate, Share, and Advance Conservation" with Rachael Perkins Arenstein, Michele Derrick, and Suzy Morgan

This year, the annual meeting wiki-a-thon turned into a daylong workshop in the hopes that we would have more time to add content to the site. Thanks again to NCPTT for helping to fund the day! Although we never seem to have enough time, the day was immensely helpful in getting beginners comfortable with adding content to the site and moving the more experienced users forward to another level with useful tips and problem solving for getting the wiki to do what we want.
After introductions, Rachael started with a useful overview of the wiki site and general goals. She also gave a brief talk put together by Leon Zaks (from the pestlist) about how to choose your online platform. Basically the wiki is a many to many platform- there are many contributors with loosely vetted content meant to reach a large audience.
Michelle presented on CAMEO, which is hosted by the MFA Boston. It has recently been moved to a wiki format so that it can be more easily updated- hopefully by more than just Michelle. Anyone interested is welcome to contact Michelle. CAMEO is a great resource and the wiki is not meant to duplicate it, but there is definitely room for increasing the connection between the two and improving the integration of the sites.
Unfortunately Nancie Ravenel was not able to make it, but we had Nora Lockshin available to step in and provide lots of great information about wikipedia in general, what are some of the ground rules and expected conduct on the site. If you didn’t know, there is a wikipedia teahouse made for newcomers- this is a great place to post questions and get answers about coding. Just beware- the AIC wiki does not have all of the extensions and add-ons, so something you can do on Wikipedia isn’t necessarily possible on the AIC Wiki. That being said, if there is anything you want to do and can’t let Rachael know and she can look into getting that functionality on the site.
Two other wiki sites, you should know about Preservapedia (also sponsored by NCPTT) and the SPNHC wiki which is just getting off the ground.
Other tidbits you should know that came out of the day:

  • Creative Commons is a way of licensing images to limit their use by others, or make them available to all
  • when searching through google images or flickr, you can filter those that have the CC license
  • there is a great slider tool to help you determine if something is still under copyright or in the public domain
  • The AIC has a policy and expects that if you post something, you have gotten the proper permissions and you have given AIC permission to publish and re-publish content in perpetuity, so that they can migrate to a new platform when needed in the future.
  • When adding images- be aware of their size. Please resize before uploading.
  • Zotero is a great open source citation tool- the exported citation format for the wiki is not exactly right, but could save you a ton of time when adding citations.
  • Check out the Categories page from Special pages- these can be used to “tag” pages in a way to help link them together.
  • For the non-beginner training session Suzy put all of her notes on the wiki under the news section, so you can find all of her great tips there.

Happy wiki-editing!