Difference between revisions of "2007-04-04"

Revision as of 13:13, 4 April 2007

A Diary?

April 4, around 8am, a quiet, blue and sunny morning, the trees are in all shades of light green, someone is walking his two dogs down there on the grass, the campus is silent, yet somehow I feel the tension of the summer semester is out there... this seems to be a diary.

The Angl-lit-wiss-wiki is going into its second week and I feel it developing a life of its own. The Recent changes link (at the left) lists a look all the edits. You can see for instance how the Introduction to Literature Basismodul grows step by step in a process of teamwork. If you visit that page click its “history”-tab to get this view.

Yet the edits do not give the complete picture. Each page has its own counter (scroll down to see it) – and if you click Special:Popularpages (you get there via the "Special pages" link at the left), you can see how many visitors have visited our individual pages. 632 hits for the main page within 7 days, not bad.

My favourite is this page Special:Listusers – it gives the list of all our “users”, i.e. of all who have opened an account so far. 99% of the edits have come from the staff, so far. Yet we are already the minority among the users listed.

A Wiki

The wiki we have created is open – anyone can create an account, anyone can open pages, anyone can vandalise – even if he or she does not have an account.

An open wiki is a kind of Tamagochi – it is there, here, in Australia, Canada or Zimbabwe – you can kill it in China and revitalise a deleted page at the Vatican at Rome. It hence needs people to take care of it.

Well yes, we could have restricted participation to users we know personally. We would then need a bureaucracy to legitimize new accounts and all that.

The open wiki needs its own care – and a group of people who will look through the list of recent changes every now and then to detect vandalism, it needs people who have pages on their watchlists.

Things will be easy if we develop a kind of wikiquette among us – I’d propose we interact with our real names – first names and family names like Anna Auguscik or John Alistair Kühne (if you have already opened an account under Pseudonym or just your first name, open a full name one and we’ll delete the old account – the interaction between us, will become pretty messy otherwise, I fear.

And this Blog?

I do not know. Had the idea this morning. May be I shall do it for a week and someone else does it for the following. It would be brilliant to have changing perspectives. What does the institute look like through Mariam’s eyes – we all visit her office every day? What does it look like for you if this is your first or last semester?

Jutta Schwarzkopf and Uwe Zagratzki – two of our staff members – will work this semester at universities in Paris and Vechta. I feel it would be fascinating to have them writing for us for a week during this semester. (I just realise, that I myself will be absent over much of the next week – so may be I’ll find time to write from Rutgers, where I am going to give a lecture on the 12th – can hardly imagine this.)

Time to end this day’s entry – there is serious work to be done. --Olaf Simons