Wiki Management Discussion Article

This is a discussion and overview of issues of managing the OpenVistA Wiki.

Control of Users - malicious and uninformed contributions

Wiki is traditionally wide open and philosophically adament in some quarters about this openess.

One argument is that there should be no inhibition to contribution in order to maximize input.

Truth is judged by the community and authority of experts - by their persistence ? This does work amazingly well(IMHO)in venues such as the WikiPedia on an amazing variety of detailed subjects. I was amazed at the level of information in taking a course on genomics and bioinformatics to find very useful things, well orgnanized, in the Wikipedia articles. These supplemented what was covered in my course, by making it easy to look up - and I added my two cents in the process of taking the course.

Malicious stuff is easy to reverse and usually obvious to spot by legitimate readers and writers.

But, this takes time and misinformation/malicous inmformation could be used in the interim. I would propose ultimately some changesin the Wiki software and policy to better control quality in some critical Wiki venues. I believe a level of sophistication can be achieved, however, with little inhibition to contribution, - maybe less. It involves policy an software enhancements to add editors to articles and authorship - responsibility (with limits) more analogous to standard textbooks or journal articles, but with the full power of contributions by many.

More discussion is (will be) under OCTEM, the emergency medicine WikiBook, if you are interested.

Article Naming

Articles are created in a somewhat backhanded method of creating a link with double square brackets to an article that does not yet exist, then clicking on the link and getting an edit this page screen for the new article.

Selecting the Article name, is done by what you put in the brackets. The article name can be edited later, but not without some hassle- moving the discussion, correcting links here and there, ... things the Wiki software helps with, but is not perfect.

A convention would be useful to keep some coherence to the system. This Article's name is an example of how context suggests one phrase which is probably not the best Article Name.

Short names have the advantage of efficient use in Go vs Search box which is always available to find the articles. This would be useful when users watch an article and go there frequently.

Again, the issue of central control and coherency, vs not inhibiting or slowing down anyone with content to contribute, raises its (ugly?) head.

System Specific Articles

Issues such as mode-dependent information, like which MUMPS system is being used may be managed coherently. Thus a GTM use vs a Cache user could select efficiently articles tailored to thier MUMPS system when this is important.

A hospital installation versus a clinic or community clinic or emergency department (ED)installation, may select different articles. Perhaps markers within pages might make these distinctions and be useful then in searches.

Categories

Creating categories and managing them effectively for efficient use is an acquired art in Wiki.