For this week’s assignment in my Weblogs and Wikis class we are exploring the class wiki. Part of this is creating our own pages or making major edits to existing pages. As this is my first foray into wiki-ing, I’m having some trouble familiarizing myself with the technology. Which buttons do I push and where do I find the appropriate links? How do I make it look good? … What the hell do I write about?
To get ideas I started to browse the Index of pages on the Wiki and discovered that there was no page for NewMedia. I found this surprising because it is a central concept for a class like this one. “Well,” I thought, “I’ll write a page for that. That should be easy.” And so I started with a healthy dose of hubris. It took me some time to figure out how to start a new page even though we had done it in class earlier in the week (I have an easier time translating dead languages or identifying mammalian species than working with new technology).
Once I figured out how to create a new page it was easy – all I had to do was start writing. But that’s when the anxiety hit. The only wiki I have any really experience with is Wikipedia and then only as a consumer. I know that the beauty of the wiki is that it is always a rough draft that can be revised as much and as often as necessary. But, I still thought viewed it as something important that other people would be reading. If there is one thing I understand, it’s how much a person’s writing can affect how people see them. In the end I wrote only a few sketchy lines. Maybe I’ll go and flesh them out later, but right now I’m having a very difficult time having an unfinished draft out there with my name associated with it, however loosely.
Kevin
Use the icons, Ivory–that’s the easiest way to figure out how to format a wiki page. When in doubt about how to do something, go into edit mode on somebody else’s page to see how they did it. Or, as Dr. Morgan would say, “JFGI”.