Part 1 of 2

For the past two days I continued working on wikis, this time not only editing a wiki, but actually creating a wiki of my own. The next set of activities for our LIBR 246 class is to: install the open source application, MediaWiki, on the SJSU Senna server, create a wiki on that installation, and then create another wiki on a commercially available wiki. After working on these activities we are to post our experiences on said activities and expound on what other library-related uses wikis have, based on our readings, and audio-visual sources, and experience in going through the activities this week.

MediaWiki Installation

I think I am getting better following instructions and learning from the previous snags I encountered when I worked on blogs and RSS as chronicled in previous posts. Installation went smoothly, and I feel that constant use of the Terminal Window and typing the code, rather than just doing a wizard-kind of installation has ease my anxiety with working with code.  At the very least, it increased my comfort level of doing this kind of installation. Don’t get me wrong, I am still at the newbie stage in terms of working with code but at least I can get the sense of what the different commands mean, like cd means change directory, or how working on MySQL means changing configurations, and permission levels on who the user is or what the database is.  Aside from installing MediaWiki, we are also to replace the wiki.png image on the main page, and to accomplish that we have to enable the “upload image” function of Media Wiki and this was accomplished by changing the permission level of the image folder on the wiki directory on the Senna server. It sounds so complicated but it only means doing a right-click on said folder and clicking on properties and clicking on “Group” on the column “Write” to allow uploads.  After that I successfully changed the wiki.png by uploading my own file. Here is how it looks like.

Creating a wiki on MediaWiki

Now that I have MediaWiki installed, the next part of the exercise is to create a wiki using the open source software. The instructions allow a degree of latitude as to what kind of a wiki one has to make, but I was leaning on doing something library-related or something from one of my interests. In my experience for the past four weeks working on Web 2.0 technologies, this part, choosing the content, is the part that takes much time as you want to create something useful or relevant to your professional and scholastic goals. At first, I was toying with the idea of using the outline that we submitted on the first week to come up with a resource guide for Web 2.0 technologies. I filed that idea for use for another project or assignment, as I feel that I don’t have a complete picture yet of what it encompass with only 4 weeks into the semester. What I would come up with, is at best, what we have looked at so far. Although, it seems like a good idea to do later as one’s own one-stop guide, or as an evidence for the culminating experience.  The next idea is to come up with a resource page for librarians, specifically for a children’s librarian for kids’ 6 to 12 years of age. I have already taken LIBR 261 class under P Peck and I already have a wealth of materials from papers and project for the class. Besides, it is also something that I might look at or use in the future in a professional capacity. Who knows? So I accessed my files for that class and trawled for resources.

So I started editing my install of the MediaWiki instance. The first task was to add a Help page, which I accomplished by copying Prof. Faires’ Help: Edit page on the LIBR 246 wiki. That was easy since I did not need to change or mess with formatting as the page was constructed on Media Wiki. The only thing I added was a note at the bottom that this was sourced from Dfaires’ wiki and used with permission (as noted on the instruction page for this assignment).  Here’s a link to said page.

Next I proceeded to edit the main page of my wiki. I found it useful to print the Help page I copied from Prof. Faires’ wiki and refer to it on how to format the page. I used a three-heading format and also used a lot of active links on my page. I also uploaded a jpeg image of a cartoon duck that I modified using Photoshop and placed it on its own page so I can learn creating another page. Here is a link directly to the Cartoon duck page. I also placed a link to that page on the Main page and the MediaWiki application automatically added it to the Table of Contents. I also reverted to an earlier edit and here’s a screenshot of that under the history tab. And here is the link to my wiki created on MediaWiki.

continued on Part 2

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