It’s a Blog.. A Wiki… and a Floor Wax

Leigh Blackall has some great rumblings on his Vision for Wikieducator, starting with the rant:

The problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they’re doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media upload somewhere else. I really hate it when I upload an image to my preferred image host (Flickr) then have to re-upload it if I want to use it in a wiki. And what about this blog post? As I write I’m thinking about how I might put it on the wikieducator discussion pages I’m involved in”¦ I think I’ll just add a link there and point to this post.

Wikis are generally messy, chaotic, and unless you have a Wiki General overseeing it, the sites end up being useful to more or less they person that plunked the most wiki code in the edit boxes.

And Leigh goes on to expand his vision of wikis being a channel for bringing in content from other sources and being able to broadcast them out, on all, the magic carpet ride of RSS still is at the core. He points to the features in the WikiEducator site, which is a powerful site fueled on the MediaWiki engine.

So wikis are more than WikiPedia (thankfully), the mass writing well, and more than the open idea stew pot for collaborators. Just as blogs need not be diaries, wikis are not relegated to being just wild scratch pads…

And across the great Pacific Ocean from Leigh, Brian Lamb picks up the wiki stream, citing WikiEducator, as well as some of the groovy extensions for MediaWiki, but the gem was the pointing to SendToWiki, a site/tool/magic wand that offers a bookmarklet that allows you to send web pages to a wiki so that you can remix them” and that wikis is… MediaWiki.

I’d been meaning to try and write up some recent new bits I’ve picked up from using MediaWiki on a few NMC sites (NMC Campus Guide, Horizon Project).

In prep for our NMConnect event last month, one of our colleagues in the Second Life art world, turned us on to a few useful extensions. I had already been using an RSS extenstion that allows us to embed content read in via RSS feeds, and I had made some modifications on it. I have a front page side bar on the NMC Campus Guide that pulls in headlines via RSS from our NMC Campus Observer. You know that tune about “Small Pieces Loosely….”

MediaWiki extensions are code that people write; you stick a php script or a folder of them inside your mediaWiki extensions directory, and add a line to your LocalSettings.php file to activate it. Some are almost drag and drop in simplicity, such as the ones that allow you to easily embed YouTube video or one that does the same with Google Video. These are really easy, in wii editing, you simply include code like:

6444586097901795775

to embed the Google Video from the URL from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6444586097901795775

The Flickr Extension took a bit more leg work; you need to get the phpFlickr code running on your web server, which in itself involved setting up a Flickr API key and such, installing some extra PHP libraries.

but if you get through all that, you can embed flickr images for any desired tag with MediaWiki code like:

dog

Which will show the 5 most interesting dog pictures. Every wiki needs that. I set those up, but have not done much with them besides doing a test page that has all three extensions mentioned above.

Gotta love extensions, takes your wiki up a notch.

One of the downsides of doing good wikis is the difficulty in creating a method for navigation between say 5 or 6 or 10 wiki pages that are inter-related. I had done a number of these by manually creating sidebars, or top row wiki text, with hand coded links to the other pages, and a bold tag to indicate the current page. Old school. One short cut is that you don’t need to do special code to highlight the current page. If, say you have a wiki page named “Bugs Bunny”, you can create a cut and paste navigation code like:

== Toon Friends ==
* [[Bugs Bunny]]
* [[Elmer Fudd]]
* [[Tweety Bird]]
* [[Porky Pig]]

If I use this same nav code on all four of my pages, MediaWiki automatically turns the link code to just a bold tag, if you are on ne of those pages.

But that still calls for manual edits, and a _____ load of cutting and pasting to modify your menu.

So that is where MediaWiki templates come in. Woah, these are powerful. They are smaller bits of MediaWiki content you can create, and use as include-like statements in any page. So this means, rather than say, creating a hand coded nav box on every one of my Toon Friend pages, I can create one template, and reference it in any other page… with the payoff, that if I edit the Template code, it changes on all pages that use it.

So if I take the same code above, and stick it inside a page at a wiki page on my site called Template:Toon Navigation (you can just append something like “Template:Toon_Navigation” in a URL that normally generates a wiki page, and it gives you the option to edit this new page. Just pop the code in and save.

Now I have my navigation code in one place, and where-ever I want it to appear in a regular page, I use:

{{Toon Navigation}}

The Double curly braces tell MediaWiki to insert the template stuff into the flow of the page. I used it on the NMConnect series of pages to include the header graphic and right floated navigation, plus the footer at the bottom… it makes for Wiki pages that are more consistent, and used well, can provide an easier way to update content that hand editing gobs of pages.

You can get crazier with templating, as it can use variables and grep like expressions to do powerful tasks.

So this is the thing. MediaWiki is insanely powerful, but the guts of it, and doing things that are not in the box, are not really for the fainthearted. I can never find the same set of documentation bits on a repeat visit (unles I bookmark them) — the docs are a sprawling mess, and there is a book waiting to be written to explain it all in one of those bright yellow covered flavors.

I think 90% of the users of MediaWiki stray as far as changing the logo in the top left and 95% of us use the stock Monobook style I feel like I’ve only scraped down maybe 5 or 10% of what is there. It’s cool to see even more unfolding out there, especially as wikis grow more in variety and interesting uses out there.

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