Tag: wiki

Reflections on Communities through Collaborative Tools in the Government of Canada

With only two weeks left and after last night’s meetup, I thought I’d reflect a little on some of the Government of Canada (GC) initiatives I’ve been part of over the term that are outside of my assigned projects, most of which are fairly recent or new.

Young Professionals Network Committees

Admittedly, this is a departmental (not GC) group, but it’s worth a mention.

Many departments (if not most) have a Young Professional Network (even if not by that name). YPN has committees to organize events as well as other work to support staff at the department. I sat on and contributed to:

  • Retention and Renewal Report, another survey is going out to validate the results
  • Student Committee, where we’re currently trying to develop a new orientation guide for students in the department
  • Spend a Day with Senior Management, a job shadow event which has been approved by the YPN sponsor ADM

Contributing to the committees has been a good experience. It allowed me to meet other people working in different sectors and has given me a sense of accomplishment and contribution towards the department even if I’m not here to see the results.

Wiki Community of Practice – WikiCoP

My understanding is that my coworker started wikicop about a year ago in order to have people in the GC community meet every 1-3 months and share ideas, knowledge, and experience on their internal wikis as many departments are developing or have them now. Although I only got the chance to attend a couple, it was great to see what other departments were doing with their wikis and to participate in the discussions. I also got a chance to see a couple of the ways Confluence was being used, which was neat.

GCPEDIA

The GC wiki, GCPEDIA, is a great place for GC staff to share information GC-wide without making it public. There is a lot of great stuff including draft strategies, guidelines, and start up initiatives surrounding all aspects including social media and web usability. I didn’t actually take part in sharing much information, but I have been helping with maintenance. Most of it is day-to-day stuff like fixing broken/double redirects, categorizing pages/files, and page clean ups, but I have also:

  • participated in a wikibee (essentially you do a big clean up as a group in person) for UXWG (User Experience Working Group)
  • been helping with the migration to a new and much improved National Inventory of Bridgeable Students [internal link]

Doing wiki maintenance has helped me learn more about the different departments and what goes on in GC. I also got to know a few people through doing wiki maintenance and participating in the 2011 Best User Page Contest. It was lots of fun!

I think that’s one of the things that makes GCPEDIA interesting to work on. The very active (more permanent) people have been very encouraging (i.e. @jesgood and C. Au) and people will do little things to increase the sense of community and enjoyment, namely by making fun user boxes. I got a green belt/experienced contributor award (basically it’s a level up system based on how much you contribute to GCPEDIA), the 5th level, which I think is pretty decent for a single summer.

Web 2.0 Practioners – W2P

It’s kind of funny, because I avoided Twitter for the longest time. I didn’t think I’d have much use for it, and it just seemed like another social media platform, especially since I don’t have a phone with internet and lacked a laptop for the longest time, I didn’t see how I’d get involve with any conversation.

I was pushed onto twitter because of work. It helped that I got tweetdeck installed. Regardless, I was somewhat surprised by how much of day-to-day sharing between GC employees involved twitter. I shouldn’t have been, but then I used to work at an agency where you had no internet access.

It’s been a great source of keeping up with GC Web/technology news, finding interesting reads, and resources. But most of all, #w2p really taught me what a great community can be built through twitter. It’s been a rare experience for me to simply show up and be so welcomed into a group of veritable strangers. Being a little nervous about going by myself to my first #w2p meet, I was encouraged by many #w2p members most memorably by @spydergrrl (for various reasons includind the fact that she was a co-host). At the meet, I ended up chatting mostly with @mhellstern who introduced me to lots of other people. It was great.

The proof that #w2p can just suck you in (in a good way) is how involved I got. After only two meetups, I ended up co-hosting last night’s meet up. Thanks to @macjudith and her discussions with a friend, the meetup’s theme was to meet the (bridgeable) students of #w2p and I cohosted with @mhellstern (I didn’t even know she was a bridgeable student!). Each student/recent graduate got a couple of minutes to introduce themselves and “sell” themselves just a little bit. We had a great turn out, plus as always, great conversations and stories. I got to finally put a few more faces to twitter nicknames, especially the ones from my department! Not least of all, it meant I got to add another userbox to my GCPEDIA user page (see the fun?).

I will definitely miss #w2p, because unless I get a position in the area in the future… well, it’s not unknown that getting a group together like this outside the NCR can be difficult since this is where most GC staff work and where a lot of this type of work is done since this is where all the “headquarters” are located.

Sense of Contribution, Engagement, Belonging, and Community

I’ve frequently heard people on contract talk about how they don’t in any way feel connected to their department, or the government, especially as a student when you may conceivably never return in, but I didn’t get that feeling thanks to joining #w2p and other groups. There are of course so many different ways to get involved and to find out what’s going on in the GC world, and these are but a few examples, so I encourage GC staff, especially students to get involved; it doesn’t matter that it’s only for a short time, and newbies are welcomed!

MediaWiki Image Link Workaround

So, in playing around with my user page and trying to make it look pretty, I found out that you can link an image to an internal or external link like you might normally do instead of the File: page. That’s great, but the problem I found was that except for the basic internal and external link, when you linked the image to something that inherently has a little icon next to it (e.g. mailto link gives you a little e-mail icon), then it would show the icon next to the image (see below left).

So, it turns out that there is a workaround to hide the icon (see above right). You can add this bit of code to the main.css file:

#bodyContent .plainlinks a {
background: none repeat scroll 0 0 transparent !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}

Or if the CSS Extension is installed, you can hack it by using the same code, but you’ll probably want it to be context dependent if you can.

What do you call a wiki moderator?

Just a quick post.

At my old work, wiki moderators = wiki gardeners.

At my new work, wiki moderators = wiki gnomes.

Interesting that they all refer to gardening in some way, but I suppose that’s just a general wiki trend. I think I like the gardener title better, but gnomes definitely allows for some interesting pictures.

The Politics of Gardening a Wiki

Disclaimer: The purpose of this is not a criticism of anyone, but simply a reflection on the reality of things. Opinions written here are also my own and do not necessarily reflect the organization I work for, nor is it necessarily a reflection of what goes on in my organization as I have experience participating and managing numerous wikis. (This more or less applies to anything on my blog really…)

Normally, when you have a wiki, the idea is that the community collaborates to create and manage content. Others will not only suggest changes, but make them. There is little in terms of crossing lines or boundaries or stepping on someone’s toes beyond general netiquette, because what you begin, change, and read is created by a community of users whether that be a partner, team, organization, or the whole world (as is the case with large wiki sites such as wikipedia).

Nevertheless, because the wiki is a very open space, organization and managing content can become very unwieldy. Thus, in order to keep everything working and useful (i.e. not just a hodgepodge of pages), there is one or more wiki administrator and moderators.

So, what happens when a wiki is created within an organization? Hopefully people are educated about the purposes and the workings of a wiki. Then hopefully, as a result, if people start suggesting or changing things (especially moderators and admins), people do not ignore them or complain. However, in an organization where a set of content was traditionally created and managed by a single person who had complete control over what they do and how they do it without that really affecting anyone else, the idea of the wiki itself is hard to grasp for a lot of people, let alone the fact that it’s for community use and other people may come in and change things.

Many people also have a hard time grasping categories as it’s a different kind of organization and many people treat it like tags using their own personal organization without realizing that other people might change the hierarchy and/or use of the category as the wiki evolves. Most of all, because they use it as a personal tagging system, they don’t think about the larger use or organization of the wiki.

Because it’s obvious that some things are related to a specific unit’s or person’s project (but which will be used for greater use and public viewing), as one of the wiki moderators (and the one tasked with a specific area of it), I generally try to make suggestions instead of simply changing things in the hopes of not stepping on anyone’s toes. In some cases though, I simply get ignored or essentially get told “I/we don’t need your help, leave me/us alone”. Sometimes it’s all the harder because not only am I on a part-time contract, I’m also a student (which in some people’s view means I’m not fully qualified to do my job and/or make decisions for the organization without approval).

Perhaps the fact that I’m a student is an easy excuse or out, but whatever the reason, I think the real problem here is that our organization is changing the way we create and disseminate information. People will have much less control than they used to. This can mean more time for them to do other things, but as one who likes to have control over things, I can fully understand that people might not want to let go.

Getting people to understand the new system is one thing. Getting them to accept it is something altogether different. (And please don’t misunderstand, some people have been great about accepting and working with the changes that have been going on. I might even say the majority, but I don’t really know.)

What might be most interesting is that I will soon be passing this work onto someone else. Who that is, I don’t know, but I suspect it will be the next student to come along. It’ll be interesting to see how our wiki develops.

When Basic Tutorials Go Defunct?

Documentation, tutorials, and user guides must evolve and be updated as technology and software move ahead, but when so many web-based applications use the same basic WYSIWYG, are basic tutorials even needed anymore?

This issue was brought up recently with our wiki’s update to the newest version of MediaWiki.  If you use wikipedia at all, you’ve probably been using the new version for quite some time now.  One of the greatest improvements for the end-user is the new toolbar.

MediaWiki 1.16 Toolbar
MediaWiki 1.16 Toolbar

It covers all your basic formatting needs including tables (which is not the easiest for new users to figure out).  The help section is really nice too (since MediaWiki is not a WYSIWYG) showing the user how something will display (of course there’s always the preview button).

After this update, I realized that users will unlikely need as much guidance in editing their wiki pages and the basic tutorials that I created don’t really seem to be needed anymore, or do they? I haven’t exactly polled my users on this issue or anything.  For the moment, I have kept it live and updated as it’s being used as a general help article as well.  Maybe some users need a bit more structure via a linear method of creating pages, but it would be interesting to know…

When Wiki and HTML Formatting Collide

So I’ve been messing around with wiki coding since obviously I’ve been working on developing content on the wiki. One of the things I was trying to do was a hanging indent (here’s another more complex one where you don’t need to set a margin and documentation is better) in order to display citation examples properly. More than that, I wanted to offset the whole citation (i.e. add an indent) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the text.

Template Code (Hanging Indent)
Whether you look at the first or second template, they both modify the CSS in order to make the hanging indent. They essentially change two attributes:

margin-left:2em;
text-indent:-2em; (shifts the first line of a paragraph)

Now in order to indent a line or paragraph, there are usually a couple of ways to do it in wiki, but throw the hanging indent template into it and it didn’t always work out so well.

Add Wiki Code
Usually the best way to do a simple indent in wiki is using a colon, such as

: Indented text

However, I suspect that rather than adding to the margin, the wiki changes the margin for that text, and the hanging indent code overrides it. So, the result is that it does nothing.

Add HTML Code
The other option was to use the <blockquote> tag. As the blockquote does not interfere with the CSS styling, this had the intended effect except that just like in this post, if I use blockquote,

you get spacing before and after the blockquote as you would with a <p> tag

My Solution
Not a very elegant solution, and rather the brute force way, but I just ended up creating a template for citation examples that hard coded the extra margin. I suppose the other solution would have been to add an extra variable to the hanging indent template but I figured that would not be worth the trouble.

PDF2Wiki Conversion Comparison

So, some people may ask, why are you trying to convert PDF to Wiki? PDF is usually the last step in the process, so just use the original document. My response would naturally be, what if you don’t have the original document?

A Two-Step Process
Through my searching and reading on the topic, it seems there is no PDF2Wiki Converter. Every site that I have read explains converting the PDF to one of: DOC, RTF, HTML, XML first then to wiki format.

PDF2HTML
I tried a number of PDF to HTML programs, but none of them worked to my satisfaction. Most of them only converted simple formatting, such as bold and italics.  Adobe has an online conversion tool. It’s better than some of the others I’ve tried as it interprets lists and such. The resulting code is rather ugly and a lot of the code would need to be stripped before using a HTML to Wiki converter. See my previous post on HTML2Wiki for a couple of tools on tidying or stripping HTML code.

PDF2DOC
I found that a much better alternative was converting the PDF to a DOC/RTF file since it’s a lot simpler and some formatting might be lost, but you won’t have a lot of needless code that might mess up your wiki page. There are a lot of online tools that provide a PDF to DOC/RTF service, however, again, they only tend to do basic formatting.  Adobe Acrobat does a really good job, because it will change lists into formatted lists (instead of normal text).  The major downside of course is that Acrobat is a paid program though there is a 30-day trial.

Conclusion
I had a lot of problems in particular with PDF to HTML, so I thought PDF to DOC/RTF is simply. Honestly though, unless you have a PDF file which is really long and has a lot of simple formatting (bold, italics, etc.), if you cannot get your hands on Acrobat, then I suggest simply copy/paste (or alternatively save as a text file) and manually formatting it in the wiki’s editing box. Of course this depends on the wiki you’re using because ones that don’t have a toolbar to help you quickly format might be a bit of a pain. Someone please let me know if you have found a better method!

DOC2Wiki (Word2Wiki) Converters Comparison

So to continue on ways to convert existing documents to wiki code, next is formatted text documents, which is typically word DOC files, but may also be something like RTF files.

Most sites I found actually just instructed people to use a 2 step conversion. From Word to HTML and then to wiki code. While this may work, it’s much less efficient and I can imagine more things are lost in the process. Admittedly, the converters that I have found are all geared towards MediaWiki, so if you’re using a different wiki then these converters may not work so well. Nevertheless, MediaWiki provides a list of Word to Wiki converters the most basic of which does not seem to be specifically geared to MediaWiki.

OpenOffice Sun Wiki Publisher Plugin (MAC and Windows compatible, not sure about other platforms)
(the wiki converter is built-in, the publishing part of it is optional)
The downside of OpenOffice is that it does not always interpret word documents very well. Embedded images tend to turn into hex code (ex. ffd8ffe000104a46494600010201 etc.) and tables aren’t always interpreted correctly either. The one I tried turned into overlapping text. So, in part, the usefulness of the outputted wiki code will depend on how well OpenOffice has read the word DOC itself, but it should handle ODT and RTF just fine.

Word2MediaWikiPlus Macro (Windows Only)
Word is the better choice for documents that OpenOffice can’t seem to handle very well. There is also a Word2MediaWiki Macro which is easier to use, but does not convert tables or deal with images very well.

Special Characters
For the OpenOffice plugin, ‘special characters’ (used loosely here) sometimes turn into weird symbols or random special characters. As with the HTML converters from the last post, something like ’ (not straight apostrophe) gets changed into ‚Äô, or a bullet point (which isn’t recognized to be in a bulleted list) turns into ‚Ä¢.
The Word2MediaWikiPlus (W2MWP) converter is better at dealing with special characters. The macro will simply insert the character as is and at times put a nowiki tag around it, but regardless, it displays just fine.

Text Boxes
For some reason, the W2MWP plugin turns text boxes into a single cell table and then repeats the same text again as regular text (not inside a table). The OpenOffice plugin strips the text of formatting and leaves it as regular text in the wiki output.

Tables
When tables are interpreted correctly, I think the OpenOffice plugin does a better job overall. The W2MWP macro is better at keeping formatting, such as colours and border style (below right), but OpenOffice one seems to interpret things inside a table better, such as type of lists (below left). (It’s supposed to be a bulleted list, not a numbered list.)

Needs Good Original Document Formatting
In both cases, the usefulness of the wiki code will depend on how well the original document was formatted. For example, in one of the documents I tested, a number of the number and bullet lists were not formatted as such, but instead, numbers and bullets were just manually added. In both plugins, they were considered to be regular text with a ‘special’ character or number at the beginning of it.

Conclusion
Whether the Word2Wiki or the OpenOffice plugin is better depends on your priorities. OpenOffice seems to interpret lists and text boxes better, and doing a replace all for characters that weren’t interpreted properly is a pretty quick step. W2MWP is better at keeping formatting and interpreting all characters. So, if you like the way your document looks and you want to keep it that way, use the W2MWP macro.  The big downside of course is that it doesn’t work on MACs (which I’m using right now, yay for VMware).  Nevertheless, my conclusion is that the DOC2Wiki Converters are useful, but may not be the optimal solution depending on how much you’re willing to install and play around with. And if the document isn’t formatted like it should be, then manual wiki formatting might be the way to go.

HTML2Wiki Converter Comparison

So, for the past little while on and off, I’ve been looking for and playing around with HTML to Wiki Converters to see which one works best. Most of the ones I’ve found are online and most of them seem to be based on a Perl script created by David Iberri, who provides a web interface as well.

HTML2WIKI
David Iberri has provided a running web interface version for his script for a lot of different wiki dialects. However, I’ve only tested the MediaWiki version for the purposes of my project.  I really like the “Fetch from URL” feature which is not available on many others.

berliOS’ HTML2Wiki
Interestingly, I found what looks to be the exact same converter on another site, but it gives me slightly different results. (see below)

Seapine’s HTML to Wiki
The one is really good for basic things and even though it does not have a “Fetch from URL” feature, you can easily copy/paste.  However, this converter frequently broke for me when dealing with whole pages because it seemed to stop working when it faced something that it didn’t quite recognize.

Batch/Site HTML to MediaWiki converter
I have not actually tried this one, but I thought it might be a useful resource for later and for other people. This uses the same Perl script in combination with MediaWiki’s PHP importing scripts.

Comparison between HTML2Wiki and the berliOS version
General Text
Neither deals with ’ (the non-straight apostrophe) very well for some reason, and I’m guessing it will have problems with some other characters as well. Currently, both give a � in place. However, if it’s always the same character in your wiki document, it’s easy enough to do a replace all.

Tables
Both seem to handle tables quite well and one as well as the other, though sometimes the Iberri one seems to forget to put the first line of the table code on a new line, which of course, means the table fails to work.

Links
I would say that overall I like the berliOS version better for links because it can recognize anchor links, whereas the Iberri one will display text. For example (berliOS):

[#reserve Finding Articles on Course Reserve].

The Iberri one does a better job at “oh my god i don’t understand this” by simply stripping the HTML and leaving text. The berliOS one will try to interpret it and end up with odd things at times.  However, I think it’s pretty understandable that it doesn’t handle mouse over boxes very well especially when the original script to do that is CSS and not a part of the HTML tag. For example (berliOS):

You CAN find hundreds of thousands of articles through the UBC Library Web. more »
UBC Library subscribes to tens of thousands of magazines, journals and newspapers, in print and in full text online. The UBC Library Catalogue DOES NOT list individual articles by topic. more »
To search for articles by topic, you need to start your search in an index or database. (Instructions follow.) Like the catalogues of most libraries in the world, UBC Library�s catalogue does not contain a listing for each article in each journal in its collection. Search engines like Google DO NOT retrieve most academic articles. But… more »
”’Google Scholar (Beta)”’ has begun to reach some academic journals and online archives, but for now, Indexes and Databases are the most complete searchable lists of articles.
Most academic and publicly-funded researchers publish the results of their research in scholarly journals or in online archives, which search engines don�t reach. Most popular magazines do not provide their content for free on the Web. Newspaper articles have a different search guide (right here).

Overall
So overall, I like the berliOS one better because it recognizes more elements, but it’s easier to screw things up with it. So I would say the Iberri one is easier to use since it generally just strips what it doesn’t understand.

Strip/Tidy HTML
On a related footnote-sort note, after converting to wiki code, if there is a lot of HTML code left that seems to be messing up the wiki page, you can try stripping or ‘tidying’ the HTML code. HTML Tidy tries to make the HTML conform to current HTML standards, but depending on how the page is done, it might start creating CSS which obviously wiki pages don’t understand, so the strip HTML function may work better.
Zubrag’s Strip HTML online tool
HTML Tidy