Re: FAQs, best practices, ESW Wiki

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 04:34, Jim Hendler wrote:
> Dan-
>   my nervousness about a WIKI is "social" rather than technical - I 
> very much like the openess and accessibility of a WIKI, 
> unfortunately, in my experience when a Wiki gets popular and heavily 
> used, it attracts the nuts, who then ruin it -- this has happened to 
> us a couple of times at Md where we've been trying to use Wikis in 
> both our  .  Reconstructing the "good stuff" after someone has 
> trashed stuff seems like it would be easy (just restore from the 
> history), but it is not so easy if osmeone makes a lot of changes to 
> stuff that is linked to each other

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Are you sure they didn't
just disagree?


>  -- several of our most successful 
> wikis at UMCP had to go to password protection because of these 
> "maintenance" issues.

Sounds to me like you weren't trying to document community wisdom,
but just run a class.

>   Problem is for something like an OWL how-to, 
> assuming it does get used, it would be hard to patrol and maintain.

I find it hard to reconcile that with your claim that you
like the openness of a Wiki.

>   What we found does work a little better is Wiki's used for the 
> annotation of some "controlled" content -- a simple example is that 
> when I use Wiki's in my class, I put the assignment page on my web 
> site, and create an assignment discussion page on the Wiki, with a 
> link.  This means the students cannot rewrite the assignment, but 
> they can discuss it, post ideas, discuss other peoples ideas etc.

Well, that makes sense because the assignments are not a matter
of community consensus. You're the prof, and the students,
by signing up for the class, have agreed that you get to say
what the assignments are.

Best practices in the Semantic Web are, by definition, a matter
of Semantic Web community consensus.


>   What I was thinking is that if we had our how-to page somewhere in 
> W3C space maintained by an editor, linked to a Wiki where a lot more 
> could happen, it will keep us from doing MORE work if the Wiki 
> becomes successful and then needs someone to maintain it.

How is it more work for the community to write the best practices
themselves than for a WG member to edit them?


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 09:28:56 UTC