Wiki Thoughts

In the "Possible site changes" discussion, the idea of a Wiki came up. If there is anyone who doesn't know what a Wiki is, check out Wikipedia. While it is a huge Wiki, there are many others, my guess in hundreds of thousands. The discussion here is about adding a Wiki to NL.

On the positive side, a Wiki does seem like the ideal way to present some of the information. For example, some people have offered up names and contact information for "trusted taxi drivers". The current site structure doesn't offer a good way to "add a name to the list" so you find this information spread all over in comments.

If "trusted taxi drivers" was a wiki page, people could just add their favorites to that page. This is but one example. Many of the Resource pages here (for example, ones about a particular city) currently are owned by one person. Thus, revisions can only be placed in comments or by contacting the owner.

On the other hand, Wikis have disadvantages. Two concerns are:

1. People not understanding how to use a Wiki.
2. Dealing with SPAM in the wiki.

I have been doing my homework and it looks like a new "node type" (all the pages you see on NL are called nodes, whether they are a blog with comments, forum topic with comments, ...) that is/works like a typical Wiki page. There is quite a bit of discussion about how to get all the Wiki features such as hierarchical pages in the implementation. I am asking you to think about what we really need so that I can implement something that makes sense. Here are my current thoughts:

• For the most part, people will not need to create new Wiki pages. That is, a moderator can decide where a wiki page is appropriate and create it. This may sound restrictive but it is pretty much like how the Resource section is already. The structure was supplied by, in general, the administrator. This has the advantage of creating a reasonable structure rather than having to go back and fix it.
• Once a page is created, any regular user would be able to modify it. Thus, if there was a "trusted taxi drivers" page, any logged-in user could edit the page.
• One by one, current pages that would make more sense as a Wiki page could be converted.
• A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor would be available (and not just for Wiki pages) so you really wouldn't have to understand Wiki syntax in order to edit the pages.
• The versioning system would allow moderators to back out inappropriate changes,
• There would be a "talk tab" associated with each Wiki page for discussion of content issues.

While the trusted taxi drivers list is a good example, there are many others. Here are some I can think of off the top of my head:

• Dealing with the airport. This would link to transport pages and such but just general airport info needs a page.
• Where to find things. For example, I located some things in Managua yesterday that I figured I needed to import. This could be quite a few pages for specific types of things.
• Restaurant info. Something topical (such as the recent discussion of vegetarian options in Estelí better fits a Wiki format.
• Importing, shipping, ...
• Lists such as press, radio stations, TV stations, ... which will need updates.

To summarize, someone just reading NL content would see no change other than, hopefully, better organization of information. For those contributing, there would be the added ability to put changes where the belong rather than having to append a comment or create a different page.