Session 1: Institutional MediaWiki (10:30-11:20)

Session 1: 10:30-11:20

Institutional MediaWiki

Meg Brown, Folger Shakespeare Library

• Institutional wiki: Folgerpedia (folgerpedia.folger.edu)
  • 99% of contributors are staff members
  • Scholar pages, playbill collections, seminar information
  • Not a repository per se—Folger also has an image repository called Luna
    • Wiki doesn’t allow for certain file type hosting; future plans to cross-link to other resources
    • Does host MP3 files so podcasts of Shakespeare’s birthday lectures are accessible online
• Issues of audience
  • Folgerpedia is a place where other departments of the Folger come together (exhibitions, public outreach, etc)
• Institutional history
  • Outsiders: keeping track of seminars, fellows, etc.
  • Inside history: collections, possibly tracking all the times the Folger has appeared in film, etc.
• Other wiki spaces
  • Link to time management & scheduling systems
  • Wiki development space—Insights—publish pages in private before putting on Folgerpedia
    • Used for longform pieces
• Other uses for wikis (non-Folger folks)
  • Central location for best practices documents—internal wiki
  • Not always a culture of collective editing/updating
    • ways to foster collaboration?
  • Silos can prevent communication & collaboration
• Many DH groups default to GoogleDocs instead of wiki
  • Is the wiki concept “too much?”
  • Having to use markup language deters people from adding and participating
• Measure of success
  • Reader views, not patron contributions: if people are accessing it, it is useful
    • Readers=people who have applied for reading privileges at the Folger
  • Main page of Folgerpedia has been accessed over 36,000 times.
• Other possibilities of access and formatting?
  • Wiki is great for text and articles
    • Allows for transcriptions
  • Omeka would be better for objects or photos, but with a text-based collection, wiki works
  • Can be an intermediary for learning and creating with regard to public resources
  • Wikipedia doesn’t like institutions posting, so this is a way to take ownership of material and research

• Does the wiki format add to or get in the way of information sharing? (Think linked open data, etc.)
  • “friendlier way to get at linked data”
  • connecting ideas and resources in a non-hierarchical way
    • sometimes tagging can be hierarchical
    • interdepartmental issues can prevent people from feeling comfortable making changes
    • some departments are more proprietary than others
  • institutional wikis require large amounts of staff time
    • can lead to outsourcing
    • not always group consensus and staff input when outsourcing
• Wiki models
  • Business school wiki at UM does both outreach and internal service but most wikis are either/or
    • Intranet
  • Folger is still looking for other models
  • UMD: wiki resources are underused
  • Harry Potter wikis—best models may not be in scholarly communities
  • Monticello—community can comment but not contribute but you still have to apply to be in the community
• Cataloging tag on Folgerpedia
  • Folger’s earliest pages were cataloging pages in efforts of trimming website
    • Getting rid of the extra “u” in cataloging was a problem
  • Seeing what made it from the card catalog to the online and such has helped researchers
  • Scholar pages (920 of them!)
    • Patrons are engaging with the resource and suggesting edits and corrections
  • Potential for growth in the area of provenance and former ownership
    • People get excited about book plates and signatures and identification
    • Random fact discoveries
• Rosetti archive
  • Catherine: “it’s too much”
  • PDFs of every page of every Dante Rosetti poem in literary journals
  • Look at this as an example of a linked data extreme—learn from this for wiki
• Deciding how to do Folgerpedia pages
  • Hamlet the play vs Hamlet the character
  • Who are the focused users? Librarians, catalogers, high-level scholars who may be interested in other things
    • These people fill in for users who don’t have contribution privileges
• Development and crowdsourcing
  • Folgerpedia as a pedagogical tool?
    • Have college students create pages?
• Information architecture
  • What sections do you funnel people into? What are the goals and who ends up keeping track of how the wiki grows?
  • Need for targeted expansion
  • Who moderates? How can institutions prevent vandalism?
    • Folgerpedia is gated because there are academic perspectives the institution does not support (i.e. Oxfordians)
• Folgerpedia is different from Wikipedia because Folger accepts and encourages original research
  • Use of primary sources encourages people to go to the Folger library. Wikipedia only wants citation of secondary sources.
  • Best practices and contributor guidelines
    • Do not have to have a higher degree to contribute to Folgerpedia—all ranges of expertise welcome
    • Not wholly prescriptive
    • Templates created, but require some knowledge of Media Wiki to use
• Stylistic issues
  • Disambiguation issues with scholar pages
    • LOC plugin would’ve broken MediaWiki
    • Middle initials are problematic
  • Everyone should have ORCID records!
    • Unique research identifier number that can be attached to article systems
    • WorldCat supported!
    • AND, facilitates attribution for people who might publish under multiple names
    • Not common in the humanities yet
  • It is possible to make a redirect or disambiguation page if a scholar asks for it, but Folger uses the “most authoritative name” they have on file (i.e. fellowship name)
    • “what do they call you at tea?” (Folger has tea every day at 3)
  • Redirects for people who change the gender they identify with
  • Academics move too much to have biographies
    • When scholars become participants they have the option to add biographies