Thoughts on this TWiki

I'm collecting notes here on people's impressions and my responses to share the learning process.

JeffDeutsch wrote, "Thanks for setting this up. Never having used a wiki before, I'm curious to see how it works.

So I logged in and looked around a bit. Right now it is mostly a collection of what I would call personal pages. Is that true, or is there other content I'm missing?

Creating an account creates a personal page. That's why there are so many. They don't have to be used for anything.

I only pasted miniscule content.. the pages I created for each officer position, for instance, have the relevant snippet of the constitution in them.

What's powerful about this isn't what I've put there so far, but how easy it is to ADD content. You just go to a page and click edit then type. And creating new pages is trivial.. You just reference a new page in editing a current one by using a WikiWord (something with mixed case).. when you save your edits this WikiWord appears as an "implicit" hyperlink -- clicking the question mark after it puts you in edit mode on this new page, i.e. it actualizes the page. Then on saving the new page the implicit hyperlink in that and other pages in the wiki are converted to real hyperlinks.

I see this as a place where chairs can put gear lists, spreadsheets, documentation on the real duties of that chair and policies, minutes, etc. It could also be used more broadly.. Depends on what people want.

Other useful things are the ability to click on "changes" and get a reverse chronological listing of pages changed and who by. It lets you keep up with the evolution of the content. All pages are under revision control so you can see what changed between different checkins. And you can attach files to any page, powerpoint, excel, etc. any file type.

-- DonBarry^? - 25 Feb 2004