The Wawascene was created by Dr. Mark Stock, former Superintendent of the Wawasee Community School Corporation. Due to its local popularity, Dr. Stock has left the blog site to future Wawasee administrators.

Blog Rules

Comments should be respectful and pertain to the topic posted. Comments about personnel matters should be made directly to the administrators responsible. Blog moderators reserve the right to remove any comment determined not in keeping with these guidelines.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Why the Wiki is down

A recent commenter asked why I took the Wawasee Wiki down that contained the information regarding changes in summer registration process. I took it down because I copied all the comments and suggestions in hard copy form and will take them to the principals for consideration after school is out. I took it down because I didn't have the time to monitor it daily.

Because this technology is new, people (including me) are still not sure how to best use it.

For example, people would replace the main information on the page explaining the purpose and leave a statement that says "This isn't a good idea, people can change the page and say bad things." Of course this is true, but the solution is for the community to police the pages themselves. In time the goal is for the community to monitor a Wiki themselves.

In other words it takes a whole community to monitor a wiki. In the blog format I have been using here, I moderate or monitor and the public input is just commentary.

People have gotten used to the limited forum this provides. A wiki is a wide open (Web 2.0) environment that requires broad community policing.

As far as the main task of improving registration, I have copied all the ideas and will take them to the administrators for discussion.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, right.

Either that or you decided that people were saying what you didn't want to hear, so you made all record of the discussion disappear on the WIKI and the Wawascene.

Hopefully, you don't end your reign with an appearance of less openness than you've had before.

Superintendent, Dr. Thomas Edington said...

I know how that appears to some, but if I didn't want to hear it I wouldn't have asked in the first place.

But when the last person modified the Wiki page by saying "Duh - Look I changed the page" it meant the either the kids were having fun with it or the childish adults were having fun with it.

In either case I can't serve as moderator on two forums and do my "day job." Ulitmately when the public is comfortable with how open web 2.0 environments work, they will police themselves. In other words the first mature reader that noticed the "Duh - look I changed the page" comment - they could have restored the original comment immediately. (Same philosphy on vadalism - remove the perpetrator's work immediately)

I printed all the ideas off and made a folder of all the comments.

I appreciate everyone that took the time to give input. Hopefully as time goes on these type of open environments can be used more often to generate ideas for improvement.