BrentSimpson

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run: http://auckland.wiki.org.nz - a CityWiki? for Auckland, New Zealand.

Wikis i'm on:

eXe Developers Wiki @ http://exelearning.org/
Wikieducator: http://wikieducator.org/ - looking at use of Wikis for Open Educational Resources (OERs) and technical aspects of working with MicroFormats and Wiki content.
Also watching Wikiversity quite a lot, mostly on IRC. Not editing as much but participating in discussions about mission, theory, and relationship to Wikieducator, which I am quite active on.

Been back reading a bit on Meatball a bit lately doing some research for work on Wikieducator. Meatball rules!

Auckland.Wiki (http://auckland.wiki.org.ng) has been running now for about a year and although it has not garnered much of a community I'm still hopefull and working away at it. It is not looking quite nice and has a reasonable amount of information available. Recently I "lost" a participant over a disagreement over using CamelCase or WikiNames on the wiki; he thought that this made it look sophomorish, but for myself it was just a simple habit from using wikis for quite some time. I did some research on Meatball as well as on Wikipedia and discovered that Wikipedia does not support CamelCase. I have now decided to mostly abandon CamelCase on Auckland.Wiki. Would be interested to hear what others think on the matter. On one hand CamelCase is so easy, but on the other it may undermine the professionalism that some wikis are trying to present. 11/07/2006.

: Hi Brent, the wiki I do a lot of work in is WikiIndex, which I have argued for [[CamelCase or Free links or both]] and I worry that when things get too complicated, new people will be less apt to join, thus the arguement that linking actually takes out a character to type in this wiki, rather than having 5 extra characters. I am in favor of using CamelCase as it is a way of understanding LinkLanguage in wiki. Have you seen WikiPractices yet? Best, MarkDilley

: Mark, i've sort of flip-flopped on the idea in Auckland.Wiki - at first I thought "no, stuff it." WikiWords are cool and people will just get used to the concept, but then in retrospect I think I was using them in places where they're perhaps not so appropriate and it could add confusion to what might already be confusing to newcomers. So i'm now adding the few more keystrokes to some links. I also think that if the wiki does get more users, most of them are likely to use the GUI interface for editing - which will have an impact on the use CamelCase, which may just be an anomoly of old timers like myself :-) --BrentSimpson.

Update: well, we'd hoped that we'd really be up and running in January but we're a little behind schedule still feeling that we've got to get the site (http://auckland.wiki.org.nz) a little more functional, prettier, and add some more code features before really going out and trying to establish a community behind this thing. But in the interim we've added quite a bit of info ourselves ... perhaps even too much. We've also started http://dunedin.wiki.org.nz as well as we were at the Linux.Conf.Au in Dunedin and thought that we could seed a little ourselves while there. We've had some good responses from people that we've showed it to so far as being a good idea and quite 'needed' around Auckland. Someone also pointed out that because the wiki is mostly text based it actually performs quite well on a cell phone browser; we tried it out and yes it is actually quite functional. You can even edit if you want. Brent.

We are pretty new to the idea of a City Wiki and in fact our wiki http://auckland.wiki.org.nz has only been up for less than a week. We are currently 'seeding' and won't publicise for a little while yet as there are a few technical issues for us to work out... but we are keen. We got the idea from [WikiMaas] as a colleague and I are on our way to Maastricht for a conference. We found this to be the best resource for honest information on the city and thought that it would be a great idea for Auckland and in fact New Zealand in general which is a popular tourist destination but crowded with 'commercial' information; so we have reserved the name wiki.org.nz and are setting up a MoinMoin wiki farm to achieve this. I am also keen to explore wikis in educational settings. BrentSimpson

Brent, I don't know if it is convenient for you, but WikiMania? will be in Taipei, Taiwan in August this year. You may find some birds of a feather there. Plus, it is one hell of an event. -- SunirShah

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