Daily Wrap-up

At the end of each day there will be a short "Wrap-up" of 5 minutes with a summary of the day (see schedule). For this purpose session assistants are asked to take notes for each session. 1-3 sentences are enough! Please include

• The average number of participants (especially whether there were some participants, whether it was very full, whether it was crowded etc.)
• Whether something interesting occurred (heavy discussion, questions, incidents etc.). If you can summarize the session in one sentence then do it.

Day 1 (August 3)

Session 101

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Session 102

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Session 103

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Session 104

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Session 105

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Session 201

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Session 202

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Session 203

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Session 204

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Session 205

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Session 301

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Session 302

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Session 303

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Session 304

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Session 305

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Session 401

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Session 402

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Session 403

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Session 404

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Session 405

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Day 2 (August 4)

Session 501

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Session 502

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Session 503

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Session 504

• Number of Participants: 63.
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Session 505

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Session 601

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Session 602

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Session 603

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Session 604

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Session 605

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Session 701

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Session 702

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Session 703

• Number of Participants: The classroom with 80 seats is only about one third full. The audience did give some response, and the spaeker also invited Mr. Cormac Lawler, the speaker of the following session about Wikiversity, to help assist in introducing the part about Wikiversity.
• Summary:

Wiki is a kind of tool that you can use at all kinds of materials, but it's hard to get people being familiar with how to use it. If you give a certain group of people, they might be willing to use it, but not really able to do it well. However, the truth is slightly different: They, whether the group is small or not, just need some help and guidance. So what we rather than just giving them wiki, which everyone can get easily without our help, we let people apply for it and give them technical assists later. If needed, we would help them in the fisrt few weeks, like having a kick-off meting. Take the Dutch government-run project of "Knowledge Roundabout" for example, it is just like people get on the highway, and they'll meet more clarifications of the question at the very following roundabout. Then at the third one, there will be people helping solve their problem, and eventually they can leave the highway of bazodee at the fourth intersection. This is just how wiki works. Another example is an international project called "Learning Circles", they also tries to use this technology so that the students sitting in the different classrooms throughout the world could learn together, maybe writing some essays or doing some researches. But in the Netherlands, we found that it's difficult to make it successful without any kick-off meeting. It is not easy to gather all the small students together, so are the situations in Germany and France. Therefore we can hardly help them. The connections wouldn't be successful with no ant connecting beforehand. The other rather example is "Wikikids". This is a special project designed for kids. We first give some teachers a suggestion and plan about how to ask and teach students to participate in. They went to local schools straightly, asking them to join and teaching them in class about how to truly get involved. And soon they found that this kind of previous teaching really works. Students became more interested in it, just like the experiences we have in Wikipedia. The interesting thing is that you'll find the kids use quite different languages from us on Wikipedia. Well, it's better than forcing them using the more complicated Wikipedia. While it's good idea to help children have their own place, it after all not always safe. So the teachers have to be behind the screen to watch if there are adults pretending a child and doing modifications. That's the reason why it's not easy to develop into a international great project because more energy would be needed. So we can see that wiki is not suitable for everything actually. Now we face a problem that every one think wiki would be solutions to every thing just because of Wikipedia's success. And here on those Dutch educational projects we found some good or bad factors that might lead a wiki project to succeed. For the first thing you should aware for becoming successful is that make sure the main goal of the new project is clear. There could have some chat rooms discussing or some short kick-off meetings between core organizers. The second is about "Guidance", we should have people helping newcomers be in. The third factor is "time", don't even wish the project would be success in just few months, it requires longer running time, perhaps a year, two years, or even more. The last suggestions of mine is make sure it has a "good start". No one is willing to revisit a website looks awful at the first sight. About those bad factors included Short running time, experts , no focus in the beginning, expecting too much , and the complicated Mediawiki interface. Short running time, as what mentioned above, could make the project succeed. And experts, yup they might make the articles accurate, they usually attenuate others' enthusiasm while correcting all passages or even finishing the entire articles. No focus would be terrible too. If everyone is waiting to see what others would do, then nothing will come out at the end. So make sure people focus. Expecting too much is probably the worst thing, even Wikipedia needs lot of time developing! Yet the wiki interface is also annoying, its rather complex way to use may decrease people's interests. They want the interface to be more friendlier. There's also an interesting thing that what should we do if the topic in which I am interested has been written perfectly already? We know that children as well as adults want to write articles about our own interests, but we can't create three or four pages about a same article. So in my opinion, we may help these children combine different comments into the same one so that every person can feel participate in. They can also learn how to handle it well. So is the same on "Neutral Point of View". They'll get to know what "Neutral" is as well as how to express their own views and disagreement on others peacefully. There is also another example, Wikiversity, we hope this WikiMedia project could gather as much as possible educational knowledge together. If we succeed, then WikiVersity would be a great sources for Wikipedia's development. Unfortunately, some professions do have great materials made by themselves but not really like to share to public. From these clues given since this presentation started we can realize that a successful educational wiki really need enthusiastic participants, no mater on material providing, newbies-helping, and site-managing.

• During the session, some audience asked about the question on licensing and knowledge management on wiki system.

A: We do use the exact same license as Wikipedia on Wikikids, and about the knowledge management, it's truly a hard question, we all are thinking how it could be better.

Session 704

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Session 705

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Session 801

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Session 802

• Number of Participants: More than expected. The 70-seat classroom even need more seats from other room to fulfill the capacity.
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"It's just few years from now when I was just day-dreaming about a wiki site related to travel, and now it's already the reality." said the humorous speaker, Evan Prodromou, when striking the presentation. He first metioned that wiki can do almost everything. "But not really everything in fact, just like you can't ask people to updated current time using wiki!" Wiki is not good for automatable job, like the time problem we said, personal opinion and some more. However, we found that a good wiki need more people to participate in, just like Wikipedia's community practice is a great example of people working togrther for some thing. Well, it's actually hard to get enough people to join in. A search on Wikitravel done recently shows that 65% of the user registered just edited for less than one time, and 95% remain contributing only for a month. If we can keep those users edit only for one more time, then a lot more articles will be created. Therefore we are thinking about that despite using more complicated wiki format, we may also try some features that other social networking systems have like blog, photo sharing, forums, social bookmaking. By these, they can use their own familiar way of communicating to contribute to wiki projects. We may take the wiki page associating with tags contains categories that is organizing contents from different sources. By doing this we can associated wiki contents with those non-wiki contents. Contributors can keep a blog here while putting thier photos elsewhere. But I'm sure you aren't excited about it cause I myself aren't, either. After all, no one wants to repeat themself ever and ever again. They don't want to create a new social identity. They don't want to create new sharing photos. So here I want to talk about our new experiment, Wikitravel Extra. We know that travel is a rather private and personal thing. People usually have different opinoins on the same topic. They want to tell their own story, so we let them do so. Technically, we use stuffs such as Drupal, Shared login Open ID, Plugins, Glue code. We also use many license making the choices more various. Since we started the more relaxing and easy Wikitravel Extra on August 4 2007, thousands of posts/reviews have been post, hundreds of links have been made connecting to related wiki sites, many of the users who existed on Wikitravel started sharing something on the Wikitravel Extra. We make convenient links on the side bar so that users still are able to travel between different versions of Wikitravel and the Extra. It do help people make travel planning easier. And recently (actaully few days ago), we have started a new parenting site called Keiki. As we know parents are more crazy about their children than travellers about their journeys. They are willing to post their photos of their babies, they like to share informations about parenting, and moslty "local" but useful, like which retaurant is good to take my baby to go with in Atlanta......etc. We also hope to use the same ideas on Wikitravel Extra in Keiki.org. By these tools as blogs and photo sharing which is not wiki system emphasizing but is more intimate to public, we can recieve more response. After all, not every parent knows wiki well.

• Due to the lack of time, Evan Prodromou didn't respond to the attendee's question but did answered him later after the session.

Session 803

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Session 804

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Session 805

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Session 901

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Session 902

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Session 903

• Number of Participants: About 10, due to the large room space of the classroom with not so many attendees, it's a little difficult for audience to pass the microphone to one another when having discussion
• Summary: The leader first asked participants to get into a group of two, then discuss the most impressive learning experienceone of thier own, whether it is in class or at work, even the time spent with family. Most of the people talked about "Teachers", which seems to be a quite traditional way in learning. In one of these stories noted that how a conscientious teacher would leave a good effect on students. It was the unique way the high school journalism teacher used when tutoring students how to do a report aroused the then-student audience's aspiration to be a journalist in the future. "Even though I am not a reporter now, I am still full of thankfulness to my teacher" said she." Unlike ordinary teacher who just concentrating on the board talking to himself, my unqiue teacher usaully guided us one on one. He even took us outside to do some field survey. Despite the story of being taught by teachers, there was some others like the following one which is "being a teacher". "I teach at a school, and about two years ago when my co-workers teaching different subjects hoped to make a project of teaching together, I was the coordinator and responsible for the negotiations. I learnt a lot experiences on how to communicate with others and handle the conflicts as well as express my own point of views. It was a great experiences of learning" There were also some other stories was shared during the workshop like one who learned diving in South America......etc. But the point of this workshop is how to extend Wikimedia tools for Collaborative Learning. Therefore the leader, Kim Tucker, used a software called FreeMind to record thoese memory, showing how a wiki-based GPL software could help audience in such a workshop Collaborate efficiently.

• The leader said he will post the FreeMind file of this workshop on the Internet. You may contact hom directly if you feel intersted in it.

Session 904

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Session 905

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Day 3 (August 5)

Session 1002

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Session 1003

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Session 1004

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Session 1005

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Session 1006

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Session 1202

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Session 1203

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Session 1204

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Session 1205

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Session 1206

• Number of Participants: 80.
• Summary: It is a bit crowded, and the participants have lots of responses. the speaker asked everyone to recall our first encounter with Wikipedia for a start. " I believe many people felt a little bit lonely at first, especially when being an Australian like me but see few articles about Australia", sais she. Well, the more you participate in, more familiarity you would have. As you can tell, being a newbie could be the most difficult thing, but we found some different results from a recent research. We take February First, 2007, for example, number of new registered users in that single day was as high as 10641, while 1.5% of them used "07" in their name. Do you think they will stay in Wikipedia for a long time? Some others even take "Microsoft Network(MSN)" as their username. Does that fit the wiki spirit? There are also people called "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa", "La la la la hey hey hey good bye!". How long do you think they would stay? According to the research, two third out of 10,000 users never edited, and only 5% edited more than ten times. "About Uploading Files, nearly 500 images of 1400 uploaded files have been deleted, mostly I believe is due to copyright problems, though I am not really sure." Said Laugher. Some people also use Wikipedia just as an odinary social tools, even the lifeline! Although there are some new-registered users vandalizing around, there are still some genuine newbies who want to contribute but just purely didn't do well. However, we found that some old hands love to use templates to warn them instead of telling them by self-typed text. Sp how could newbies feel humanness when they first step in. Some old stagers even uses templates in weird language, making Wikipedia like a store which you can't touch anything when shopping. To newbies, we should open up our mind. Yes, we should tell them what is right and what is wrong, but in a more humanistic way. Not just hang on a cold template!

• There was one audience consisting a different opinion, "How could we accept there comes 10641 new users in one day and most of them are vandal? Don't you think they did it on purpose and should we keep tolerating?" Though there was a discussion like this, but it all went peacefully.