Westnet Wiki Coming Soon
We are currently making preparations to release a Westnet Wiki as a future replacement to our current Help section. We have tried various forms of Help/FAQ pages on our website over the last decade but have found it difficult to create a navigation structure that everyone finds easy. The amount of content that can be provided is also limited by the resources that we have available so only the most important articles end up being created.
Wiki will be a fantastic solution to both of these problems in my opinion. Due to its high placement in most search engine results and huge amount of content, more and more people are becoming familiar with the main Wikipedia site. What I am really excited about though is that it opens up the possibility of Westnet members and the general public (eg modem vendors, enthusiasts of particular software applications etc) contributing articles. There is a huge amount of knowledge out there that we could not possibly turn into articles ourselves. I really think that people will be pretty enthusiastic about sharing that knowledge.
We have been using a Wiki for our internal knowledge base for quite a while now and it has been a huge success. Staff have contributed nearly 900 articles covering everything from how to tweak the MTU on a Mac to how to join the Westnet MySpace group:)
As always, I am interested to hear any thoughts you might have on this topic.
Posted by Ryan Bunter
April 21st, 2007 at 10:25 pm
wow First person to work out how to sign up and post :-P.
Wiki’s have proved to be a very useful resource, just see Ubuntu’s Wiki Gentoo’s Wiki and of course wikipedea, Software Community’s such as the various Linux distro’s and user Groups.
Through you may have the same problems as many linux distro’s that you made the community thing a Second thought, and left it too late. Only time will tell if this is the case.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I guess the next question to ask yourselves is how you will monitor the content which is uploaded? It’s to bad that so many people find it important to break things on the internet.
But great work on involving the public in the technical assistance side of things, I’m sure it will be accepted with great enthusiasm
May 4th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Good idea in the main, monitoring and moderating the content will be the challenge. Wiki seems to work well with open source projects but we are dealing with enthusiasts in that case and not a general user base. Wikipedia itself is up for debate on the accuracy of its content, particularly political and social articles. Wiki does open it up but also leaves you open.
May 5th, 2007 at 11:41 am
You are all definitely correct that moderating new articles and edits will be a crucial part of the success of this project. All changes or new articles will need to be moderated by a staff member before ‘going live’ which should allow us to maintain a high standard of accuracy.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
How is work on this progressing ? it’s been over a month since the this idea was posted.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:08 am
We’re currently hard at work here at Westnet planning and preparing for this venture. To this end, we’ve assembled a core team of staff that will be primarily responsible for seeing this project through to launch, as well as being heavily involved with it once it’s been released into the wild.
If you’ve ever picked away at Wikipedia’s surface, you’ll see that there are a staggering amount of policies/procedures/structures/etc in place to keep things running smoothly. There’d be a lot of potential for chaos if these measures weren’t in place, or didn’t work effectively. In light of this, the current idea is to release it as a ‘Beta’, and run it alongside our current Help pages for a period of time.
This also gives us a bit of flexibility in terms of being able to release it slightly earlier and work on it while it’s live - which means that a large number of customers will be able to contribute content and provide feedback while the wiki is still evolving.
At the moment, we’re basically determining what out of the things mentioned above we’ll need in place before we launch the wiki (even as a Beta). From there, we expect things will move relatively quickly once the project has a clear set of tasks to work on.
In the meantime, if anyone has any comments in terms of what they’d like to see in the Wiki upon release I’m definitely keen to hear them!
August 10th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I thought I’d give everyone an update in terms of where we’re at with this initiative. The good news is you can all hopefully expect to see our beta wiki released in the next week or so!
I won’t give away too many details just yet, but there’s a surprise in store for those of you that were expecting something similar to Wikipedia…