Thing 10 --Setting Up a Wiki

I thought I'd asked to be added to the wiki we're using for these Things, but it doesn't seem to be working. I did poke around for a while and look at some features. I like that you can compare different edits of the document, like here:

That's pretty handy, I suppose. It's because of features like this that I'm not sure why we won't use wikis in the circ department. I know there's a concern about unreliable information and all, but when it's this easy to look at who said what I think it'd be reasonably simple to clear up any misconceptions. In fact, sometimes the best way to make sure everyone's on the same page is to find out who isn't and how far off they really are, and this is a great way to do that.

Wikis, like other collaboration tools, are great ways to work on drafts of things and work toward consensus. I was hoping to find a way to prove that I do understand wikis by showing the one I'm already in, but it won't let you past the main page without logging in. This is a wiki that we use for a project here at the university called Londontown, which is an MMORPG.

On second thought, it's probably just as well that you can't get past the main page because all or most of us are under an NDA and I don't want anyone getting trouble. I thought about logging in and showing you a screenshot to show that my artwork and contributions are indeed up there, but that might be a bad idea. Just believe me.

Anyway, this team has up to I think 40-ish people on it, doing different things, with about 10-ish artists (including myself). The art lead (person in charge of art asset production) puts up links to the things that need to be done, and we pick and choose what we work on. Once we've completed a concept or a model, we upload our work under the link put forth by the art lead. We also share URL's, reference images, and names of useful resources with each other. Like with Googledocs, this means we don't always have to physically meet in order to get work done at this stage.

It's sort of different from the text-only wikis like the ones we're using as examples here, but the process is about the same. It's awesome, too, because getting that many busy college students together at one time is extremely difficult.

If I still need to add to the 23Things wiki in particular in order to prove that I get this whole wiki business, then it'll have to wait until I figure out how to get added. In the meantime, those are my thoughts on wikis and how awesomely useful they are based on outside experience.

Here's a big tortoise:

Oh, and why does Blogger always add images to the beginning of the post, no matter where your cursor is? I guess I could just type in the HTML myself but I don't feel like it. Bah.