Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Tracey Baker, Joe Hoover, & Rose Sherman

MW2009 Indianapolis, IN

April 16, 2009

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

What is Placeography?

A website about ANY place anywhere that anyone can edit

A site to share knowledge, images, and MEMORIES of places

Goals– Share the history of places– Foster interest in historic preservation– Collaborate with libraries, local historical

societies, schools, museums and historic preservation groups

www.placeography.org

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

• Tools• Tenacity• Tactics

The 3Ts of Community Building

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Tools Software

– Mediawiki – open source wiki software used in Wikipedia

– Semantic forms

Semantic forms– Forms based entry

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

User interface– Closely resembles Wikipedia’s

– Recognize Placeography as a wiki Identity

– MHS deliberately subordinated its brand

– Presented as a tool for others rather than an MHS project

Tools

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Tenacity Leadership and passion

– Passion about the topic is a good thing– Keep open to learning and discovering

Inviting Participation – Active and Passive invitations

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Tenacity Active invitations

– Meet and greet new users on the site– Go to them; Meet them in real life– Start local think global– It is not cheap or easy

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Portals for organizations– Entryways for organizations– Partners in Placeography

growth and development– A place to link to tours

and projects

Passive invitations– Site design– Facilitate relationships– Portals/Projects

Tenacity

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Projects– Specific work by an

organization or class– Ways to organize information

on the site– May focus on a particular

community or type of building or site

Tenacity Passive invitations

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Tactics Internal marketing to

coworkers – Educating individuals – Re-purposing content – Seeking internal partners– Getting leads and

suggestions

Advertise– Printed collateral

– Web advertising

– Press release

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Progress since launch:By 12/31/2008 we aimed to have:

As of 3/31/2009 we had far exceeded some of these goals:

150 place entries 1,250 entries for buildings, sites, & structures

20% of entries are for places outside the Twin Cities metro area

3% of entries are for places outside the Twin Cities metro area

100 registered users outside MHS

200+ registered users

5 administrators outside MHS 0 administrators outside MHS

Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community

Questions?

placeography.orgplaceography.org