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- The wiki is our face of open source engineering. That means that everyone from scientists and engineers to potential donors to your parents goes on it to see what we are up to. Every word you write must be spellchecked and professional.
- The wiki is used for communication between teams, the engineers in Honduras, and future members of the project.
- Please do not just put stuff up here to make it look like you've been doing extra work. It doesn't fool anyone and it just means that your midterm or final feedback will tell you to rewrite everything! This is a real database and we cannot have it bogged down with fluff. The wiki is a dynamic database. You should update the wiki, not just add to it, so if something is out of date you may delete it or fix it.
- The answers to most of your questions and uncertainties are probably already there. We have an in-depth wiki organization guide, photos, and there are always other pages to steal formatting code from.
- The wiki is set up like a tree, there are important branches fanning outward from the Home page and where you put new pages in the hierarchy is very important.
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- From the home page you can easily access the major branches of the project: Research, Design, and Outreach. Another important branch from the home page is Team Resources
- What is a child page? Each successive branch of the tree is a child page of the branch above it. Design Calendar is a child page of Design, for instance.
- How do you find
- Past research
- Go to the Research to see all of the teams that currently exist and have existed in the past. A typical research page is home>research>Chemical Dose Controller
- Assignments Home>Team Resources>Team Assignments
- Due dates are all on the syllabus
- Outreach events
- Contact info for other people on the team
- All team members have to update their contact info on our roster home>team resources>team roster and alumni
- International experience information
- the sandbox
- This one is trickier because you cannot navigate directly to it, you have to use the search field. The sandbox is not navigable because it is just a place to play--if you are not sure about how to do something, try the code in the sandbox first so you can test if it works without messing up your own wiki page.
- Past research
How Do We Use the Wiki?
- It is not a historical account, it is a dynamic database
- Keep information current, updating is better than adding
- Meeting Minutes are done every week on the wiki to chart your progress
- Communication between teams, the engineers in Honduras, outreach, etc
- Turning in assignments
- Take them to the team resources page again and click on the "turn in completed assignments here" link. Explain to the team that this returns a spreadsheet to you and Monroe that includes date and time things were turned in! Team members should always email their whole team when they turn something in so everyone knows it was taken care of.
Editing the Wiki
The most important part of editing the wiki is using the wiki organization guide. Show the team how to navigate from Wiki Organization Guide home>team resources>wiki organization guide. Browse the structure of the guide with them--there are directions there Here you can find directions for formatting assignments, figures, pictures, equations, etc.
Next cover these points by showing people how to:
- Log in
- Go to View on the top left of any wiki page.
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- Go to View on the top left of any wiki page.
- Create a new page and immediately set the default to Wiki Markup and not Rich Text (rich text seems easy but there are a lot of bugs in it and it is harder to keep our formatting consistent with it, wiki markup is easy to learn and it allows us to all use the same headings, bullets, etc)
- Add a template to it, distinguish between the "Global" (useless) templates and ours which are "Space" templates
- Talk about naming conventions-- do not name a page "Meeting Minutes 3/3/03" you should always use a descriptor for your team like "Team A Meeting Minutes 3/3/03" so there is no confusion between who is responsible for what pages. Also the page name becomes part of its web address, so it is helpful to be descriptive.
- Create different headings on it
- Add a link using brackets
- Add bullet points
- Move that page
- Now delete it
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Your First Wiki Assignment
- All team members have to update their contact info on our roster home>team resources>team roster and alumni
At the end of the lecture take 5 minutes to explain the personal page assignment. Have everyone go back to the Home page and show them again how to navigate to the syllabus and to the assignments page (both from team resources). Show them the personal page assignment, it has very detailed step-by-step instructions, and tell them they should do it ASAP while the wiki lecture is still fresh in their heads!
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