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Wiki Training Lecture

Make sure you have created the new semester's team roster before giving this lecture! Also make sure you have added all new members to the wiki as directed at the bottom of the list of early responsibilities

This lecture is meant to provide an outline of basic skills team members need to successfully edit the wiki. Without these skills they will be unable to do any of the assignments or correctly document their research, so this lecture is very important. Make sure to host this lecture in a computer lab so every student can sit on the wiki and follow along while you project your screen in the front of the room and lead them. Carpenter Library has the Accel labs, which are OK for this. They usually make you take upstairs rooms, though, which are too small for the whole team so you will need to book two and make sure to recruit someone to lead the lecture for the other half of the class.

General Information and Introduction

The wiki is not meant to be an online repository for reports. It is a dynamic database that we continually update. It is meant to provide resources on every facet of AguaClara, from research to design to outreach to syntax and grammar! Whenever you are updating the wiki, think very carefully about where you are placing information and how you are presenting it.

Always Remember!
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

A Tour of the Wiki

Start the tour at the Home page, it can be accessed by typing http://AguaClara.cee.cornell.edu. Have everyone follow along with you so they get an idea of how to navigate through it.

  • 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?
  • How do you find
    • Past research
      • lead the team to the Research page and show them the different team represented. Show them a typical research team page. home>research>?
    • Information about other teams
      • Just explain to them again how easy it is to navigate from the home page to all of the team pages
    • Assignments
      • Make sure to show them a few different assignments--highlight how there is information on expected content, formatting, and grading there, but due dates are all on the syllabus
    • Outreach events
      • The outreach team is responsible for maintaining a calendar of all the events that are coming up that they need team members to speak at or help with. These can be found by navigating to Home>Outreach>Outreach Calendar
    • Contact info for other people on the team
    • 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.

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 home>team resources>wiki organization guide. Browse the structure of the guide with them--there are directions there for formatting assignments, figures, pictures, equations, etc.

Next cover these points by showing people how to:

  • Log in
  • 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

Now take them to the calendar and explain that each team has to log in to CUAguaClara@gmail.com and add their weekly meeting times and locations.

Also go to edit a page that has pictures and equations on it so you can show them what the code looks like to do that. Remind everyone that the directions for adding equations and figures are in the wiki organization guide and they don't need to remember the code!

  • For figures it is easiest to copy code from another image and modify it for your page

Your First Wiki Assignment

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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