Wiki Announcement (2019-01-10)

Huh?

Template:JfanoteBy Greg FullerTemplate:Jfanote-end

JusticeforAnimals.org is being converted to a Wiki, running on the same platform as Wikipedia. You are looking at the new site in an early stage of conversion. After the conversion is completed, the site will be moved from wiki.justiceforanimals.org to justiceforanimals.org, replacing the current site. We will provide URL redirection for most of the posts on the current site, so that bookmarks and other links will not break.

Template:Jfanote Feel free to look around. Template:Jfanote-end

Background

Last year a friend put the bug in my ear about using Wiki software for justiceforanimals.org. I let the thought simmer but it kept popping up in my head. I looked at the features of MediaWiki—the software that Wikipedia uses—and did a few edits on Wikipedia to familiarize myself with how things work on a Wiki site. I didn't much care for the aesthetics, but I was surprised about how capable and well suited the software seemed to be for justiceforanimals.org, even without considering the possibilities for a wider collaborative effort.

So I set up an instance and started experimenting, still somewhat skeptical. But the more I learned the more convinced I became. I'm still in the process of rapid discovery, learning about footnotes, table of contents, tables, infoboxes, edit approvals, versioning, user permissions, etc. This immersive experience of beginning the conversion from the old site is allowing me to set up the overall structure for the site and the structure for various types of individual posts.

Take a Look

You can learn about the structure of site by reading the Main Page, which is Wiki talk for home page. The greatest opportunity for outside contributions will be in two new Sections—Fact Sheets and Summaries. Visit the other Section Pages in the Sidebar Menu to see the kinds of entries in each section. See an example of a post that's been converted here.

Advantages

Here are just a few of the benefits of using a wiki site:

Collaboration. The ability to engage other contributors in a more collaborative effort will result in more content more quickly.

Cross-Linking. The wiki platform offers strong capabilities for cross-linking the information between posts and the sections, something that is much easier on with MediaWiki. It just wasn't getting done on the WordPress site. With two new sections, and possibly more in the future, this becomes even more important.

Richer Presentation. The wiki platform makes it easy to produce a table of contents, citations, nicely formatted tables, information boxes, etc. Some of this was possible before but was not being used to its full advantage because it was difficult. Here it's easy.

Productivity. Since I've started working on this platform, I am impressed by how much faster one can jump in and start writing, editing, and cross-linking. When you see something wrong, you can hit the edit button and fix it immediately. You longer have to go through a cumbersome administrative back-end to get things done. As a result, things get done.

Common Skills. With the WordPress site, in order to contribute, one had to be trained in a system that was specific to that site. Here, there's learning to be done, but it's the same platform as Wikipedia, and help is readily available by searching the MediaWiki site. Wikipedia has proven this can work.

Continuity. I would like for others to not only be involved in content creation and editing, but also in managing the site. I won't be around forever, and something could happen to me at any time. The Wiki platform does what we need it to do without a lot of third-party and homegrown customizations, making it easier for someone to jump in and help with system maintenance, or even take over.

Site Considerations

It's a whole new ball game for how the site is organized and how contributions are managed.

Content Contribution. As more people start participating in creating and editing content, many possibilities exist for how page creation and editing can be controlled. Decisions surrounding this are under consideration. Among the possibilities:

• Allow anonymous users to edit pages and possibly create pages.
• Allow all registered users with verified emails to create and edit pages.
• Contribution by invitation. This would result in having a team of contributors, and the team could be large.

This kind and degree of participation would be very difficult with the current platform.

Foundational Articles. As more content gets created, the more foundational information could get lost in the sea. This is certainly not a problem now, as everything being work on is considered foundational. As the site grows, foundational articles from each section can be flagged as foundational and be given higher visibility.

Copy Editing. Currently, all articles are copyedited by a professional copy editor, Isaac Nickerson. This has resulted in high-quality content. As more contributors get involved, it will be difficult to maintain this standard for all articles.

The platform supports flagging of content based on quality. We can use this feature, combined with an approval process, to make it clear to the user where an article stands in this regard. The goal is to have all foundational articles copy edited.

Outlining. I thought the outline feature would be useful, but it's hasn't generated any interest. That may be because people need to be educated about how outlines can be used. Outlines take considerable work to maintain, and I'm not sure people will use them.

Here's what I'm thinking: Put what is now in the "Details" and "Extra" part of an outline into a collapsible box in the article, and have its initial state be collapsed. This would work well for much of what is there now, but it would not work for deeper outlines. Much of the content in deeper outlines can be moved to Fact Sheets.

Please let me know how you feel about this. If we continue with outlines, I will have to rewrite the code to collapse/expand outline nodes.

Clipboard. I think that having a plain text version of an article that can easily be copy-pasted without formatting problems is useful. We should keep this feature, but only require it on foundational articles. As richer content that includes tables, informational boxes and such are put into the main article, that text will become even less amenable to copy-paste. The feature will be implemented differently, making it easier to copy-paste small portions of an article.

I have not set up the Visual Editor yet, but I've used it on Wikipedia and it was one of my considerations in moving forward with a wiki solution. Although wiki markup notation is quickly learned, the Visual Editor will make it even more appealing. Even without the Visual Editor, ease of editing is orders of magnitude better than the current platform. The ability to edit small portions of a post quickly is a godsend.

A lot of work and thought went into this decision. All the factors would take too long to explain, but I'm confident this is a good move for the site, and for the site's mission.

Moving Forward

There's lots to be done, some of which is on the To Do page. This includes improving the aesthetics, which I've already worked on quite a bit. I will be changing the fonts and other parts of the design before GoLive.

I'm excited about the current and future possibilities of being on a Wiki platform.