Assignment5EdwardsLillyWisnesky

Assignment5EdwardsLillyWisnesky

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)

Task 1

Wikis fall into this category. Compare Wikis as meta-design environments with another meta-design environment of your choice for which user-generated content is the defining feature.

Task 2

Analyze in detail the following two Wikis:

• the Wiki used for our course with which you are (or at least should be) very familiar http://ngw.cs.colorado.edu
• the Wiki for the research community in "Creativity and Information Technology" at: http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Pierce Edwards, Joe Lilly, Jacob Wisnesky

2. Task 1

Visual Studio and wikis both share common meta-design elements. WYSIWYG allows designers to drag and drop or cut and paste desired elements into their environment and the necessary back-end code is implemented automatically. This dynamic creation of necessary elements makes it simpler for designers to focus on what they want to do with their projects as opposed to how to do something. Visual Studio does this within an IDE suite to generate code for programming projects. Wikis on the other hand generate new web pages with each new link. The importance of both is to take the work load off the "prosumers" so that they can produce works of quality.

Task 2

Interestingly enough, the first few things that hit us as major differences between the two wikis were the general look (ie, superficial graphics) and organization of the wiki. The general look and feel, while important from a social standpoint, struck us as both being "1.0"-ish and unimportant. Granted, for the great unwashed, the look of the wiki is very important, because the layout will ultimately guide them to do what they need or want to do.

The organization, however, seemed to be not much more than a collective of hyperlinks that were vaguely related to each other. This perception was brought about because the navigation was static. If you notice this wiki has many navigation tabs, and a nice search bar that is easily found. With the other wiki there is only one tab, and the search function is hidden behind a link. This brings up an interesting point in how the paradigms for wikis (and websites) has changed over the years. Not only do they need to be pretty and have a shiny UI, but they need to also be search oriented. This is simply because any user generated content is not guaranteed to be nicely connected into the navigation that is previously defined. Therefore, either you can enforce a strict method of defining the pages parent's, or use tags or have an unwieldy site map or you can just include a nice search function.