Assignment5DelanyTamabayeva

Assignment5DelanyTamabayeva

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

Daniel Delany, Diana Tamabayeva

2. Task 1

One of my favorite sites is a community called Hacker News. The site is a collaborative news site run similarly to Reddit (or Metafilter, Digg, etc), and aims to provide newsworthy and noteworthy tidbits to the teeming hacker/CS/startup/web worker masses. The rules are:

• Anyone in the community can post a link to a news item/blog post
• Posted links are ranked in order of relevance on the site. Relevance is a weighted average of number of "upvote points" a post has and how recently it was posted.
• Users can "upvote" links to give them more points by clicking on an arrow next to the link. "Downvoting" links is not allowed, since it seems to contribute to trollish activity.
• Every link posted can have comments posted on it. Comments are shown as a conversation thread, not chronologically. Comments can be upvoted or downvoted by anyone, and the ones with the most upvote points show up at the top of the comments.
• The combined total of the number of upvote points received by links you posted and the number of upvote points earned by comments you wrote is your "karma" number. This number is visible to other users and is generally regarded as a quantitative measure of your respect, credibility, and involvement in the community

This system is difficult to compare with the wiki meta-design since their motives are so different: Wikis are, at their most basic level, an empty space and a set of building materials. They exist to facilitate the creation a set of interconnected facts or ideas in what was once a void. Collaborative news sites like Hacker News, however, create a framework in which conversation can take place amid the constantly flowing roar of informational content we find relevant. Making remarks on news as it goes by may not, on the surface, seem like a particularly rich community interaction. However, a look at the list of all the comments I've ever made reveals that, over time, if the community has similar interests and knowledge, these interactions can yield surprisingly thoughtful and stimulating debate.

While wikis have varying feature sets, they essentially provide two modes of user content generation: creation of new pages, and editing other users' pages. Hacker News, however, has at least three: First, the community decides which articles are shown on the front page, and which comments are most noticeable, through upvoting and downvoting. Additionally, they contribute comments to the discussion, and are motivated by the karma system to keep them intelligent and helpful. Finally, Hacker News is the only collaborative news site I've seen in which a large number of the articles linked to by the site are actually written by members active in the upvoting/commenting community. In many online communities, this sort of self-promotion is considered tacky and spammy. However, at Hacker News, it's encouraged, and it works because everyone is there to talk about the same topics. This leads to all sorts of interesting collaborative phenomena; for example, occasionally a heated discussion on HN drives someone to write a long blog rant on the subject, a post which, itself, later makes its way to the front page of HN.

Hacker News is, I think, an example of an interesting new paradigm in meta-design. Allowing users to define a community based not just on their own content but of any that they find collectively interesting is a new idea, and one that allows those who share similar interests to form a strong sense of community. As our knowledge and information about the world around us continues its inevitable increase, I predict that these communities will continue to thrive in niches small and large as a necessary complement of purely creative systems like wikis.

Task 2

Website Design: We started comparing these two wiki's by comparing their design, general look and layouts. Xwiki, the one we are currently using, has a better developed interface. Its color choice is more or less conventional and thus looks better developed for a regular user. Swiki's design is associated with beginning website developer's work. First impression of the color and home page gives a wrong idea about the purpose of the website. Somehow it seems that this website might have been developed for some student project, or something similar. In general, websites for particular programs should be developed in the way that will emphasize purpose and "seriousness" of the program. It appears that developers of this website tried to be creative but did it in not most professional way. In general, Swiki's design seems much older, may they haven't updated it for a while. Also an advantage of the Xwiki is that one can take a look at perhaps all pages without logging in.

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Navigation: Xwiki allows much more convenient navigation between pages. Bars on the left and on the right stay pretty much consistent with each other when navigating through pages. One can easily go to home page by clicking on the "Lifelong Learning and Design" sign. Navigating through Swiki is quite complicated. One almost always has to go back to the home page to find other links within this site, except some occasions when the links actually stay on the left after navigating to some pages. There is no constant main home page button, except the little one on the left.

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Searching: Searching is easier on Xwiki than in Swiki because you don't have to navigate away from the page to start searching. And also Swiki gives all these options to search, which I find not useful. There is conventional way to search, and it would be more convenient to just use that instead of asking a user.

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