Thanks for the list! Of course as a resident of the greater Rochester area I’d be totally remiss to have this conversation and not mention RocWiki which is often my first stop when I have one of those frequently asked questions in my head.

It looks like I need to check out the permissions issues in MediaWiki, although I’m not too keen on fiddling with theming — I figure the more this looks like Wikipedia, the better. Keep it familiar and clear for readers.

One thing we found was something you’d expect: successful wiki projects usually feature a good deal of startup content right from the beginning. They also require early, committed investment on the part of the creators (as in several months of daily edits). The goal is to reach a critical mass of content valuable and large enough to sustain itself. Like any social site, it can help to augment the online community with some offline meetups, to discuss what you want the resource to become.

One of the reasons I decided not to use a wiki for my fellowship project is that the two-semester window wouldn’t give me enough time to sort through our subject matter and make the required up-front investment. Another reason is that I wanted to focus not on the general advantages a wiki could bring – Wikipedia has demonstrated those pretty well – but on the specific advantages that a context-based, repository approach could bring to journalism.

Yet another reason was that MediaWiki (my choice for the most feature-rich and stable open-source wiki software package) remains somewhat frustratingly difficult to theme, and as Serdar pointed out, it doesn’t have much of a permissions infrastructure.

But if I get the opportunity to apply these ideas outside of a time-constrained project, I’m pretty certain I’ll try to make wiki software work, and my choice would probably be MediaWiki.

Before settling on a wiki, I’d encourage a news org to define their short and long-term goals (Do we want an organizational wiki? Do we want the ability to expand into a public-facing wiki?), and then take a hard look at the software, documentation, and its community to see if it suits their needs and offers a strong support network.

A good starting point to compare and contrast is WikiMatrix (http://www.wikimatrix.org).

It turned out well, be interested to hear your thoughts (and see what others think)–thanks for making the video conversation happen!

@Carlos – I would build a list of categories and create a couple sample pages to send out to newsroom staff, then get them started adding their own. If they get into it, one category will create a need for the next — every proper noun they type in probably needs a page, especially if this is local information that’s not “notable enough” for Wikipedia itself, as Brad put it in our video talk.

Then you can start opening it up to public *view*, but I’d try to build some momentum and make sure that you have the newsroom engaged in it, caring for it, growing it, before you open it up to the public (or to a subset of the public) for editing.

Note: I am skype illiterate but would be up for learning how to record something with it.

We use ecamm for Pulse and we’ll reimburse you. Could be really brief.

What do you think?