Taxonomy Wiki Guidelines
Introduction
Welcome to the TRIN wiki. This wiki is a shared and collaborative work space for taxonomic research and information management projects. This page offers general guidelines and notes on philosophy, structure, content, operation and use of this wiki.
General Structure
The Taxonomy Hub wiki is a single collaborative work environment or wiki serving a number of largely autonomous taxonomy research and documentation projects. Its overall structure is that of a single wiki with a number of discrete 'wiki webs', rather than a number of discrete wikis, to encourage shared standards, information and resources between projects.
Although the wiki enables complete freedom in creation and arrangement of content and resources, some basic structure, agreed operating principles and shared understanding is required to enable smooth access to relevant information, and to stave off the second law of thermodynamics.
A 'Main Web' provides a convenient first point of contact to the Taxonomy Hub Wiki, with links to the webs of each of the Hub projects and separate pages of information common to all projects, including general policies and guidelies for wiki use and content.
Project webs are created and maintained by each project community. Guidelines and templates are provided to assist projects in starting their wiki webs. The wiki is a tool for the projects and it is expected that each project will expand the pages to suit their particular business and operational needs.
A 'Management Web' holds information and materials for operational Taxonomy Hub management, such as management team meeting papers and discussions.
The overally philosophy of the Taxonomy Wiki is inclusive rather than exclusive and invitations are extended to other collaborative taxonomy projects to use the tools and support of
taxonomy.org.au to manage the group's communications of their taxonomy research and documentation projects.
Assumptions
There are a number of underlying assumptions made about this taxonomy wiki and participation in it:
- Participation is voluntary and success depends on sustained enthusiasm and commitment of participants.
- The wiki is a technology-driven communication environment, so a degree of information and computer literacy and sophistication is expected.
- Wikis are dynamic and multiple and continuous authorship is allowed and encouraged; a page is very likely to be different each time you look at it.
- Wiki information is visible to all.
- Editing is available to registered logged in users who have been added to the project group.
Security Overheads
Users have indicated a preference for some degree of access control. Other that editing priviledge through registration and login, Wikis tend not to obsess about access control. The taxonomy wiki offers a degree of access control through member ship of individual topic webs, which can be contoled by each project. There are some implications of this arrangement:
- Security comes with a cost and each project will have to allocate time to managing user access.
- New users
- User permissions
- The more a project is restricted, the less user and community engagement it can expect
- Users are more irritated by what they think they can't see than by what they know is not there.
Mail and Wiki Management
After initial establishment, primary management of email lists and the wiki webs is expected to be with the project but support will be available if needed. See individual project webs for contact details.
"Rules of engagement"
Because the Taxonomy wiki is a shared environment, its success will depend on a number of agreed "rules of engagement":
- There is no room for complaint.
- If it is wrong, fix it
- If it is not there, add it
- If it needs to be somewhere else, move it
- Expect your work to be 'enhanced' by your colleagues, and be prepared to 'enhance theirs'.
General page structure
A number of page formatting recommendations are offered to provide a degree of consistency across the Taxonomy Hub wiki:
Text Formatting
- While it is possible to embed HTML, excessive and elaborate formating should be avoided
- Headings are best made with the H1-H6 labels
- The appearance of headings is controlled by attached predefined stylesheets
- Bold, and italic can be applied to blocks of text
- If necessary, text can be coloured.
Headings
- H1 is the title heading for each page
- H2-H6 provide a hierarchy of nested headings
- The variable %TOC% will build a page table of contents based on the heading structure.
Acknowledgement
- The wiki keep a log of topic page creators and contributors. These are usually visible in page headers and footer information.
- If you have made an important or significant contribution to the page, add you name to the contributors block at the bottom
- It is quite acceptable to summarize and incorporate the contributions of others into the body of the page and to add their names to the contributors block.
Indexes /Lists of useful links
In General, lists of useful web resources should be compiled onto as few pages as possible and categorized on these pages using the wiki Headings as a sort of categorized index. Crosslinks can then be made to parts of the index along a given theme by referencing the headings e.g.
Online Resources for
by typing
Online Resources for
- Phylogeny [[HubRISLinks#Phylogeny]]
- Images [[Main.HubRISLinks#Images]]
Additional information
[ Contributors: JimCroft; GarryJolleyRogers; MargaretC ]
Copyright © by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.