Practical Semantic Mediawiki
This hands-on session for non technical users emphasizes the "need to know" aspects of Web publishing, wikis, information design and Semantic Mediawiki.
Acronyms
- SMW = Semantic Mediawiki
- MW = Mediawiki
- CC = Creative Commons
Web publishing
Access models
- Fully open
- Require login
- Require created accounts to edit (closed editing)
- Require created accounts to access (fully private)
Access models can be changed over time.
Accessibility
Here, accessibility refers to supporting people with vision, motor control or cognitive difficulties.
- Making sites accessible generally increases usability
- Mediawiki is accessible, SMW has issues (forms)
- Value content over appearance
- Good tags for images
Terms of use
- Creative Commons - share with options for attribution, non-commercial, changes
- Traditional copyright - by permission only
- Re-using content
Using Mediawiki
Mediawiki is the underlying software of Wikipedia. It is robust, supported by a large community and supports hundreds of useful extensions.
Creating pages
- How to name pages
- One topic per page
- Short, avoid special symbols, sentence form
- Code and matching brackets
- Basic markup — [[]] , [], |, {{}}, {{{}}}, [[File]] headings, bold, bullet points
- Linking
- Brainstorm using links
- Categories
- Uploading images and files
- What not to upload
- Subcategories
- Moving pages
- Deleting pages
- Templates - used for consistently reused content
Making pages look good
CSS is the style system of Web pages and can also be used in Mediawiki. Like wiki markup, learning can be progressive.
Placeography | Biofuel Visions
- Re-using CSS styling <div style="background: orange">Hello world</div>
- Avoid losing meaning (don't use <big> for headers), keep it simple
- Re-using styles MediaWiki:Common.css
- Hiding MW's menus and changing the 'skin'
Semantic Mediawiki
SMW is an extension ecology of MW that allows marking up content for re-use and create easier to use forms and views.
- Meaning through annotations and relationships
- Triples
- What properties does your content need to be useful?
Inline property annotation
Single instances of data can be marked-up using annotations.
[[Date::Jan 1, 2011]]
- Built-in types
- Geographic coordinate
- Viewing all properties
- Subtypes
- Queries
Classes
- Creating a class (template, properties, forms)
- One topic per page
- Formlink {{#formlink:Comment|comment||Comment[Topic]={{PAGENAME}}}}</formlink>
Views
Basic inference
Converting content or sites
- Pandoc
- Convertors for Open Office, Microsoft Word
Hosting
- Export a site, modularize by category
- Complete site export
- Special:Version
- Free light/startup hosting
- Inexpensive Mediawiki with SMW option
- Wikia
- Self-hosting