User:Bhumbash

Google Code-In Essay

I am not the best with computers. As a result, upon arriving on the MediaWiki and WikiTech home pages, I was instantly lost. For awhile I tried clicking links to see if they would lead to any information as to what the purpose of these communities actually was. However, my searches always led to pages with lines of code that might as well be Latin to me. Now, this is probably my fault. I’m pretty sure that my confusion is due more to my inexperience than anything. Still, improvement can be made.

My first objective was to try to find out the purpose of each site. MediaWiki was the much easier site in this regard. Both sites had a sort of mission statement on the front page, but that didn’t offer that much information. MediaWiki was actually very helpful on this front, offering multiple pages on what the purpose of the wiki was and how to join. I was pleased that even though MediaWiki seemed impenetrable, it had pages specifically for new users, helping them be an active part of the community.

Sadly, the same could not be said for Wikitech. I understand that the wiki is a hub for documenting and fixing all bugs related to the MediaWIki software, and as a result doesn’t really need to be all that welcoming and user friendly. And it showed. As a newcomer, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, or what to do. I understand that the wiki is only for those who have already been initiated into the wiki community, but it would be nice to have some pages dedicated to explaining it’s layout and how one could contribute to it.

As you can probably tell, I favored MediaWiki over WikiTech when it came time for my research. It is a much more informative and newcomer friendly wiki. However, my impressions are that they are both very well made wikis. One is for people who are just starting, MediaWiki, and the other for people who are already integrated into the society. I would advise anyone who is a newcomer such as me to not be turned off by the lack of accessibility on the wikis. While Wikitech is still a daunting and, in my opinion, not that well organized of a wiki, MediaWiki is a surprising delight to traverse. It has many pages to help you create an account, how to use write extensions properly, and much, much more. MediaWiki did exactly what a wiki should do. It taught me. And more importantly it taught me useful things. The most important of which is how to edit a wiki page. My previous attempts at editing wiki pages did more harm than good, but with my improved knowledge of the syntax, I can actually help contribute to the numerous wikis I, and many others, frequent every day.

I know I have said this before, but Wikitech is, fact of the matter, confusing. Not it’s purpose, which took far too long to discover, but the means which to navigate and contribute. Each page that you click on leads to lines of code that I have a great difficulty in understanding. Once again, this is probably just my problem as I am highly inexperienced in coding, but this is just my point of view. There is no clear path to take for answers. It took some time of me randomly clicking to discover the purpose of the wiki. If such a simple task takes so much time to complete, how could anything get done? It may seem like I’m jumping all over the place here, but what I’m trying to say is that the wiki could be organized much better. Pages could be placed into groups such as “Fixes” or “How to Get Started” that would be front and center on the home page. It just seems like the whole wiki is lazily hashed together, at least on the surface.

Another small gripe I had is that neither of the wikis had a forum. There is probably a reason for this as I recall reading specifically that there should not be a forum on one of MediaWiki’s introduction page, but I could not find one. Anytime I join a community, the first place I go to is the forums as this is where the information you need usually is. There are many threads full of helpful people and comments. Chances are, any questions you might have have already been answered, and if they haven’t, you can easily start a new thread that will be answered soon. A forum would have been perfect for Wikitech, although I guess it is sort of a forum itself. Anyway, a forum would immediately do away with all of my concerns (except those concerning organization) and would be a great place for any newcomer to start. It wouldn’t even have to be that much in the way or officially supported. Just include a link to the forum on Wikitech’s homepage and let the users do the rest. It wouldn’t just include a beginner’s guide, it could include all sorts of things such as bug fixing guides, bug reporting guides, etc. I’m fairly certain that this information is already included within the pages of the Wikitech wiki, but this would be a much easier place to access it from. Plus, it provides a place to ask people questions. What I mean is that it would be a place to discuss and collaborate on anything which, to the extent of my knowledge, the wiki itself has yet to do.