Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Any interest in a gifted education wiki?

Thanks! Feel free to pass along my contact info if you like. You can also mention, if it helps, that I have a background in software engineering, so setting up (and extending the software of) a wiki would be easy for me. I love to collaborate.

A lot of small entries certainly can seem that way. There's a project related to Wikipedia at wiktionary.org that is just that, a user-editable dictionary.

Sounds like a great idea I agree it is very easy for resources to get lost in discussion forums.

Totally love the idea!!

I think it's a great idea. Good one Lucounu

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

I like this wiki's intro. But we do need citations so far as we need reference material that we can use and look into, so, nevermind. Ok. Let's at least plagiarize the part that says we're not about bashing things or making snide remarks, except when they're Really. funny.

This is going to be fun.

Update: I'm in the process of evaluating where and how to host the wiki. This overview shows some things to consider:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Starting_and_Running_a_Wiki_Website

I've ruled out hosting the wiki at someplace like wikispaces.com, which are called "wiki farms" because they exist just to host lots of wikis. At these sites, to get some of the full-fledged permissions, custom domain name, etc. seems like it costs extra money while still not providing perfect flexibility, and I want us to have full control over the software and features we use. Besides, wiki farms from my quick review often don't offer very good export capabilities, which seems like it might become a problem if the wiki must be moved later. For example Wikispaces, which seems like the biggest and in some ways the best wiki farming option, allows export of hosted wiki content in only HTML and PDF formats, which I'm guessing would require re-entry of every page if the wiki were moved to another host later.

For these reasons I've tentatively settled on using MediaWiki (the software which powers Wikipedia), and buying generic web hosting from a provider like GoDaddy which includes PHP hosting and MySQL database support, which are needed to run MediaWiki. The whole bit could be picked up and plopped on a different web server capable of running the same software, and MediaWiki offers lots of robust and familiar features. But if Mark's contact turns out to want some other software, I'll be open to using that too. There are apparently over a hundred different types of wiki software to use.

La Texican, that tvtropes.org intro does have some good parts to it. I particularly like the emphasis on the lack of the "notability" aspect of Wikipedia, to stress to new people that it is much less restrictive. Our wiki will not be an encyclopedia, but more of a repository for people to share useful information, even if it's not easily verifiable in the way encyclopedic content must be.

Another important way in which I imagine it may differ is by containing useful content that people develop themselves, like home-schooling curricula. I also imagine different types of learning resources which people find useful will have their own pages, where I would want people to put in their own personal impressions; this would be more useful the lesser-known the resource. There are different sources of review and rating information on the web, with Amazon being a big example, but they are not focused on the needs of gifted people and it's hard to get an idea from them of how appropriate a particular resource would be for a gifted child. It's user-created information where I think the new wiki may tend to be most different (in type of content) from places like Hoagies and this site.

All that and plus a wiki asks the contributors to be more objective and generic because forums are for your stories and personal opinions. I think a wiki can hold reviews. I'll have to google that.

I don't know anything about hosting. I only know tripod.com or webs.com will host free pages, but you only get like ten pages which is not enough for a wiki.

Not really. A wiki, at its heart, is really just a user-editable website. It can hold anything you like. Wikipedia is just one particular use of a wiki.


That's right, and in addition the web hosting requirements for a wiki are higher because those free websites can only serve static (unchanging, mostly unprogrammable) pages. In selecting the hosting for this wiki, I also want to stay away from ads shown on the wiki pages.