Our Class Wiki - So Far

I signed up for the tasks of layout editor and graphic editor for Baruch New Media’s wiki. These tasks involve working in all content pages in the wiki, mainly dealing with the visual representation of the content.

I have added graphical elements to many articles and edited existing images. Many articles suffer from huge pictures which need resizing, other articles contain too many images, which don’t really add much value to the content. I call this the MySpace effect, in which users want to personalize the pages they are working in, sometimes in detriment of the overall look and feel of the Wiki.

before	after

 

There are many articles where the heading of a section is a link to another article. For example the How New Media are used in Business article has an introduction section with content introducing the subject, but the heading links to another article that also introduces the topic. This confuses not only users, but also people collaborating, since they add new content to a section already explained in the main article page. In such cases what I do is try to merge content or indicate there’s another article that expands on the topic.

Main article	New page with different content and same subject

There were other articles such as New Media in Transportation where the article page contained links to new pages with very few content – two or three paragraphs. In this case I combined all separate pages into one main article.

before	after

Overall, I have been making small changes across all pages, formatting text, taking away unnecessary visual elements, fixing external links… and so on. My goal is to keep a usable Wiki with a constant visual layout.

I have not created any new page, but I plan to do so with content from my term research project within the next three weeks as the semester approaches its end.