A ThunderbirdWiki?

OMG just a week ago I had the exact same thought!

I definitely would like to see people stop posting about "what is Vanier like" and "apartment recommendations" and "I can't register yet, it says I need $100, what's going on?!?" and "How reliable is ratemyprofessors" and "Should I get a laptop? What kind" and so on and so forth.

I also have some extra space on mine, though I'm not sure if I can handle the bandwidth. However, bandwidth and everything is cheap these days.

There are a number of premade wikis that shouldn't be too troubling to install on a Perl database or something. Anyways, I think it'd be a very good idea, and I'd love to help ya with it. My email is archtrozman (at) hotmail (dot) com

Yeah, I've got a wiki running in my development folder. I'd definitely prefer to go the MySQL route for the database, mostly due to the familiarity thing and for simplification. The only issue is that I'm not sure if my hosting provider caps database sizes, or if it's just counted toward the disk space quota.

I have install scripts available for PHPWiki and TikiWiki, I think. I haven't decided which of the two I like better, or whether I should go with something a little trickier to install. I'm dividing my time among my real job, packing, my roll-your-own-Tivo plan (which is silly because I don't watch TV, so really it's more of a media server in a stylish box), and now this.

I can be reached at mjaustin [at] gmail [dot] com.

Keep the comments coming!

ill help with writing, copying and pasting. i dont do any code beyond html/css (and i suck at that).

im damn tired of a lot of these posts about rez and registration and buying shit ... sorry. its interesting for the 1st years and whatnot, but im a bitter old bitch going into 5th year (or perpetual 3rd year, as i like to call it) and im more into posts about clubs and events and campaigns. i mean really, most posts on this community are catered to incoming students and book-sellers (which is probably due to it being august)...

so instead of solely bitching, i am offering help.

perpetual 3rd year was my favourite...

with perpetual 4th year being a close second.

yes! definitely! I, for one, would herald a UBC wiki like the end of the dark days of the UBC website :) I still can't get over how I missed my early arrival deadline because it's A GODDAMN FOOTNOTE on a page you don't even have to go through.

I'm willing to help out with any writing and hard-labor tasks; my coding is pretty poor.

Go for it!

Good news! I have chosen a wiki and installed it on my web server. I haven't done much tweaking yet, and the layout is pretty basic, but by the end of the week (or at least before school starts), our Thunderbird Wiki (ThunderWiki?) will be online.

I'll post with the URL once I've made the site look a little less ugly and removed all the debugging code.

The best part about the system is that NO HTML knowledge is necessary to add content. Just some basic word processing skills and some information to copy or create is enough to create a page.

why is the name thunderbird-related anyway? i feel it discriminates against other residences and will therefore, out of sheer spite, never ever use it. lol

jk, but seriously now, why not something more general? sure, UBCki may be a bit (!) too cheesy, but i'm sure we can get to something.

Heh. Well, UBC's mascot is the Thunderbird, but you know. We can call it whatever we want :). It just needed a name for the immediate future.

Wikis@UBC

You are welcome to post pages at:

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki

or http://wiki.elearning.ubc.ca

Please feel free to contact me (brian.lamb@ubc.ca) if you have questions about this service.

Re: Wikis@UBC

That's a good thing to know, and the second one has more of the power I was thinking about, but it lacks the user friendliness that we'd want to go with, I think. Also, the second wiki (the first doesn't seem to be an "open" wiki) is full of interesting, technical pages. It's not really a wiki for the purpose here and we wouldn't want to intermix the two.

There's also the small detail that using a UBC-hosted wiki requires us to comply with a certain set of standards and forces us to give UBC the final say in content. This isn't to say that our intended project by any means seeks to defame or damage UBC, just that a wiki should be democratic, and any university-owned pages and servers aren't. Complaining about the prices or food quality probably wouldn't go over well there.

If we could get a dedicated wiki hosted by UBC, I'd be open to that idea, since the purpose here is to provide information to a large audience. But we want to convey accurate information, too, so your suggestion would be a solution only if UBC wouldn't police the wiki.

I really appreciate your post and alerting us to the wiki work going on at UBC. Thanks for the offer, especially. I'm pleased to see this sort of interaction between the university and its students.

Re: Wikis@UBC

I totally understand why you want autonomy, as well as a space of your own. I do wish to stress that we take a fairly hands-off attitude toward the wikis we host. We'd nuke something that is outright offensive (ie racist, sexist, homophobic) or slanderous. (We've never had to do that, by the way.) We certainly wouldn't censor a page because someone thinks food quality sucks, or because they are expressing an honest criticism of how the University is run.

Having said that, your concern is probably sufficient to justify setting up something on your own, and I respect and admire your efforts to do so. I just wanted to let you all know we do provide this service to the community (we host Movable Type weblogs, too).

I was really pleased to stumble onto this site, and wish it and all related endeavors all the success in the world.

Best,
Brian

(brian.lamb@ubc.ca)