wikicranky.
You can kind of stick a fork in UMassWiki, I guess. Something this morning spurred me to log in, check out recent edits, approve all the ads I've been ignoring, etc. It had actually been over 2 months since I'd last logged in. Obviously, I'm not part of the community out there any more and I'm busy, so I knew my involvement in the site would be declining. The problem is that there was never enough sustained interest from any one person who was good with Mediawiki that I could transition ops to somebody to carry the torch. I did op one person but she's not a daily user. And of course now neither am I.
It sucks because even as incomplete as the wiki is, there's already a wealth of information there. There is a lot of content that is already useful to people at UMass and even people in town, and there is tons more which I wanted to capture -- history, hangouts, detailed information in place of the many stubs. But there's no community and no real sticky editors. I'm gonna redo the main page to not be time-dependent (before, it was updated a few times a semester) and make some moves and edits and categorizations that need to be made and then I dunno what, just let it go to seed I guess. Fortunately it's highly resistant to spam given all the safeguards I put in place.
It's just frustrating. That site was my baby to raise for well over 2 years, and it's not succeeding. Part of the problem was lack of promotion which is exacerbated now that I'm no longer local to UMass to promote it on the ground. Part of the problem is search relevance. The vast majority of our inbound search traffic is for a few restaurants. UMassWiki has that market cornered. A huge of the problem was finding the "20" in the 80/20 rule, which on wikis is more like a 99/1 rule. I need editors and there aren't any, or the few wiki nuts that I did come across in the UMass community were too busy editing Wikipedia and for reasons I cannot possibly comprehend, apparently saw no value in UMassWiki and therefore didn't edit. Enjoy your pages long discussions on policy minutia and edit wars with fundies and crystal gazers, I guess.
One of the biggest problems, though, is that nobody will link to the site. Back when UMassLinks was the big thing, I wrote the dude that started it and asked for a link since, you know, I was running a free student-built public information service for UMass. His response? The site was "too full" but I could place an ad for $150 a week. Riiiiiiiiight.
So I went to upstart competitor ZooMassLinks which was 1000x better designed and more interesting, and had integrated search boxes and whatnot, and the owner of that site gave me a link and put UMassWiki in the search box so people could search it directly from the site. For a while it was a good source of inbound hits, second only to Google. For this I repaid him with a primary sponsorship, a graphic placement on nearly every page of the site above my AdBrite block, which included text links which contained the phrase "umass links." (Hello Googlebomb.) I didn't have clickthru tracking but I guarantee that placement got significantly more clicks than my text ads.
Anyway I was looking through my stats one month a while back and noticed the referrals from what had become CampusLive had dropped to zero. Turns out he and his new army of interns pulled UMassWiki from the site and never informed me. I emailed him, he said oh, it's available as a customization option for people to put in when they customize their link boxes and search engines, and people are using it. Not. I made an account and no, it wasn't an option. Emailed back, he said it was an oversight, they'd put it in. Nope. I gotta say, I tried not to let it get to me, business is business, dude has his expanding web presence company and is taking CampusLive national blah blah blah, but that shit really pisses me off. I sent him hits when CampusLive didn't EXIST. Anyway.
This is a perennial problem. UMassWiki has had newspaper articles written about it, but nobody links to it except Google, the only editors are one-shot people without accounts these days, and I'm not at UMass to promote it any more. Traffic is flat or declining, though right now we're in the summer slowdown.
As for my involvement, I'm afraid it's pretty much permanently lost its shiny factor with me. That means I'm largely done with it whether I want to be or not. Anybody want a wiki? :P
It sucks because even as incomplete as the wiki is, there's already a wealth of information there. There is a lot of content that is already useful to people at UMass and even people in town, and there is tons more which I wanted to capture -- history, hangouts, detailed information in place of the many stubs. But there's no community and no real sticky editors. I'm gonna redo the main page to not be time-dependent (before, it was updated a few times a semester) and make some moves and edits and categorizations that need to be made and then I dunno what, just let it go to seed I guess. Fortunately it's highly resistant to spam given all the safeguards I put in place.
It's just frustrating. That site was my baby to raise for well over 2 years, and it's not succeeding. Part of the problem was lack of promotion which is exacerbated now that I'm no longer local to UMass to promote it on the ground. Part of the problem is search relevance. The vast majority of our inbound search traffic is for a few restaurants. UMassWiki has that market cornered. A huge of the problem was finding the "20" in the 80/20 rule, which on wikis is more like a 99/1 rule. I need editors and there aren't any, or the few wiki nuts that I did come across in the UMass community were too busy editing Wikipedia and for reasons I cannot possibly comprehend, apparently saw no value in UMassWiki and therefore didn't edit. Enjoy your pages long discussions on policy minutia and edit wars with fundies and crystal gazers, I guess.
One of the biggest problems, though, is that nobody will link to the site. Back when UMassLinks was the big thing, I wrote the dude that started it and asked for a link since, you know, I was running a free student-built public information service for UMass. His response? The site was "too full" but I could place an ad for $150 a week. Riiiiiiiiight.
So I went to upstart competitor ZooMassLinks which was 1000x better designed and more interesting, and had integrated search boxes and whatnot, and the owner of that site gave me a link and put UMassWiki in the search box so people could search it directly from the site. For a while it was a good source of inbound hits, second only to Google. For this I repaid him with a primary sponsorship, a graphic placement on nearly every page of the site above my AdBrite block, which included text links which contained the phrase "umass links." (Hello Googlebomb.) I didn't have clickthru tracking but I guarantee that placement got significantly more clicks than my text ads.
Anyway I was looking through my stats one month a while back and noticed the referrals from what had become CampusLive had dropped to zero. Turns out he and his new army of interns pulled UMassWiki from the site and never informed me. I emailed him, he said oh, it's available as a customization option for people to put in when they customize their link boxes and search engines, and people are using it. Not. I made an account and no, it wasn't an option. Emailed back, he said it was an oversight, they'd put it in. Nope. I gotta say, I tried not to let it get to me, business is business, dude has his expanding web presence company and is taking CampusLive national blah blah blah, but that shit really pisses me off. I sent him hits when CampusLive didn't EXIST. Anyway.
This is a perennial problem. UMassWiki has had newspaper articles written about it, but nobody links to it except Google, the only editors are one-shot people without accounts these days, and I'm not at UMass to promote it any more. Traffic is flat or declining, though right now we're in the summer slowdown.
As for my involvement, I'm afraid it's pretty much permanently lost its shiny factor with me. That means I'm largely done with it whether I want to be or not. Anybody want a wiki? :P