To Print this page, go to the File menu and choose PRINT.
Click here to return to the regular version of this page.
|
Great Lakes Wiki
|
CONTACT INFO
Great Lakes Wiki
348 Comm. Arts and Sciences
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1212
(517) 432-5417
The center will create collaborative wiki entries that describe the problems, cleanup strategies, contaminants, industries, people, health impacts and other issues related to the 43 toxic hot spots in the Great Lakes region. Student reports and research will initially populate the wiki and then community members will be solicited to add input.
Check back for future news and updates.
• End of Year One: November 2007
• Spring 2007
• November 2006
• August 2006
Since its launch in January 2007, the Great Lakes Wiki continues to thrive and grow in cyberspace. The wiki was initially conceived as a repository for environmental information about the Great Lakes Areas of Concern, the official name given to 43 geographic and aquatic locations, which the U.S. and Canada agreed are threatened by industrial contamination. However, the creators of the wiki soon broadened the scope of the project to include other regions and other aspects of the Great Lakes to attract more writers.
The site is now divided into six major categories: culture, recreation, commerce, ecology, geography and areas of concern (AOCs). Each category has elements that can be expanded, eliminated or modified. Each section can contain news stories posted by anyone. Those news stories can also be linked off the “citizen reports” section of the main page.
According to project leader Dave Poulson, associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, “The Great Lakes Wiki has proven to be a great platform for students to experiment with new forms of journalism.” He cited these examples from the Wiki:
From September to November, the site received 10,000 unique visits, an average of 117 visits per day.
The number of Great Lakes organizations with profiles on the site has expanded to 40, offering a greater awareness of what groups with similar interests are doing.
In April, the wiki was designated the “site of the month” by the Great Lakes Information Network, a coalition of more traditional Great Lakes information providers.
Encouraging contributions from citizens and other groups to the Great Lakes Wiki is a priority. Video help files were created with Camtasia software and additional help documents, such as a how-to on shooting and uploading video, are being developed for online and print distribution.
This summer, Great Lakes Wiki hired a paid media coordinator to “prime the wiki pump,” generating and modeling content for the site by traveling throughout the Great Lakes basin, teaching people how to use it. From the annual meeting of the citizen coalition Great Lakes United in Toronto to a Michigan Energy Fair in Manistee, these events help the wiki recruit and train a diverse pool of contributors and readers. They even attended a Grandparents University at Michigan State University in East Lansing where 20 pairs of grandparents and grandchildren shared a computer as they learned to contribute vacation memories and other information to the Great Lakes Wiki.
One strategy for expanding awareness is the creation of a Great Lakes Wiki group on Facebook. As of November 2007, it had 64 members. Wiki promoters also used Meetup.com and various listservs to generate interest in training sessions. Numerous mailings to environmental, citizen and educational institutions have begun to pay off. “A journalism professor at Kent State University in Ohio has contacted us because she is developing curriculum for nontraditional investigative reporting techniques to be integrated in several classes,” said Poulson. “It is our hope that the Great Lakes Wiki becomes a platform for students taking classes at other journalism programs in the Great Lakes region.”
GreatLakesWiki.org launched on Jan. 31, 2007 with a number of news and blog outlets picking up the announcement - and a few critics worried that Michigan State’s “Journalism College has put its reputation at stake” by inviting ordinary citizens to contribute news and information.
The wiki seeks to collect “the experience and knowledge of a network of citizens, including scientists, hunters, policymakers, environmentalists, anglers, lakeside property owners, boaters, business operators and others who care about the Great Lakes region,” according to the site’s mission statement.
Within a month of the launch, the project’s leaders had tracked more than 500 edits to the site, 84 registered users and several thousand anonymous visits.
The site lists 32 non-profit organizations working on Great Lakes issues and half of those organizations had posted information about their groups.
Users could read about organic farming in the Commerce section. Or view a map of the Lakes’ environmental Areas of Concern.
Users could also post information about the culture, recreation, geography and ecology of the Great Lakes.
In addition to distributing news releases via e-mail and MSU’s public relations department, the project published a color brochure that was mailed to 46 leaders of citizen groups involved with the most polluted areas of the Lakes. The brochure was also sent to 140 colleges and universities with journalism programs in the region.
“Our hope with this effort is to offer the site as a publishing platform for schools interested in experimenting with non-traditional forms of journalism,” said site creator Cliff Lampe.
The site is also placing ads on Google, so during a keyword search for “Great Lakes,” the wiki will be called up. Lampe says he “knows that for every 100 who come to the site, one will come back,” so he is trying to make those people who do visit the site “more sticky.”
While there has been much positive reaction to the site, some critics expressed concern about allowing “contributors to post information and commentary without prior editing with regard to fairness or accuracy. “
Noted one respondent: “If MSU can attract quality contributors at the right scale ... the wiki service may enjoy credibility and provide a valuable resource. If MSU attracts pranksters and paid trolls, the project will tumble under its own weight toward a well-deserved demise.”
While the site only uses wiki technology and has no affiliation with Wikipedia, one Wikipedia and Wikimedia administrator has offered help in ironing out some of the technical issues.
A big challenge going forward is to help teach potential contributors how to post on the wiki, which has a “steeper learning curve” than posting on a blog-driven site, Lampe said. To address this, the site has developed a help system with screenshots and simple instructions and they plan to arrange workshops with local environmental groups to train people to use the site.
The project also plans to offer one of five $600 digital cameras to those people who contribute frequently and emerge as leaders within their “area of concern.”
In the upcoming months, Lampe hopes the wiki will have established a regular contributor base of at least 150 people.
November 2006
Content has been piling up on the Great Lakes Wiki, which is operating but has not been officially launched. Project Directors Dave Poulson, assistant director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, and Assistant Professor Cliff Lampe hope to give a green light to the site soon.
The delay has been a debate about when a citizen-powered and constantly changing wiki is ready. Poulson believes a better-designed site would engage visitors. Lampe thinks the site should launch before worrying about the aesthetics and the community can help resolve such issues. In the meantime, the directors hired a Web designer to come up with templates for the wiki, which now has a design similar to Wikipedia. They also hired a coder to implement design changes for all the content.
Students at the Michigan State University have provided the bulk of the content, with a special topics journalism class producing stories and structures for various areas of greatlakeswiki.org, such as Areas of Concern (on polluted regions), Ecology, Culture, Recreation, Commerce, Great Lakes Organizations and Geography. An investigative reporting class at MSU contributed a series on the Red Cedar River. Poulson and Lampe see students as an integral part in keeping the wiki up to date. In the spring semester, one student is overseeing development of the wiki as an independent study. Another class offered extra credit to students who participated.
Students used video and still photos with their stories, and linked to relevant mainstream news articles. Portals were designed for community contributions and several aspects are designed to coax public involvement, such as a section for Great Lakes vacation memories ; models for reporting on industries in the region; a section for information on Great Lakes artists, musicians and writers; and an in-depth exploration of one environmental area of concern that is a model for pages on other areas.
While Poulson and Lampe’s journalism students had a hard time with the concept of giving up editorial control of a wiki to citizens, some students from other disciplines wanted to push an environmental agenda. Activist interests may continue to be a concern. “A significant question is whether we can maintain some kind of journalistic integrity or whether we become a tool of biased activism,” Poulson and Lampe write. “The challenge is to engage the scientific, business and other communities in a way that creates a holistic report.”
Whether the wiki can attract a large enough community to add a steady stream of new content remains to be seen. The format has its limitations, too: Students were disappointed that Flash and other technology didn’t work on a wiki. “Another question is whether the wikiness - the ability for anyone to add content - outweighs those limits,” Poulson and Lampe write. They also need to expand the content beyond Michigan to reach the entire Great Lakes region, which spans eight states, from New York to Minnesota.
Only eight citizens attended a fall workshop in which students demonstrated the site and how to use a wiki. Poulson and Lampe note that the workshop was held on short notice after an announcement on a regional listserv. Here’s one page that shows how citizens can contribute to an entry: http://www.greatlakeswiki.org/index.php/Lake_Erie.
The project will concentrate on marketing next. But, despite little promotion thus far, Web surfers have found the site. One piece of evidence: Greatlakeswiki.org was vandalized with fake stories that chronicled a Godzilla attack, a new great lake uncovered in South Dakota and the danger of zombies as an invasive species. “To some extent, vandalism is a healthy sign for a site like this,” Poulson and Lampe write, “indicating that it’s attracting effort from a larger community.”
The Michigan State University professors heading the Great Lakes Wiki project spent the first months of their grant developing the class that is working on the project and encouraging the students to think outside the traditional journalism box.
The project is using wiki software to create reports and discussions on a host of environmental issues in the Great Lakes area. Students are publishing initial reports on the Web site, which is “semi-live” at greatlakeswiki.org, and citizen journalists will be encouraged to contribute. Lampe says that while anyone can log on, the wiki won’t be publicized until it’s more developed.
One interesting aspect of the class is that it pulls in students from other disciplines. Of the 13 students, seven have majors other than journalism, including economics, physics, fisheries & wildlife, and advertising.
Instructors Dave Poulson and Cliff Lampe hoped to get radically different ideas from their students, but it took some time to spark a new way of thinking. One hurdle: the contradiction of a J-school that discouraged students from using Wikipedia as a source but is now asking them to build their own Wikipedia on the Great Lakes. Poulson writes in an e-mail: “They (much like myself) have trouble letting go of control to non-traditional citizen journalists. That has evolved and I sense an excitement about ‘when are we going to unleash this thing so the world can have it’ mentality.”
This summer, project directors made one major change with student and community input: They decided not to use the 43 Great Lakes Areas of Concern as a framework for the wikis. It was determined that these areas, identified by U.S. and Canadian governments as toxic hotspots, involve chemical pollution and wouldn’t address a wide variety of environmental concerns and agendas. As the directors wrote in their progress report, “We want to build a broad concept of environmental issues that builds understanding among groups as diverse as politically conservative hunters and granola-crunching environmentalists.”
As part of the planning, the technological aspect has taken off. A project server, using Ubuntu Linux software, has been established. Open source software includes MySQL, PHP and Apache, and the project is using DekiWiki software, made available for free to the project by developer MindTouch Solutions.
Teams of students are interviewing citizens to compile stories, but also to get them to participate in the site. To foster a joint citizen-student effort, Poulson and Lampe invited leaders of Great Lakes organizations to speak to the class. Students have also explored the pros and cons of wikis, plus how to create one with editorial integrity and ensure it stays that way. They’re also learning a lot about environmental issues in the region and creating a marketing campaign for their wiki. One idea in the works: a workshop for the public on how to use the wiki.
Outside organizations have offered help. The Great Lakes Sea Grant program, with ties to both citizen and government groups, said it will reach out to citizens at Great Lakes conferences, and area J-schools are interested in participating.
Lampe has done some initial outreach to community and activist groups, and the plan is to increase such efforts late this fall as the site grows. Says Lampe of the initial positive, yet guarded, reaction to wikis: “One of my take-away points was to create simplified documentation for getting started on the site.”
Copyright © 2004-2005 J-Lab, a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
