It’s just a handful of weeks before our wiki pilot project is launched and we are all busy working towards the big day.
Several videos that accompany some of our articles are being prepared and uploaded to YouTube, We are starting to select our photos as well, and this is likely to be the main activity over the next week or two. These will be progressively uploaded to Flickr, ready for linking to articles on the wiki.
Most of our first batch of articles have nearly completed their many revisions and only a few remain to be further expanded and edited. As with most things at the museum, when you start on something it invariably leads to a whole host of other activities. Certainly, as we have been revising our articles for the wiki, many more ideas for new stories keep popping up, and it’s not as if we don’t have a multitude of stories already queued up to add to the site. I can see that we could easily be adding articles for the foreseeable future, without ever running short of material. That’s the nature of research into the past, and one of the exciting things about our wiki project. I look forward to the comments and contributions that come from visitors to the wiki, and the many new articles that I am sure will arise as a result.
The blogs are coming along, with the museum blog well underway, and ‘correspondents’ approached to supply the other blogs. It is hoped to have blogs from Dublin History Group, the District Council of Mallala, A Mallala sports report, and Mallala Primary School, as well as our own. These will all be accessible from the wiki front page, as well as feeds from our local papers.
The planning for the launch event is also well underway, and we are pleased that the task has been taken on by the Collections Council, allowing us to concentrate on the content for the site.
We are all eagerly anticipating the day the new wiki goes online, as we become more aware of the possibilities of the technology, and the opportunity to present the stories in our museum in such a new and collaborative manner.
