| This month Wikispaces
is featuring the Oaxaca Wiki edited by Planeta.com's Ron
Mader and friends.
Here is the interview from November 2012:
Ron Mader started the Oaxaca wiki in July of 2007.
Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it
to do:
The Oaxaca Wiki brings
together the fans of Oaxaca, Mexico. It's plurilingual
in approach and we measure progress slow step by slow step.
We bring together the visitors and the locals who edit information
about unique cultural and environmental aspects of Oaxaca in
multiple languages (starting with English and Spanish). We focus
attention on niche interests in travel and tourism, helping
guide the way for those interested in cuisine,
indigenous peoples,
cycling,
markets,
and a host of other topics. All travel is local when we learn
to listen to the locals.
The wiki format has worked wonders. Paraphrasing Benjamin
Disraeli: “The best way to become acquainted with
a subject is to wiki about it.”
Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your
favorite?
History. The ability to see and review revisions over time makes
the progress visible to all. Cheers to embedded transparency
and accountability! Second favorite: Embed a widget. This has
been so helpful in adding videos.
What is one way you're using wikis and other web 2.0
tools in your projects?
Creating events, including local workshops,
photo safaris
and grassroots fairs. To get people to interact requires collaborative
editing. The wiki has been a stellar platform.
Tell us about a particular moment that made you say,
“Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!”
The development of the Indigenous
Cuisine (Comida Indigena) menu. I simply print out the page
from time to time and show it to friends at local markets. The
conversations that this engenders is awesome. Likewise, we couldn't
create multiple language vocabularies without true collaboration.
Check out:
Santa
Maria Ocotepec (Ayuuk/Mixe)
Teotitlán
del Valle (Zapotec)
San
Pedro Tida'a (Mixtec)
If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would
say about you?
I think the wiki would exclaim how collaboration
is the key strength of my work. Even if the pages are not physically
edited by others, they show the steady development in a slow
conversation and reveal how valuable local knowledge is when
combined with global partners. This type of open
journalism encourages feedback that was unimaginable ten
years ago. That said, what we do in the next ten years depends
on our willingness to collaborate. The experiences online and
in face to face chats using this wiki has been fundamental in
developing collaborative skills among friends who share different
backgrounds, languages and interests.
This
article was originally published online Wikispaces and is
translated in Spanish on
the Oaxaca Wiki. |
