BenningtonWiki:About
From BenningtonWiki
Contents |
[edit] Information wants to be free
This website is the continuously evolving effort of many people from many disciplines within the Bennington College community and its wider circles. It is a wiki, meaning that every student, staff person, and faculty member can change this website’s content or add to it at any time.
When you click “Edit” on any page, you can make changes or additions to that page, which everyone else will see. As currently configured, anyone and everyone is allowed to edit every page. Anonymous editing is allowed in order to support the varied uses of the community. (However if you intend to make a lot of contributions we encourage you to create an account.) This website is accessible on and off-campus, and is therefore editable by the global internet congregation.
With that being said, we, as a collaborative community, are confident that the information on this website is as reliable as that on any website and more open to diverse voices and perspectives than most. In order that it remains so the site’s interactivity is to be used freely and widely. As you move through it you may, in consequence of such openness, encounter content that surprises you or with which you don’t agree. That will be the sign that this website reflects life in our community in all its heterogeneous dimensions.
[edit] Some questions or concerns
If you have questions about the appropriateness or the functioning of this website, please feel free to email me at jholt@bennington.edu. I’d appreciate hearing from you.
[edit] Usage
Information about how people are using the wiki can be gleaned from these resources:
- Statistics shows a few high-level stats about pages, access and users.
- Recent changes lists recent changes to the wiki (it’s also available as a link on the left).
- Google Analytics is a glossy spread of wiki access stats. Very nice. Use the username bennington.wiki@gmail.com password btonwiki.
- Webalizer usage shows a lot of raw information about wiki usage. Updated twice a day.
[edit] History
The Bennington wiki was installed by me, Joe Holt, on January 27, 2006. I originally intended it as an experimental site for the Computing discipline, to be used for online resources, course syllabuses, assignments, etc. As its usefulness became apparent, I began promoting it to other faculty members and to students. Since then it has been embraced by the Bennington community as a forum and resource for its many varied interests and diverse intellectual pursuits.
In its year and a half of existence there have been only four incidents of defacement or abuse. The very first occurred six months after the wiki went live, when an anonymous editor changed a single instance of the word "course" to "horse" on the main page (in my Computing section, natch). I changed it back. The second instance occurred a few months later during a campus science talk when I added a playful, scurrilous comment about Betsy Sherman on the Sciences page to illustrate the ease with which pages are edited. The third and fourth instances occurred during a huge spike in wiki access in February 2007 when Computing's Home-made microprocessor had its 15 seconds of fame on the internet. Both cases of abuse were simple "select-all-delete" events that were easily fixed. In other words, among the 100,000 views over the years that this site has been active with an open editing policy there have been only three real cases of defacement or abuse. It should be noted that during the same period of intense interest in the microprocessor, a few technical errors were corrected by anonymous contributors.
