During the seventh HCI class, I presented the Helpsite and KMT to the group in brief, giving an overview of the goals of Knowledge Management team and the structure of the tools. I asked the group to participate over the following weeks by using the KMT to contribute documents and provide feedback on their experience with the UI.

One of the points I tried to make followed up on our discussions of the essential problem of wikipedia- how to allow for community-based contribution without sacrificing the quality of the content? In the case of the KMT, I argued that overly-strict quality controls in our original design created a bottleneck that was reducing the freshness of the knowledgebase and the usefulness of the tools.

Reflections on last week: Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia presentation: do we need authorities to determine what information is "correct"? What will happen to wikipedia down the road, when Jimmy isn't around anymore?

What happens down the road when somebody tries to license and commercialize the site? do people get back revenue?

NC state is using the wiki software to create a wiki for their agriculture extensions;

how does wikipedia keep users from plagiarizing other sources for their entries; Gary points out that technology is getting better for detecting plagiarism.

Reflections on last week: Cathy Marshall

academic blogs are allowing premiere researchers to "self-publish" and have their site used as references for others.

"how does one develop scholarship into a career?" – talent, networking, etc.

Gary, on the Library of Alexandria: "they were more like a university than a library- they were thieves." (taken out of context)

concept of studying how users turn pages- how can this be relevant to facilitating reading?

With digital/web navigation, it is traditionally hard to develop navigation that is intuitive to users.

Giving users a "lookahead" feature helps them not follow false paths in navigation

tree-structured navigation limited linking options based on what you've seen before; the user must complete one stage to get the options for the next.

KMT presentation

After presentation, Gary set this as an assignment for everyone- to log in to the KMT, create a document (I reccomended an FAQ) and submit it for publication.