What’s this for?
This site is about what we can do to support students, teachers, and families at Graham Hill Elementary. Like many good things at our school, we all get to pitch in and help make it work. It’s about connecting, sharing information, and making good ideas happen.
What’s a wiki?
A wiki — that probably does bear some defining. According to Wikipedia, the world’s largest wiki site:
A Wiki (wĭ'kē) or (wē'kē) is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most content very quickly and easily.
The beauty of a wiki is that anyone can contribute content to the site; there’s no single editor or editors who choose what goes and doesn’t go. Instead, that’s done through the process of people making big and small additions, deletions, or modifications to existing and new pages. That means you, too!
This site is a customizable piece of the internet where the Graham Hill community can edit content, upload files, communicate and collaborate.
What can I do here?
Find out what’s happening. Check out the calendar. See PTA meeting agendas. Read the minutes.
Connect with other parents.
Sign up.
Work together.
Share your insights, tap into other perspectives.
How’s it different?
Graham Hill has some existing online resources, like this website, this other website, and this email group. Let’s not try to replace any of those. Instead let’s use the wiki to point people to those sources and to focus mostly on what the wiki does best.
Like an email group, a wiki can be a useful way to share information among parents, teachers or other members of a group.
Unlike an email group, a wiki shouldn’t clog your email box (though you can arrange to be notified of certain changes). It’s all visible to anyone, 24/7. The information you see here stays here, at least until someone comes along and changes it.
Just like a typical website, you can read, browse, search, and find information. Hopefully you find something interesting and useful. Ideally you find or propose something you’d like to make happen.
Unlike a website, you get to be an active participant. There’s no one person who calls the shots and writes all the material. If you find inaccuracies, you can change them. If your experience of the school isn’t represented, you can add it to the mix. Nothing is especially permanent, and changes are easily unmade.
Like a community, this wiki is what you make of it. Ideas and information might be hasty, inappropriate, cluttered, or disjointed. There can be conflicts among users in style or substance. There can be dialogue, compromise, and a level of tolerance for differences. Like a community, a wiki is basically just an experiment in connecting, getting along and working together.
What are the risks?
This is a loosely supervised public forum. Anyone can view it, and anyone can make changes. Thankfully the wiki medium doesn’t lend itself to spam, so spammers generally ignore it, and any wiki-graffiti is easily erased in any case.
This wiki caters to relatively small (but select!) user group, and blatant abuse is unlikely. A much bigger risk is that the Graham Hill community won’t find it or recognize its potential. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.
If you see a problem or anything here that makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re empowered to change it. Or send a note and spell out your concerns.
Ground rules & pointers
There aren’t many. Mostly, they’re the same norms that make for good community:
- Respect — allow for privacy and differences of opinion,
- Friendliness — please pay attention to the tone and content of your edits,
- Communication — work out conflicts, assume good faith, and remember that often there’s no substitute for connecting in person.
As you’re wiki editing, consider these points:
- Keep new draft pages under wraps ("orphaned": unlinked to other wiki pages) until you’ve got something you’re ready to share. That keeps clutter and confusion to a minimum.
- For time sensitive information, be specific about dates. “Next week” or even “August 7” can be confusing if content is left untended for a long time.
- Once you’re ready to share a page, attach it to its appropriate "parent" (usually one of the main pages in the “contents” drop-down list, above). Use the “options” > “parent” buttons at the bottom right.
- How will the page reach its intended audience? You might want to send people the page link via email. Ideally the wiki shouldn’t clog local emails, even indirectly.
- Be prepared to have other people edit your stuff — even those literary gems. It’s the way of the wiki.
How do I do this?
It’s pretty easy to edit the wiki. Hit the “edit” button at the bottom of the page — that opens an editor. You then enter or replace text. The editor’s toolbar is a handy way to adjust layout and to insert links. Read this simple how-to.. If you’d like more background, check out this resource. Otherwise, simple is good.
To take part, you're welcome to create a free Wikidot account, but you don't have to. Just click the "create account" link at the top of the page, and fill out the entries.
If you’d like more help with edits, check out the Wikidot community page, or send a help request and we’ll see what we can do.
