03 March, 2008

Wikinorthia Launched



WikiNorthia, a joint project between Darebin, Moreland and Yarra Plenty libraries, was launched last Thursday at Coburg Library by the President of the Library Board of Victoria, Mr John Cain. This initiative aims to collect and preserve the stories and images of this region’s colourful history and rich cultural foundations.

WikiNorthia uses social networking technology to publish people's stories in Melbourne’s north onto the world wide web. This is the first such project in Victoria and Australia, engaging people from communities across the five local council areas of Moreland, Darebin, Banyule, Nillumbik and Whittlesea. The aim is to engage and encourage people across the five municipalities to share their stories and by compiling people’s stories, photographs, even moving images, a profile will be built of life in Melbourne’s north.

The project was funded by the Library Board of Victoria , through a $50,000 Libraries Building Communities demonstration grant.

Ongoing training sessions will be offered to people who are interested in contributing their stories, memories and insights to the project through their local library. A reminiscence session will be held at Watsonia Library on Wednesday April 16 from 10.30 - 11.30 where library staff will help you record your memories of growing up in the northern suburbs.

I encourage you to have a look at the site, and please - feel very welcome to add your stories. We are looking forward to watching WikiNorthia grow!


6 comments:

Polyxena said...

Is Wikinorthia going to have RSS feeds? I can't find any on the site.

Anonymous said...

Very Cool. Congrats on launch of this exciting project and a great way for libraries to collaborate.

Mikea said...

Looks really good

Christine Mackenzie said...

Hi Polyxena
sorry to have taken so long to get back to you, but I now have a reply from the developers:

It is not a problem for us to insert a link to one of the feeds (eg new additions/edits). But they would be editorial feeds.

As such, the contents of the feed may not be relevant to a regular person and may, over time, annoy them (for instance as the site grows they are notified each time there is a new article or edit.)

To make the feeds a more positive experience it would be best if a module was created so that there was a mechanism to create and edit the content being fed. It would also be good if there was a holding area for news and announcements. The module would need to be ‘purpose built.’

That's outside the current scope, so we'll wait and see if others want it too.

Christine

Christine Mackenzie said...

thanks for the nice words Helene and Mikea!

Polyxena said...

Christine
I believe that this depends on where you pop the RSS feed - if someone selects an RSS on "all recent activity" the person will of course get every change. And they might want to. If you select a page you are interested and activate a feed, you will just get updates on that page.

I don't know about your particular platform, but there is an RSS widget that can be easily installed. With Wetpaint for example, my preferred wiki platform, you are given the option to install the RSS feed on each page as part of the easy edit option for the page.
PS I am not trying to critical; I think Wikinorthia is great and I just want to get feeds to it!