David Dehghan's blog : Social Computing

Shortening URLs on MSWiki for better search engine ranking

DavidDehghan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:17:00 GMT

There is extensive documentation on Mediawiki on how to shorten the urls from www.yoursite.com/index.php?title=testpage to www.yoursite.com/testpage. After a few hours of research I was able to do just that on my Windows Server 2003 and IIS. It is probably wise to follow the URL pattern of wikipedia exactly so that in future software updates of Mediawiki your site will not break your site accidentally. The more customization you do to your site the more likely is that the development team on Mediawiki will not be testing your specific settings and will not be taking your modifications in mind as they write new code. So it will be safer to mimic wikipedia url pattern: www.yoursite.com/wiki/articlename

I have put this text on MSWiki so that it can evolve: http://mswiki.com/wiki/Short_URLs_for_better_search_engine_ranking

Step by step guide

URL Rewite

Install URL rewite for IIS
Download the zip file and unpack it somewhere on your server outside of wwwroot
Give Network Service account write privileges to above directory.
Configure the ISAPI ini file like below. Debug 1 will cause debug output to be written which will help you troubleshoot problems. Reload 5 means that the ini file will be reloaded at every 5 url redirection. This saves you from resrtting IIS every time you change this file.

Debug 1
Reload 5
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

On the command prompt type iisreset +<enter>. Your re-director should be working now. Test it by navigating to www.yoursite/wiki/Main_Page.

Mediawiki settings

Modify MediaWiki localsettings.php to look like below. This will cause internal links on the page to also be shortened

$wgScriptPath     = "";
$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath      = "/wiki/$1"

'Security Step' If everything is working now then revoke the write permission from Network Service where you saved your ISAPI filter. Then change the ISAPI ini to look like this

Debug 0
Reload 5000
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

Some pages on your site will be cached by PHP or IIS and will still have the old style URLs. But eventually, with time or with editing of pages, the files in cache will be replaced.
The old style URL will be present for non existing pages. I think this is a bug in MediaWiki software. Even wikipedia has this problem.

An interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder

DavidDehghan — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:28:00 GMT

The interview on C-span.

Some interesting points that I can very much relate to based on my experiences with http://www.wsuswiki.com and http://www.mswiki.com

Contributors to Wikipedia:

3000 authors that contribute more that 100 edits a month.
There are set of even more active users that make 1000s of edits a month which bar far, contribute the majority of the content on the site.
Wikipedia is ranked 40th on Alexa.

Who are the authors:

Smart friendly people with targeted knowledge. He really emphasized the idea of being a social person and enjoying collaboration with other people to create new content.
People who feel great for contributing to a great cause of documenting the human knowledge.

Amazon introduces Product Wiki

DavidDehghan — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:27:00 GMT

A good move by amazon. They have created a wiki page for each of the items in their catalog. Research has shown that anything mentioned by independent sources about an item will increase customer confidence in that item. Even if the comment is negative.

Items with user comments on Amazon simply sell more. Many people read negative comments about a product or a vendor and simply dismiss it because they don't relate to the author. So if you can get people to say something about your product, anything really, it will increase your sales.

Customer comments are one way, wiki is another. They are complimentary.

A cool way of extending google map

DavidDehghan — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 05:43:00 GMT

I was just listening to Tim OReilly's talk at MySQL conference. Here some cool sites he mentioned.

Google Map Craig's list http://www.housingmaps.com/
New visualization model Baby name: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Golden rules of building Wiki community trust

DavidDehghan — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 05:01:00 GMT

Here are some of my key leanings from the past few years of working with wiki communities. I will write more about each of these points in the future posts.

Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user.
Promote your active users to roles of greater and greater responsibility. Make them administrators, content police, editors, spellcheckers etc.
Create a space where all users can add value. Extract value form everyone: your readers, technical experts and language experts and the silent majority.
Design for participation. Simple interface, easy to use.
Don't enforce social norms with software .
Help the community define and evolve rules of cooperation.

The Hole-In-The-Wall experiment

DavidDehghan — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 01:42:00 GMT

The Hole-In-The-Wall experiment is one of the most amazing studies that show the ingeniousness of children. In 1999, Dr Mitra setup a computer with internet connection in the slums of India and watched childrenâ€™s interaction with the computer. Only the monitor and the touch pad mouse was exposed to public though a hole in the wall in a public street. Dr Mitra then video taped peopleâ€™s interaction with the â€thingâ€™ through a camera mounted to a tree across the street. Soon enough children discovered the computers and started to play with it. Without any instructions whatsoever the kids were able to discover MSPaint and start drawing and coloring. Childrenâ€™s discoveries were astonishing, One day Dr. Mitra discovered that the kids had saved a document on the desktop that had the words â€œI LOVE INDIAâ€ in it. He could not figure out how this document was created given the fact that the computer had no keyboard. Eventually one of the local boys showed him how it was done: The boy used the character map in Word to individually pick the letters and then increased the font size and colored the letters one by one. The kids had learn all this on their own.

They had no concept of files and programs. They had simply noticed that if they dragged and drop an mp3 icon on Windows Media Player icon music would start to play from the â€thingâ€™. They had no idea that the â€thingâ€™, as they called it, was a computer. They invented their own names for different things. They called mouse pointer sui, hindi for needle; they called the hourglass mouse pointer damru, hindi name for drums.

The fact that the computer interface was in English was not a hindrance to the kids at all. They were able to navigate internet and find and download hindi music mp3s. All this knowledge was passed through word of mouth between the kids.

The story of the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment has been out for a few years. You can find our more about it from here http://www.niitholeinthewall.com

Influence vs popularity

DavidDehghan — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:15:00 GMT

Weblogs and Authority is an interesting way of deducing the influence that a blogger has on the blogging community versus his or her popularity.

Unique traits of Wiki

DavidDehghan — Wed, 19 May 2004 06:55:00 GMT

Here are some interesting points from Ward Cunningham's talk at Social Computing Symposium

Unique traits of Wiki:

It establishes a community standard for acceptable quality.
It is easier to clean up damage in Wiki than creating it thereby Wikis discourages vandalism.
In wikis you don't ask questions. You offer the information that you have and let people complete it and fill the gaps.

We are just data processing nodes

DavidDehghan — Mon, 17 May 2004 09:51:00 GMT

Notes from Neville Brody's talk at Microsoft. (He is a renowned graphic and brand designer)

The new information system [Internet, mail, blogs, etc] is forcing to act as data processing nodes. We process information and forward it to other nodes. The trend is toward faster and faster information generation and processing. However this information processing is fairly exhausting for our body and mind. At the end of the day we go home and we are exhausted. But then, when we look back at a day's worth of activity we don't see what we have accomplished with all the mental work.

Personalization is all about making us into more efficient information processing nodes.