content management

[William J Poser]

I have worked for the Linguistic Data Consortium, which produces
data and other materials for industrial and intelligence computational
linguistic projects. The LDC makes fairly extensive use of a wiki.
The software used is MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org). This is
free software, the same software that underlies Wikipedia.

You can see some of the LDC pages by starting at:
http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/LCTL/
(There are also restricted pages for internal use only.)

The wiki is used for two main purposes. First, to record progress
as a project progresses, including notes on the resources found/created
and urls of where they are located. Second, for web harvest sessions,
where a bunch of people all search the web for resources for a particular
language. In this case, each section usually has one team member in charge.
If somebody else happens to encounter a resource outside his or her
assigned area, he or she will email the person in charge of that section.
After the harvest sesssion, someone will clean up the whole thing,
neatening it up and eliminating redundancies.

I'm not aware of any problems with this software - it seems to work
quite well and is used for projects of some complexity. My only
caveat would be that the people using it are generally sophisticated
computer users - it is possible that unsophisticated users might
find it more difficult, though no particular problems come to mind.

Bill