Comments from guy who wrote the NASApedia idea.
Comments from guy who wrote the NASApedia idea.
Hi. I am actually the guy who proposed the NASApedia idea on the openNASA page that was linked to on the page this talk page is from. I am thrilled to see someone (smallman12q!) has posted this on here. I work for NASA Goddard in Maryland doing Microwave Satellite Communication System Engineering. I started contributing to Wikipedia over a year ago (under the account wikipedia:user:nasa-verve) and made the connection that our branch does not retain knowledge very well and I could use a wiki to retain the knowledge. I started developing the wiki in house, and about 3 months later (last November) I was in a meeting with our director of engineering and the my wiki came up. Long story short, I ended up presenting an idea about deploying our wiki more broadly and the idea was accepted and fully funded. I started using Mediawiki at first, but needed software that had more enterprise functionality out of the box, so after some research I switched to Wikipedia:MindTouch wiki, which is actually orginally a derivative of the Mediawiki codebase.
Somewhere in here I was exploring Wikia and their new rich text editor and ended up emailing Jimmy Wales. The email is here.
Fast forward to now, I am switching careers and jobs at NASA to work on this Web 2.0, collaborative technologies as my new job! I am excited and I hope that in my new position I can actually facilitate NASA getting better at knowledge management and collaboration through innovative software, such as wikis. I have been talking with the coordinator of the openNASA initiative, Robbie Schingler (see his name here as the open gov rep) and we see eye to eye on some things about collaborating about topics. I really like the idea of collaborating with wikimedia -- especially since they birthed the idea in me for all this wiki stuff to begin with! Nasa-verve 05:37, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Hi Jon, Glad to have you on the wiki, Welcome to Wikimedia strategic planning. I read your proposal, it was an excellent suggestion, along the same lines as smallman's current proposal. I also mentioned that we should get in touch with you and see if you wanted to collaborate or offer any suggestion, I am very happy to have you on the wiki. Maybe you would consider joining the relevant task force, [1]. This was originally Smallman12q's idea here, I am sure he'll be delighted to have a discussion with you on how to proceed. I just wanted to point something out about the email you posted, another user also commented about this, you might need permission from the recipient to publish since they are considered confidential, also the IP addresses in the header might be private, you might want to edit those out in case they are private.
Looking forward to having further discussions with you.
I am indeed thrilled to see you come here Nasa-verve=D.
I too would like to see Wikipedia get a WYSIWYG rich text editor...something similar to wikias/mind touch. It would make it much more intuitive and nooby friendly.
My goal in the collaboration between NASA and Wikimedia is make some of NASA's content/expertise more available. NASA publishes thousands of fact sheets and other general summaries, many of which are of little use to the general public. What I'd like to see is NASA write some short quality wiki/encyclopedic entry summarizing their missions/events which could be more readily "consumed" by the public than 50-page pdf summaries and 10 page fact sheets. (There's also the case of redundancy in which wikipedia contributors have to go through and summarize what NASA has put out...I'm sure NASA could do a fairly good job if given the chance).
Aside from articles, NASA also publishes dictionary and acronym lists which could be used in Wiktionary.
Then there's media. Despite virtually all of NASA's work being in public domain, their media is so scattered among individual bases and sites, that virtually no one can find what their looking for.
There's also an idea about each mission/operation having its own wiki, which I too would support.
I do hope you can convince NASA to some type of collaboration with Wikimedia projects, it would bring great PR ^.^
The details for the collaboration still need to laid out, you're welcome to help out=D.
smallman12q:
here is another response from jimmy:
question: I'm the NASApedia guy who emailed you 5 months ago, still interested. It seems you are, see this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=346034789&oldid=346004536
answer: Yes, I'm interested, but I'm probably not the best person to talk to. You should email me at jwales@wikia.com but also cc: erik@wikimedia.org
Jimbo clearly supports this...but beyond moral support, not much has been done so far...
On the other hand, the wiki-like suggestions at Open Nasa appear to have gotten some support.
- NASA collaboration with Wikimedia-25 votes
- Projects, Missions and Branches Have Wikis-32 votes
- NASApedia-84 votes
The support appears to be there; so for now some formalization as to what approach will be taken should be made.