Friday, June 09, 2006

New Wiki project

For a while I've been toying with an idea about setting up a wiki related to FOI, for the unitiated read the definition of a wiki, the most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, the editable encyclopedia.

The idea I've had is to create a wiki as a shell for people to put information for users of the Freedom of Information Act, such as contact details, websites, publication schemes, disclosure logs etc about all public authorities covered by FOIA and FOISA. I've only created the structure and I would rely on people (users and practitioners) to add details and amend them when neccessary. It will require sensible policing by the FOI community to work. I plan to run it as beta for a few months and see how it goes. If there are major problems with unsuitable comments and content I may change the way it has to work. Entries will be locked or removed if necessary. Note: This is a personal project not funded by my work at the University and is intended as an experiment at present.

The website runs the same software as Wikipedia called mediawiki, editing pages is relatively simple. Users will need to fill in new sections and structure as required looking at the examples already there.

The website is available at http://www.foi-directory.org/

An example entry: e.g the Cabinet Office and Liverpool City Council

Happy to take comments - and please do add some content to give me some feel as to how the project can take shape.

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