WikiCandidate Project 2008

Another note to say that WikiCandidate was featured on the news and public affairs program, Capital Tonight this evening.  We’ll post a link to the story here when it becomes available.  Also, if you saw the program and you’re visiting the site for the first time, take a moment to meet our illustrious development team—we can never give them enough credit for all they’ve done to put this site together.

Just a note to say the Chronicle’s Website ran an article on WikiCandidate today.  Take a look!

Here’s a quick primer.  You may have noticed that the front page of the WikiCandidate website is one of the only pages on the site that’s not directly editable by users.  So, how does the content on the front page get there?

The top stories on the front page are always the two most recent news items.  There’s only one exception to this rule—and that’s if the body of a news item is left blank.  News articles without body text will still appear in the news section of the site, but they won’t appear on the front page.

As our last message suggests, the site has experienced a few technical difficulties in the last 24 hours as it’s begun to receive large amounts of traffic.  At the same time, we’re happy to report that the majority of the site infrastructure we’ve built here works, and will continue to work.  We’re rapidly working to repair those aspects of the site design that have proven less robust.  As we do so, here’s what you should know:

1. We’re thrilled that the site is becoming popular and we want to invite you to continue to contribute, even as we conduct repairs.  Your contributions will be preserved through the process.
2. During this (hopefully brief) period some features may temporarily become unavailable. If a feature goes down, or a particular article is unavailable for editing when you visit, we want to assure you that the situation is not permanent, and that we are working on the problem.
3. If you find bugs, or apparent breakages on the site, you can help us by reporting them.  Please use the site’s contact form or the forums here on the research site to tell us about a problem.
4. Occasionally, an article may become temporarily unavailable during repairs.  We want to assure you that we are actively backing up the database and will restore any affected articles to the live site when repairs are complete.

Thanks again for all your contributions!  There’s been a lot of exciting and constructive user activity on the site in the last two days, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

Traffic is a double-edged sword.  While it may be the lifeblood of a website, it can also bring a site to its knees.  Today, WikiCandidate is experiencing both effects.  The development team is working on fixing the bugs that the added traffic has uncovered.  We hope to have the site fixed and fully operational again shortly.  Thank you all for your patience.

A few announcements:

1. We are aware that the edit feature on the bio page went down briefly today.  It’s been repaired.  You still need to be logged in to edit the page—otherwise it may appear locked.
2. The site has received a welcome spike in traffic and contributions in recent days, thanks to articles in New Scientist and the AFP newswire.
3. The research team presented WikiCandidate, at the Politics: Web 2.0 conference in London today.  Thanks to all the people who attended the panel—your questions and insights were excellent and much appreciated.

After many hours of hard work on the part of our development team, the new WikiCandidate template is up and running today.

You can check out the previous post for more information on the site’s new features.

If you want to celebrate, here are three things we’d love for you to do:

1. Please edit the site to help make WikiCandidate better!
2. If you find a bug in the new interface, please let us know!
3. After you’ve played with the new site, please tell us what you think!

Thanks for your help and enjoy the new and improved campaign site!

Sincerely,

The WikiCandidate Team

You may have noticed a few changes to the site recently, like more easily accessible profile pages and other usability features here at WikiCandidate.  As usual, the developers have been hard at work behind the scenes.  And pretty soon, they’ll be unveiling some major upgrades to the site that will include a brand new look, improved ease-of-use, new community-building tools for users, and more ways to contribute to the research effort.  This post is intended to give you a first look at some of the new functionality.

A Brand New Look.  Despite our best efforts, ’til now parts of the site have looked much more like Wikipedia than a Presidential campaign site. The site’s new skin will preserve the wiki functionality you know and love, while introducing a slick new campaign-site style.  At the same time, we’ve made it a bit easier to find your way around and identify ways to contribute to the site.  Here’s a snapshot to give you an idea.  It’s still under development, so it’s not complete, it’s filled with placeholder text, and there may be a few visual glitches, but it should give you a notion of where we’re headed:

Community Building Tools. Soon you’ll be able to add your blog and your favorite websites to WikiCandidate’s blogroll.  We’ve also been gradually introducing ways of featuring our users, like adding bylines to articles and improving the functionality of user profile pages.  We’ll continue to add these sorts of features so users can better get to know one another and hold more discussions on the site.

More Ways to Contribute.  Soon, if you like, you’ll have the opportunity to answer survey questions posed by the researchers on the site.  Some of these may help those of us on the research team to improve the site further, and others may simply help us to get a better handle on the pros, cons, and day-to-day realities of the unconventional form of civic participation in which our users are engaging.  In the future, we also plan to introduce a whole new space for users to contribute: the gear pages, where you’ll be able to post your campaign designs, from bumper stickers to t-shirts.

We hope you’ll be back to see all these new features in action.  In the meantime, if you’re inspired to start contributing, the live version of the site beckons.  If you have thoughts, questions, or concerns about the upcoming design changes, hop on over to the research site forums and let us know!

As you may have noticed, the WikiCandidate site has gotten a bit of a facelift in recent days, with new (Creative Commons licensed) buttons, courtesy of Ken Saunders, and a new blog feed that trolls the web looking for mentions of the WikiCandidate campaign.

As always, though, with upgrades may come bugs. We’re very open about this, and we’ll try to keep you abreast of any troubles to the site code that may affect your user experience. Check here for news from the developer team. They’ll be posting news and updates about the technical and design aspects of the WikiCandidate website. Just look for the development icon featured in this post! (Courtesy of Everaldo Coelho, GNU LGPL)

To scan past development news, check out the “Development” tab above. And to discuss bugs, and other technical/design issues with the site, hop on over to our our tech message board, which you can find any time by clicking the “Forum” tab above. The forum also has message boards for discussing the research effort on the site, and other miscellaneous issues. Thanks, as always, for participating in WikiCandidate!

Welcome to the brand-spanking new WikiCandidate site. Like what you see? Have suggestions for how to improve it? We want your help! Here are some things you can do to help with the development of the site and with the research effort:

• Check out the Action Page on the WikiCandidate site.
• Log the site on StumbleUpon and other recommender sites.
• Visit the WikiCandidate Project forum and give your comments and suggestions on how to improve the site.
• Join the various social networking groups of which WikiCandidate is a part:
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

With your help, WikiCandidate will be a fun online community, an engaging political discussion, and a great research project. Thanks so much for stopping by!