Workshop:
The New ICOM Wiki, new internet services for ICOM

Saturday 18th August 2007
16:00 P.M – 17:00 P.M.
University of Vienna
Room HS32, 1st Floor
Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Vienna (Austria)

The World Wide Web was developed during the early 1990s and had taken its
current form by 1994. At that time, several ICOM committees had already
begun distributing material via the Internet, and the central ICOM Web site
was formally inaugurated at the triennial conference in Stavanger in 1995.

In recent years, considerable effort has been spent developing ways to
permit the users of the Web not just to read material that is available on
it, but also to modify and add to it without requiring any software other
than a Web browser. There have been a number of differently named approaches
to this task but the one that is most widely implemented is termed a 'wiki'
(from the Hawaiian 'wikiwiki', meaning 'quick', also retaining the multiple
w's associated with the WWW). By far the most extensive wiki currently on
the Internet is the Wikipedia, a massive multilingual encyclopedia to which
any reader can also contribute, and one of the most widely used services on
the Web. The extent of the material it provides, as well as its language
diversity, is immediately apparent at http://wikipedia.org/.

The software that underlies the Wikipedia is freely available for use by
other organizations, and ICOM is currently establishing a wiki on that basis
for the use of its own committees. This will enable designated committee
representatives to provide news and information about their committees
directly on the Web without requiring the maintenance of a separate Web
site. (Although the Wikipedia permits anyone to edit the material it
contains, the ability to change material on a wiki can also be restricted.)

The ICOM Wiki will be presented at a workshop session during the Vienna
conference, on Saturday 18 August 2007, at 4 P.M., University of Vienna,
Room HS 32, Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Vienna (Austria). Prospective
contributors will be shown the basics of establishing and maintaining
separate areas for their committees, with particular emphasis on the ability
to present material in local languages. The workshop will therefore also
include a discussion of the use of scripts other than the Latin alphabet,
both for content and its identifiers – using so-called Internationalized
Domain Names, as seen at http://icom.museum/idn/. The workshop will also
cover material that is of general interest to committees that operate
autonomous Web sites.

If possible, there will also be an information desk open at other times
during the conference, where the ICOM Wiki will be demonstrated and explained.

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