We’ve been running a Confluence Pilot [insert word that rhymes with ‘roject’] for the last couple of months to see if it would be a feasible tool to help departments within Information Resources, and potentially campus at large, collaborate on projects.
The other day, we caught wind that Confluence had been described in a meeting as the “Chicopedia”. Now I’ll be the first to admit that “chicopedia” is catchy, clever, and a great way of explaining to people that Confluence is a wiki by playing off the name Wikipedia. That said, it could potentially lead us into dangerous territory if not given proper context.
The term “wikipedia” can be split into “wiki” and “pedia”. The former being a collaborative editing environment and the later being a body of knowledge. In conjunction, they accurately describe the site Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia written by multiple authors in a collaborative environment. This is all fine and good.
However, applying that same dissection, the term “chicopedia” should mean “body of knowledge about Chico State”. This is applicable if you’re talking about a web page that talks about Chico State and it’s history but it’s not applicable when used to describe Confluence.
Confluence is not necessarily a “body of knowledge about Chico State” but rather a resource used by Chico State to collaborate within and between departments.
Why worry about this in the first place? To start, this pilot is less than 3 months old and still finding it’s feet. Right now it is important to manage expectations for what Confluence is and what Confluence can do. This enables us to increase the chances Confluence will be a successful and effective resource. We must not think of Confluence as a “magic bullet” solution for problems that Confluence was never meant to solve because we fear we’ll start to view Confluence as a failure.
We’d also like to avoid being too closely compared with Wikipedia and the “why doesn’t it look like this?” or “why doesn’t it work like this?” questions because they are two different products that have two different types of content and wildly different audiences. The similarities between Confluence and Wikipedia are that they both can be edited by multiple people. The similarities end there.
So please, try to avoid using the term “chicopedia”.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Tony // Jul 17, 2007 at 7:59 am
Well, I love Chicopedia. I about busted out laughing when I heard it referred to as such.
But, I feel your pain, so I’m going to help out by suggesting some replacement names.
IRESpedia: has the benefit of denoting that it’s IRES specific, but is otherwise forgettable.
Infopedia: Catchy, but hopelessly vague.
Nerdopedia: I kind of like this one. It made me chuckle, whatever that signifies.
Geekpedia: Descriptive, particularly to management types, but a bit clumsy.
Geekopedia: I think this one has legs. Catchy, descriptive… it’s got it all. (For some reason, FF’s spell checker thinks it’s a real word too.)
Of course, the Chicopedia is more wiki than pedia, so maybe including the word ‘wiki’ in the name would be better. Unfortunately, ‘wiki’ is like the worst word out there when it comes to concatenating it to other words. All my ideas there suck in a major way.
So I guess you’re on your own after all.
2 scott // Jul 17, 2007 at 8:39 am
Thanks for your support.
/deletes Tony’s Confluence account