MoHopedia
From MoHopedia
MoHopedia is a project aimed at bringing a user-editable wiki platform to the members of Mount Holyoke College. Mount Holyoke College is one of the Five Colleges in the Massachusetts Pioneer Valley. Being accessible to the students, staff, and faculty of the college, it is hoped that MoHopedia will play an increasingly central role as an information repository for anything and everything related to Mount Holyoke.
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What can I do with MoHopedia?
First things first, make sure you have an account! Any student, staff person, or faculty member is allowed to join. Please use only your Mount Holyoke username to log in! In the future, it is planned to remove the need to register for MoHopedia, at which point you can simply use your standard username and password that you use for any other Mount Holyoke College information service, such as webmail. In the meantime, though, please register for MoHopedia only with this username to ease account transition at a later date.
Once you have a username, go ahead an create a new page for yourself, your friends, teachers, courses, anything you wish! Or find a preexisting page you feel compelled to add to, and edit away! In addition for simple article creation, editing is as easy as writing in a word processor. In contrast to writing in so-called "wikitext" which is the only option for large, well-known wikis such as Wikipedia, the administrator of MoHopedia has gone an extra step and installed familiar editing tools to lower the barrier to entry for participation of this project.
Members of Mount Holyoke College can also upload files to share information related to academics, images of people or places, or audio and/or video recordings of courses and events. MoHopedia encourages egalitarian access and participation across each and every student, staff and faculty member. By lowering the barriers to entry for participation in this project, MoHopedia can not only grow faster than any previous information source for Mount Holyoke, but given time can easily come to surpass the quality of any more-established sources.
History
MoHopedia was conceived of by Andrea Ponce Del Valle and Jose Fuentes, two students from Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke College, during the spring 2008 semester.MoHopedia as a digital platform was not created until another Hampshire student and administrator of Hampedia Niko Kern installed and configured the wiki software, scripting toolset, and database engine onto his server, ornia. MoHopedia launched on June 30th, 2008 when Niko finished inital configuration of all the server software involved. It is from Ornia at Hampshire which MoHopedia runs, although pending the growing popularity of the project, it is quite likely that it will move on Mount Holyoke campus an unspecified amount of time in the future.
Relationship to Hampedia
MoHopedia shares many characteristics with it's larger sibling project, Hampedia.
Because Jose Fuentes from Hampshire and Andrea Ponce Del Valle from Mount Holyoke Co-Founded Mohopedia, both Mohopedia and Hampedia hold similar qualities. It is wise to mention that this project could not be possible without the great technical skills of Niko Kern; the administrator for both Mohopedia and Hampedia. There will generally be an attempt to keep both digital platforms feature compatible. Any additional functionalities added on to one wiki will exist in the other. This feature compatibility is largely due to the compatibility of both projects in their nature as wikis, and their technological composition adapted to the needs of the students in small liberal arts colleges.
Technological Makeup of MoHopedia
MoHopedia currently runs on ornia, a server owned by Niko Kern. For information on the composition, history, and other background of the ornia project, please see that page. This section gives a general overview of the software used to power MoHopedia for informational purposes. On ornia, the traditional LAMP stack is emplyed to power MoHopedia, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
The operating system running underneath everything is a distribution of GNU+Linux, one called Debian GNU/Linux. Linux is the name of the kernel in this operating system, Apache is the name of the web server (the single most popular web server on the Internet), MySQL is the name of the database software which stores user information and articles among other things, and PHP provides the scripting language which yields dynamic interaction with the wiki software. On top of the LAMP stack runs MediaWiki, the same wiki software which Hampedia and Wikipedia use, among countless other wikis on the Internet.
Support
If any technological issues arise, or support is needed in MoHopedia's use, feel free to contact Niko Kern via e-mail or other methods. Also, MoHopedia is meant to be participatory as much as possible, so Niko is also open to suggestions about which features or extensions would be an improvement for the functionality and ease of use to most benefit everyone involved in the project, and by extension Mount Holyoke College.
