Grinnellwiki.com history

From GrinnellWiki

After the reunion of 2007, the 71-72-73 cluster was feeling really good and wanted the party to continue. There were a number of threads on the three individual class listservs and the discussion got very disjointed, so we decided to try to corral it all in a discussion forum format. This worked well for the 80 intrepid voyagers who ventured into “Grinnell '70's Conversations--A place to visit.” We had profitable discussions about service projects, politics, bumper stickers, whether to cluster for the 40th reunion and other topics of interest to our generation from September 2007-May 2008. However, this format did not lend itself to “archival” writing as painfully illustrated by a very nice write-up on a service project two clustermates did in Mississippi. We thought about the forum and decided we needed a wiki. Thus, www.grinnellwiki.com was born in 00:05 5April 2008.

Meanwhile, a group of students came up with the idea of a Grinnell wiki and got funding from the Student Programming Committee. As they were discussing the wiki, they discovered the url had been taken out from under them. The student cohort figured out the alumni were using “their site” and contacted the alumni cohort. After the introductions, we quickly decided to join forces.

Over the following months, the students and graybeards worked to learn how to write and begin to bring order to the site by developing categories, and discussing rules of the site. Other behind-the scenes administrative work was done by Wikiheads, notably Mike O’Connor, who researched and implemented various capabilities so we could develop pages that include pictures, footnotes, and other niceties.

After working out "enough" of the kinks, the wiki was announced to the Grinnell community in August 2008.

The history of our wiki is mostly yet to be written, so, dear Grinnellians, please start filling the wiki with articles you want there. Pull an all-nighter! Scour your archives for material! Write on!

1 Design and Format
2 Publicity
3 What's with the Green Droopy Leaves in the upper left-hand corner?
4 Other Grinnell Online Services Not Affiliated with the College

Design and Format

As the nascent site evolved, the wikiheads decided several things:

1. The site should look like Wikipedia and other familiar wikis to appear familiar to readers/editors.

2. The site should have necessary features to allow full content (uploading pictures, for example)

3. We should encourage building from the bottom up. Discourage grand title pages with no content. Encourage small nuggets that can later be aggregated into a larger categories.

Publicity

The wiki was publicized by Grinnell College in its on-line "Grinnell Connect" publication, May 2009. The article, The GrinnellWiki, was written by Terry Nelson-Littlejohn '70. An excerpt:

What is your favorite SAGA story? Have you ever wondered why the class of 1970 did not have a traditional commencement ceremony? Or what ever happened to Blair Hall? What year did Jefferson Airplane play at Grinnell? www.grinnellwiki.com is the place to go for answers. You'd best search your name … you never know!

What's with the Green Droopy Leaves in the upper left-hand corner?

This design was first used by Mike O'Connor ('72) as his very own alternative Tee-shirt for the 2007 reunion. Any similarity to official Grinnell logos, living or dead, is purely coincidental. We also leave it to the readers' imagination to draw inferences from the green droopy leafy look of this logo.