Almost every student at Hopkins is familiar with the vastly popular Internet tool known as Wikipedia. Its wide database of knowledge, created and edited by users, is an invaluable tool as a quick reference guide and starting place for more formal research. Unfortunately, Wikipedia can't help me decide on the best place around Hopkins to get my hair cut, or how to get textbooks cheaply instead of buying them through the college bookstore. However, some students at Hopkins have been working on changing this for some time now.
Meet Asheesh Laroia, a computer science master's student who also graduated from Hopkins in 2006 with a degree in cognitive science. Before coming to Hopkins, he had been interested in social software such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known example of social software. In general, social software allows greater communication through computers and other digital means. At its most broadly defined level, social software can include things such as instant messaging, chat rooms and multiplayer online games.
During his freshman year, he and the other members of his hall, Lazear in AMR II, were disappointed with the lack of decent hosting sites to share photos. Asheesh created a pseudo-Wiki for his hall, though its main purpose was for everyone to share photos. This early experience was one of the inspirations for a wiki for the Hopkins community, dubbed JhuWiki.
Laroia began to think about all of the common information that students needed. The school provided plenty of information about academics, but there was a large gap when it came to educating the campus, especially incoming students, about what was needed to get by on a college campus. This information included what restaurants in the local area were great deals, when postal hours were available and where to find ATM machines. More important at this point, the university did not offer housing to upperclassmen. However, due to the busy schedule inherent in attending Hopkins, students were unable to devote enough research to finding new housing until they were pressed for time. Wikipedia was supposed to consolidate information for those students searching for an apartment for the first time. Laroia was a member of the now defunct Student Technology Advisory Committee. He proposed the idea of a university wiki to both this group and the Resident Advisory Board. Neither group expressed much interest.
Undaunted, Laroia and another Hopkins student, Christopher Chan, began building the backbone of the wiki. It was originally hosted by the IT department. However, Asheesh was doing research on a security flaw in the now-obsolete Fester program sponsored by the IT department. As Laroia prepared to present the data, the IT department contacted him about the security research, and was very angry that someone was examining the issue. In fact, their initial response was, according to Laroia, "What the hell are you doing?" After initial draconian threats such as banning his JHED account, the department instead banned all of Laroia's web-hosting accounts on IT, and he was unable to ever register again. Even today Laroia does not have his old access. Perhaps most interesting about this is that the IT department knew of the security flaw and had done nothing about it. However, the Hopkins chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery agreed to host the JhuWiki after hearing about Laroia's problem. Laroia was able to obtain an old junk computer in which it was housed. Later, David Haldane, currently a senior at Hopkins, donated a nicer computer. Today, the Web site is now hosted on a computer obtained through a grant from the Digital Media Center.
When doing initial research on creating JhuWiki, Laroia was unable to find any other college that had its own student-run wiki. Today however, several other colleges, including Case Western and Williams, have wikis of their own to assist students in acclimating to their new environments. At the time, Laroia was breaking new ground in the social software environment.
Currently, JhuWiki can be found at: http://wiki.jhu.edu. Perusing it, you will find several key articles with information about the campus and living in Baltimore, from health center information to where to shop. You will, however, notice that a few links contain outdated information. This is the one major flaw of social software. It is only as good as its users. The more people who utilize the service and share their own great tips and little-known knowledge about how to make living at Hopkins enjoyable, the more powerful the database becomes. If you want to put up information about a sorority, fraternity, club or organization that you're a member of, go ahead. It's the ability of a wiki to evolve into what the users want that makes it such a dynamic program. The site is easy to contribute to, really only requiring basic computer knowledge. Talking to Laroia, this is probably his greatest regret about the Web site. "It's too bad that the wiki hasn't become as popular as I thought it would. There is still strong undergraduate interest, however," Laroia said. "We [the ACM] passed out flyers promoting the wiki at the Student Activity Fair ... and I've also had an undergraduate student work on some administrative duties for the Web site." However, the knowledge contained within it is already rather well developed, and reaches a fair number of students every year since its inception.
If you have any other questions about the wiki, feel free to contact Laroia at asheesh@jhu.edu.
