Please Name Your Space Wisely

Choosing the name for your wiki space is very important. Please read our community guidelines here.

The big issue is that we all must share the space names. If you create a space named my-supercool-project, then no one else can use that name. Thus it's important to be reasonably specific with your name, so that other people won't feel like you've claimed too much territory with your name.

Also, you can pretty much name a space anything you like. Therefore we should establish some community norms, otherwise the names will be "all over the map."

So here are the guidelines:

• For your homepage on the system, please use your email address First-Last as your space name. Please note the use of a hyphen as a separator—you can't use underscore. These are necessarily unique because we all have unique email addresses.
• For a course, consider using the course number, but make sure to include the semester and year as a suffix, because you might not be teaching that course next time. Also note that you can't use the period in the name. So for example, you could use the name 91-450-fall07 for course 91.450 taught in the Fall 2007 semester.
• For projects that are primarily your own activity, please use First-Last-Project-Name. Or you could simply add pages to your own space.
• For projects that are shared across multiple faculty/staff, you can use the project name as the space name. An example would be a UML Center or Institute, or any collaborative project that is shared among a number of individuals. Please choose a name that's unique enough that no one else on campus -- who is not part of the project -- would want the same name. E.g., "Outreach" would probably be a bad name (unless you were in charge of a campus-wide outreach project). Math-Outreach or Computer-Science-Outreach would be better.

Why Would You Create a New Space vs. Add Pages to Your Existing Space?

The primary reason to create a new space is to give a different group of people edit privileges. For example, you probably do not want to give edit privileges to others on your home page. But for a course site, you might want to give edit privileges to your colleagues and/or students. So then you would want to create a separate wiki space for that course.