Jo Procter in Public Affairs reports that the Senior Profiles from the excellent OnCampus magazine (distributed at Commencement and Reunion) are available on-line. Great stuff. My favorite is on WSO impressario Evan Miller.

Evan took on ever-larger projects for the site, including a list of campus student organizations. He also rewrote the campus facebook. His senior year he founded Willipedia, the Williams answer to the Web’s Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors around the world.

“Initially I started because I found this cool piece of software out there that happened to power the Wikipedia,” he said. “So this year I got that organized and started writing some articles. I thought other people could contribute to it, too — mainly things like students guides to hiking or climbing trees.”

With others he organized a governing board for Willipedia, in case there were conflicts over submitted entries. “You need some sort of moral authority to step in there and decide the way it’s going to be,” he said. “Fortunately there haven’t been too many incidents where they’ve been necessary, although there have been a couple important ones.”

That’s me! There was a sometimes heated discussion at Willipedia about what belongs in the Campus Controversy section. Evan and I have different views on this topic.

It is not clear if the stated policy is actually enforced.

If you think that someone involved in the topic you’re writing about would prefer to go unnamed, grant them that courtesy. Mindfulness of others’ identities is necessary for Willipedia to have a strong base of contributors, and we must respect this both in how we write and in what we choose to write about.

The great majority of Willipedia topics are innocuous, and writers may cover these to the fullest extent of their knowledge. Other topics, that concern individuals of the Williams community who are likely not to want to be named in them (eg. some Pranks and Campus Controversies), must either be written without naming the names or left to media other than Willipedia.

If you, with permission, include another person’s name in a way that other editors may find questionable, note that you had the person’s permission in your edit summary or on the talk page.

Perhaps I am naive, but I am pretty sure that Professor Aida Laleian would prefer that this page did not exist.

In any event, Willipedia is great stuff. Kudos to Evan for everything he has done over the last 4 years to make Williams a better place. He will be missed.