Wondering who Russell Conwell was or how to pay your bill so your classes don’t get dropped?
Knowledge Base, a new Web site designed to answer all questions from members of the Temple community, might help.
The Knowledge Base focuses on answering questions related to helping students and faculty accomplish their daily tasks within the Temple community.
“In a way, you can think of the Knowledge Base as a managed wiki because it is intended that members of the Temple community share information that will be most useful for other Temple faculty, staff and students,” said technical support assistant Cynthia Gingrich.
The entire university recently gained access to the site. Staff and faculty of the School of Communications and Theater had access to the site for a few years prior to it being accessible university-wide.
“The project began about seven years ago as an internal system for faculty and staff in the School of Communications and Theater,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich said the managed wiki was open to the whole campus community, so people within Temple could seek answers to frequently asked questions, as well as to reduce the number of recurring questions.
“We currently have 575 published questions [in the system] and another 532 awaiting a review by a department before they can be published,” she said.
For questions that are not currently in the system, Knowledge Base contains a feature that allows users to enter specific questions to be routed to the appropriate department for answers.
New questions and answers are continuously being entered into the system.
“Despite our extensive efforts to anticipate questions from users, we will continuously be working with departments over time to make the system truly comprehensive,” Gingrich said.
Knowledge Base can be accessed from TUportal or from the Computer Services Help Desk Web site.
A Temple University Accessnet username and password are required in order to get on the site. Gingrich said login credentials are necessary because Knowledge Base is intended to be an internal system.
“We are working on an external part of the Knowledge Base specifically for parents, prospective employers for Career Center purposes and prospective students.”
Grace Dickinson can be reached at grace.dickinson@temple.edu.
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