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Wiki Lecture

What Is A Wiki

Interesting Developments

• Original fame was due to collaboration capability.
  • "Instant" website for motivated users.
  • Often had a discussion board quality.
  • Revision histories highly valued.

• Second (lesser) hurrah as applications and tools were hosted on it.
  • Knowledge bases
  • Help departments
  • Design and review of projects

• Third cycle of popularity
  • Embraced by corporations and user communities
  • Popular conceptual mutations! For example, relaxing the need for collaboration, but keeping the rest of the wiki concept, led to the personal, or notebook, wiki idea.

• Wiki is used to host all kinds of web sites
  • Intranets, commercial sites, educational sites, personal home webs
  • Sometimes, it isn't even obvious that the site you're on is a wiki

To Be Fair

To be fair, not all is perfect in the wiki universe.* Like most tech, there's always some bad that comes with the good. A brief list of common complaints against wiki:

• Ease of collaboration → Ease of defacement
  • Addressed with revision history (rollback), blacklists, access control

• Wiki are sometime seen as "Too Democratic", since one person can dominate a set of topics.
  • Usenet tried solving this with moderators.
  • Despite fighting human nature here, tools like user registration can help manage it.

• Too much access control tends to suppress open content and sharing model.
  • Some of the best contributors to your site are people you don't know yet.
  • Google, A9, and Yahoo will connect interested users to your web.

• Every wiki tends to reinvent wiki syntax.
  • Yup, me too.
  • Example: convolve(a,b) ← =convolve(a,b)= vs. {{{convolve(a,b)}}}

* Surprise.

Focus: Personal Wiki

No single name for this phenomenon: personal wiki, notebooks, wiki pads...

The idea is simple: instead of requiring a web server (and sometimes a net connection), use "something else" that embodies wiki style markup and fast content growth. You trade the ease of collaborating with others for the ease of personal use. The better tools still allow for publishing with various "export" features.

Before these tools existed, the common approach was to run a wiki on a notebook computer on top of a web server. All editing and viewing would be handled through http://localhost/... URLs. Fortunately, we have better tools these days for doing the same thing.

Good examples of this:

• Windows XP: wikidPad
• Mac OS X: VoodooPad
• Emacs: emacs-wiki mode
• Firefox: TiddlyWiki

Focus: Personal Wiki

Using a personal wiki will, sooner or later, lead you to realize what's commonly called "Wiki On A Stick". This is an especially handy way to manage your notes, assignments, research notebooks, and so on.

Why is a wiki so well suited to notebooks? Separation of info into topics, instant linking between those topics, potential linking (placeholders) for future topics and content.

1. Choose a neutral wiki platform, like TiddlyWiki
2. Store your wiki on a USB key. Put a copy of Firefox on it, too; in fact, put multiple copies of Firefox on it (Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD).
3. Realize that any computer you can touch is now your editor's chair. Slap your key into the machine, and you're off.
4. When you're done, grab your key and go. Leave nothing behind.
5. Bask in the über-geek glow as you watch everyone else FTPing their docs back and forth, hither and yon, over the network. "Which version is this?" "Which folder did I put the latest copy in?" "Why can't I log onto my account?" "Is the network down?" "I forgot the URL."

"Wiki On A Stick" extends to entire projects, even at the corporate level... just in case you're one of those "really mobile" types.

Focus: TWiki

• Feature sets vary wildly between wikis (e.g., attachments, hierarchies, markup languages, database support). TWiki has one of the richest sets of plug-ins, add-on applications, database-like tools, and so on.

• Not favoring one wiki over another! Since TWiki is used in CIS and many other sites, exploring it gives you tools you can directly and quickly put to use.

Focus: TWiki

TWiki is a great collaboration tool, especially when you have teams working at a distance (not much, if any, "face time") and unable to travel. Often, you find that people work well together, but not in sync with each other. Here, we've used it on some projects over the past few years.

How do you collaborate asynchronously?

• Share a simple event calendar: DirsEventsCalendar

• Show others what you want to do: ObservationQueue^?

• Have others work with you: PipelinePedigree^?

• Let others collaborate on what you did: WaspAcquisitionDesign

• Record meeting minutes (ugh!): WaspMeetingMinutes

• Manage bug/feature lists: AorEditor^?

Hints For Effective Wiki

Refactor Mercilessly! Crush redundant or outdated information.

Eliminate the Webmaster Mentality! Encourage your users to edit! This is the number one social problem with wiki: convincing Joe User that it's okay to edit a page.

Don't Worry About Structure! Wiki webs tend to be best at gathering knowledge from users. Use the automatic linking system; references are good! Don't try to enforce "linear thinking".

Information is Paramount! Wiki webs are about capturing information. Don't worry about creating new topics that are "too short" or "too long". Other users, who always seem to have more time on their hands than you do will reflow and refactor the information if it needs to happen.

Elsewhere

• A short interview with Wiki:WardCunningham about wiki concepts http://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html

• Add More Later!

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