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overview
This profile looks at wiki - open source based collaborative
online publishing.
It covers -
introduction
Wiki - sometimes expressed as WikiWiki - is both a mechanism
for electronic publishing and a movement for collaborative
publishing.
Both date from 1995, when the Portland Pattern Repository
was established by US programmer Ward Cunningham.
Wiki content - such as the Wikipedia - is hosted on a
server and published using software (typically a web-based
publishing engine) that allows users to readily create/modify
web pages. In contrast to other content management systems
(CMS), discussed here,
use of wiki engines does not involve processing text offline
using software such as DreamWeaver for subsequent upload
to the web.
Wiki engines use a variety of markup languages to enable
non-specialist users to create/edit text, make hyperlinks
between pages on the particular server and add images.
A standard wiki markup has yet to emerge. Wiki pages are
typically anonymous.
Wiki is unusual among groupware because it facilitates
both editing of content and changes to the way that content
is organised.
The movement embraces notions that the technology will
enable publishing by specialists and the general community
alike, liberating authors and providing free access to
content outside traditional publishing framneworks. It
thus shares values attributed to blogging
and Usenet, and to collaborative
'social software'.
That is evident in comments
such as
Like
many simple concepts, "open editing" has some
profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing
everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web
site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use
of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical
users.
and
The
SociologyWiki doesn't, and most likely will never exist.
Its supposed charter was "to discuss and explore
political, economic, psychological and philosophical
issues."
The trouble with this is that "discussing and exploring"
mainly means flaming and poo-pooing. In other words,
noise. No one was willing to waste bandwidth hosting
such a thing, and most WikiZens looked on the prospect
with trepidation and loathing.
The
wiki community appears to be small but enthusiastic and
- like the supporters of initiatives such as Project Gutenberg
- has a somewhat utopian flavour. In discussing the Wikipedia
encyclopaedia one proponent accordingly asked
why
shouldn't there be a page for every Simpsons character,
and even a table listing every episode, all neatly crosslinked
and introduced by a shorter central page like the above?
Why shouldn't every episode name in the list link to
a separate page for each of those episodes, with links
to reviews and trivia?
If you haven't read Borges on the never-ending library,
why indeed not a separate page for every category and
sub-category?
That's consistent with suggestions that "the all-encompassing
nature of Wikipedia has been a significant factor in its
growth" and with developments such as Esperanto wikis,
redolent of 1920s visions of technocracy and the end of
the state.
mechanisms
As with other inward-looking affinity groups or technical
communities wiki is marked by its own - often self-consciously
cute - language.
A 'WikiWikiWeb' (generally abbreviated to 'wiki' and created
by WikiZens)
enables collective authoring, on the fly, of text documents
using a web browser. Simple wiki engines restrict users
to basic text formatting. Some of the more advanced engines
feature inclusion of images, tables and interactive elements.
An assemblage of documents, such as an encyclopaedia or
other reference work, is characterised as a 'wiki'. Individual
documents are characterised as separate 'wiki pages'.
Contribution to most wikis is open to anyone with access
to the wiki server, in principle to the general community.
Registration of a user may not required. There is often
no prior review before wiki pages are created or modified.
questions
Wikis face many of the questions asked about blogging.
Having a publishing tool -
- is
not equivalent to quality
- does
not address concerns about objectivity or defamation
and
- does
not obviate traditional publishing issues such as editorial
standards, respect for intellectual property.
The shape of the wiki community means that major initiatives
have been cruelly but with some justice dismissed as "the
encyclopedia that Slashdot
built", with extensive coverage of IT (and science
fiction minutiae) but little attention to the social sciences
and less to the humanities. If you're interested in Klingon
surf the Wikipedia; if you're interested in Busoni, Namier,
Marc Bloch, Heimito von Doderer or Christina Stead head
for the Britannica or an individual study.
The frequent absence of citations (particularly to offline
work published prior to the 1990s) and anonymous collective
authorship means that it is difficult to assess the accuracy
of wiki reference works. Proponents have argued that collective
editing - illustrated through contributions accessible
via the 'page history' link - functions as a form of effective
peer review, commenting that
Wikipedia
articles are extremely easy to edit. Anyone can click
the "edit" link and edit an article. Peer
review per se is not necessary and is actually a bit
of a pain to deal with. We prefer (in most cases) that
people just go in and make changes they deem necessary.
In
practice recurrent editing to ensure a consensus about
accuracy and filter out contributions by cranks appears
to be the case only for those pages that attract significant
interest. Areas that are the preserve of a only few enthusiasts
have sometimes received dubious coverage.
For us much of the interest of Wikipedia lies in the editorial
comments by contributors rather than the final product.
One wiki participant asked,
in Wiki vs Web, whether wiki was close to the
original vision of the web -
The
Web was originally designed to make it easy to link
information. It would be simple for people to write
their various web pages, sprinkling links to other documents
within.
ThisHasntHappened? [sic] Instead, we have the Web as
a publishing model. We have the Web as magazines. We
have the Web as TV.
Most people who browse the Web don't author their own
Web pages. Those who do typically create a simple personal
page and leave it at that. Personally, I think it is
because HTML, the language that Web pages are written
in, lies right smack in the middle ground between being
too hard and too easy. ...
HTML is simple enough that any self-respecting geek
can whip out a Web page in a couple of minutes using
nothing more than Notepad. To a programmer, there isn't
much call for a simple HTML editor. There is no need.
To the average person, though, HTML is finicky, arbitrary
and complicated. The average person, after ascending
the learning curve enough to write their personal page,
decides that they don't want to deal with all the funny
tags.
It
is unclear, though, whether the average person is that
interested in dealing with a wiki engine or indeed contributing
to an online resource.
copyright and the gift economy
The wiki communitarian ethos has advantages and disadvantages
regarding intellectual property.
As open content under the GNU
Free Documentation License there are no access fees. Contributors
aren't paid and there's no formal 'star system'. Wiki
proponents argue that
Knowing
this encourages people to contribute; they know it's
a public project that everyone can use.
The
downside is that anonymity "encourages people to
contribute" other people's work. Wikipedia for example
features individual passages, images and discrete items
that have been lifted by contributors
without any apparent concern for copyright owners or -
just as importantly - for attribution
to the authors of that content.
One of the more spiky Gift Economy comments
is that
Intellectual
property is intellectual theft, a lie backed by law,
a child of hubris and conceit. It presumes that it is
possible to own ideas, to control them, and to dictate
their use. It mandates that knowledge must always be
a scarce resource to be hidden and hoarded and carefully
metered.
There appear to have been no rigorous surveys but several
of the major wiki collections appear to be enthusiastic
recyclings of text that's readily identifiable on the
web - textual clip-art - rather than work of original
analysis or content derived from academic or other journals.
studies
Given academic interest in open source and publishing
developments such as blogging
it is perhaps surprising that wiki has attracted so little
attention from pundits and journalists.
A major source is The Wiki Way - Quick Collaboration
on the Web (Reading: Addison-Wesley 2001) by Ward
Cunningham & Bo Leuf, complemented by sociological
and informational analysis in From Usenet to CoWebs
(New York: Springer 2003) edited by Christopher Lueg,
the 2003 paper Applying the open source development
model to knowledge work (PDF),
by J Mateos Garcia & W Steinmueller and Phantom authority,
self-selective recruitment and retention of members in
virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia, a 2003
paper
by Andrea Ciffolilli.
projects
There are a large number of wiki projects, ranging from
an astrological encyclopaedia in Polish through to recipes
for hacktivism against
woodchippers and the IMF.
Four of the most prominent projects are -
Wikipedia
- a multilingual project, initiated in 2001, to "create
a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia".
"The site is a WikiWiki , meaning that anyone,
including you, can edit any article right now by clicking
on the 'edit this page' link that appears in every Wikipedia
article"
Nupedia
- a more academic encyclopaedia initiated by Jimbo Wales
and Larry Sanger, who along with Cunningham are elder
statesmen of the movement
Wiktionary
- a multilingual wiki dictionary
Susning.nu
- a Swedish encyclopaedia
An
attempt to list major wikis is here.
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