a (missing) power of wiki -was- Re: [NTL] Tonight's presentation

[Sy]

On 5/24/05, Lloyd D Budd <foolswisdom-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 5/24/05, Sy <sy1235-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > I'd like to thank all who attended tonight's presentation.  It was all
> > served through a 15 minute mediawiki installation, served by XAMPP.
> > The presentation slides are available online at:
> >
> > http://sysy.homeip.net/mw/index.php/Seeing_the_true_value_of_the_wiki
> >
> 
> Looks like a great presentation !
> 
> One of my least favorite claims about *current* wiki technologies is
> included in that presentation :
> "On a larger scale, a wiki is self-organizing, self-sustaining and
> breathes with a life not like any other collaboration system."
> 
> Wiki's are fantastic for "flat" documents (such as encyclopedias) .  I
> have not found any with the tools for knowledge management .  Wikis
> are currently too passive .  Is there one that represents the
> "strength" of statements and relationships of information ?
> 
> Aside , Wikis are labor intensive and text is seldom removed once
> entered , or after some amount of conflict .  Or removed because it is
> clearly factually in error .  Wikis are labor intensive on the reader
> - in a different dimension than blogs ;-)
> 
> Aside , if you want one of the simplest (to set up and use), and with
> a good feature set , try pmwiki .

Wikis represent a system where administrative effort is given freely
by the participants.  However, they will only properly organize if
there is some sort of direction, theme, manifesto, set of rules or
something.  I've also seen strings of conversation get left
unresolved, but I'm thinking more of wikis which insist on a separate
"talk" page for discussion (and argument) where they organize more
neatly.

Labour intensive?  Oh yes indeed.. too much so.  Strangely, people who
are interested in an article are willing to put in that work.

"On a larger scale", the "many eyes" spoken of in the open source
software world applies well to open documentation.  The many
interested readers end up giving freely to improve topics they're
interested in.  Where open source gives the old "if you want a
feature, send in the patch", open documentation has such a low
entry-point that anyone who is interested can add their drop to the
bucket.  This applies for content, for organization and for
administrative tasks like cleaning up spam.  So any topic which is
interesting to enough people will end up with a body of "many eyes"
that acts like an immune system against tampering and which tends to
work towards a more and more agreeable/correct/whatever topic.

Edit wars are another matter.. wikis definitely have a dark side. 
Accuracy or trustworthyness is another big issue for some.

A mailing list or newsgroup archive has no hope of presenting a
collaborative, unified front.  It just has threads upon threads where
a few are wrapped up very neatly.  This would be great if people could
more easily search through archives and were willing to waste time
reading through dead-end or irrelevant posts to find their answers.  A
good wiki presents the ability for participants to collaborate on a
commonly agreeable topic.  This is the "breathing new life" part.


Again, if there are interested persons, then organization tends to
happen.  It tends to not exist by default in a wiki, but can be
manufactured out of its functions.  There are some people who are less
concerned with the general topics in any random wiki than by linking
them all together in a nice organized manner.  I'm one of those types.
 I love stepping in and linking stuff together, adding topics, adding
sections and the like.


Wikis end up being a very fast and loose tool that can either form a
self-sustaining knowledgebase or a disorganized semi-useful and murky
pool of random pages.. depending on the interest and focus of
participants.
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