ADDING THE CORNERSTONES
In the post FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE, I discussed the notion of the wiki as an aspect of Asimov’s pyschohistory, a concept born of the faith in humanity’s predictability in numbers. When discussing wikis, of course, it seems natural to start with Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia “anyone can edit”. It is the first wiki most people become familiar with, and both an epic monument to the value of groupthink and a dangerous loitering place of saboteurs. However, wikis go back well before Jimmy Wales‘ grand experiment.
Reading Meredith Farkas’ explanation of the history of wikis was quite interesting (and verified by no less a source than wikipedia itself). Wikis date back much further than I would have supposed, to the mid-1990s and a programmer named Ward Cunningham. Cunningham was taking the concept of a hypercard program on early Macs that linked different “cards” of information to each other; most, if not all wikis rely on simple, intuitive internal hyperlinks to create a finely woven web of information. He used this idea to create an online “wiki” (from the Hawaiian word for quick, which Cunningham had first seen as the name of a private busline at the Honolulu airport) to share programming ideas (Farkas, pgs. 67-68).
I took three online “wiki” (or wiki-esque) services for a test drive, and found similarities and differences between all of them. MediaWiki is the software that drives Wikipedia, so it was fairly easy for me to use — I’ve edited a variety of Wikipedia pages over the last couple years, and created new ones. Instead of using html markups, the software uses simple symbols to create bullets, titles, and numbered lists. The theory is that wikis are more intuitive that way, but I’ve never really thought so — I prefer to use html code myself. I’ve always looked at the formatting of pages I’ve admired and mimicked it as well as possible. While uploading the MediaWiki software to the Senna Server was tricky, once online, it was almost identical to editing Wikipedia. Going back to examples on wikipedia, I built a small series of pages and categories built around a simple concept (San Francisco Street Art).
On the other end of the collaborative spectrum is Google Docs. Google Docs is not wiki software per se, but it is a tool for group work. A single google document can be edited by anyone invited to use the page (though they must have a google id), with formatting tools that mimic a skeletal Word Processing program. However, Google Docs isn’t designed to make publicly available web sites (though they can be easily published using Google Pages); it’s best used within a small, finite group.
PBWiki was new to me, but very easy to pick up and run with (as the name implies — PB stands for peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the easiest meal to make!). Instead of feeling like a traditional wiki, it was much more like drafting and editing within Google Documents any other contemporary word processing tool. Buttons for text formatting, auto-formatted links – it was lightyears from the skeletal simplicity of MediaWiki. I only wonder if it has the robust strength and reliability of traditional wikis.
