Wired Wiki : Comments

This page is for interacting with the original author, Ryan Singel. If you want to talk about edits you have made or consider making, use the Discussion page. You can edit this page, or even easier, click "Add Comment" above.

Backstory about the word "wiki": it can mean three different things, and if we flesh out the article a bit with that knowledge, maybe we can help explain the wiki phenomenon better.

Wiki means the "wiki engine," the software application that handles the content and makes it editable. Ward wrote the original engine, and then there are a bunch of successors, including UseMod, Twiki, MoinMoin, Socialtext, Jot, TiddlyWiki, MediaWiki (used for Wikipedia), etc.
Wiki means the text content in the wiki engine's database, created and edited by users. This is what looks like a web site, and is probably the thing most often meant by "check the wiki, I think it's in there" or "put it in the wiki so we'll be able to find it later."
Wiki means the community of users around it that define, maintain and protect the content. This is the critical piece of course, and the place where the LA Time wikitorial fell down. Ward gardened the first wiki community intensively by shepherding users into good practices and good community, and that was as critical for launching his wiki as the wiki engine itself. Wikipedia's text corpus is huge, and the first thing you think of when talking about it, but it's the few thousand people in the core of the maintainer's communities, and the many more people who interact with the content, and all the guidelines around doing that cooperatively, that make the thing work.

Somehow, it would be nice to inject a little explanation of these different meanings into the vignettes of wiki in the article.

(Peter -- That sounds about right and I think the article already uses the first and second definition but I agree that a the piece could benefit from a graf that explains the how the term wiki has many meanings.

I also think that this sentence of yours is pretty great and might, with a little editing for length, make for a good quote in the story: "Wikipedia's text corpus is huge, and the first thing you think of when talking about it, but it's the few thousand people in the core of the maintainer's communities, and the many more people who interact with the content, and all the guidelines around doing that cooperatively, that make the thing work." -- Ryan Singel)

(Ryan -- Try this: "So why has the LA Times' editorial wiki failed where Wikipedia succeded? Maybe because of the Wikipedian's sense of community. The collective recognition that they have something going on here worth preserving, leading to the creation of a culture complete with its own norms and laws." This goes before Peter's quote, and then the whole package can move before the last paragraph. Whaddy'all think? -- Ferdinand Zebua aka. Lemi4

(ps. how does one do the quadruple-tilde thing over here?/n00b-alert:p)

(pps. does Wikipedia's "be bold" social norm apply here? I'm itching to make the edits myself. But then again the combination of my graf and Peter's quote makes the whole thing even longer; it needs more trimming.)

(Ferdinand I think the "be bold" is the way to go. Add to it all you want, and maybe someone will come in and trim well. I'm personally not editing the piece, but I will be adding some writing in this section that anyone can then stick in if they see fit. -- Ryan Singel)

contributed by Peter Kaminski on Aug 29 8:33am

Ryan,
I think it's really important to mention the impact the wiki is having on education. Here are a few lines I wrote as a startign point:
The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratvely author research papers, or the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person’s course web site. Stewart Mader is the author of Using Wiki in Education (http://www.ikiw.org) a blog that helps educators use wikis effectively in their teaching and research.

(Stewart - Yes, I heard that during the course of my research for this piece. What might be great is to add some particularity into this. Can you think of a few good examples (especially ones publicly accessible) or an educator who might want to talk about their wiki experience?

Thanks,Ryan Singel)

contributed by Stewart Mader on Aug 29 9:57am

Ryan,

Are you at all interested in the future of wiki here? For instance, with SynchroEdit (currently in alpha and only works in firefox) you can actually see other people editing AS they edit. You see their cursors move, add & delete text, all while you are editing it as well.

(Christopher -- I think that's a great idea, which I seem to remember you talking about at the side conference at Web 2.0 last fall. Maybe I can slide that into the wysiwyg graf. -- Ryan Singel)

contributed by Christopher Allen on Aug 29 11:10am

First, I wanted to say that I think the article is great. Second, I think its important to mention more than the Lost Encylopedia, which is hardly innovative or large when compared with other wikis. If you want to paint a comprehensive picture of the wiki world, you should check out Mediawiki's List of Largest Wikis. While many of these wikis are Mediawiki projects, many others are run independently and cover niche topics difficult to integrate into the current Wikipedia model.

These wikis cover a range of topics, from sports and travel to tax information and how-to advice. In total, the list of largest Mediawiki helps illustrate the thriving number of wiki-based communities that will soon reach that critical mass to make an impact. Taking out the English Wikipedia, these wikis collectively house approximately 6,000,000 pages of content with the help of over 1,000,000 registered editors.

Also, you might consider looking at ArmchairGM to add some depth to your statement on Wikinews. While Wikinews might not produce a lot of content, ArmchairGM, a sports based wiki, is showing that news and opinion pieces can be collaboratively produced through a wiki. The site started just a couple of months ago and users are given the ability to write sports news and opinions and a sports encylopedia. The site has averaged over 30 articles a day over the past couple of months and uses democratic voting to sort good content from bad content.

(Aaron -- Thanks for your praise but even more thanks for the pointers to the big wikis. I wanted to add another graf of examples of wikis that were not wikipedia. I also like the Armchair GM site, which I hadn't seen before. I'll write up a couple of grafs, but I think since the idea is to have you all edit this piece, I'll just post them here and someone else can decide whether and/or where to slot them in). -- Ryan Singel)

contributed by Aaron Wright on Aug 29 11:19am

Regarding Stewart's comment about wikis in education, you might talk with Vicki Davis (http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/). She's very active in the Wikispaces community and writes frequently about how she's using wikis in the classroom.

Thanks,
James
http://wikispaces.com

(James, great suggestion. I'll try to talk with Ms. Davis first thing tomorrow and put a graf or two in the comment section and y'all can decide whether it is germane or not. -- Ryan Singel)

contributed by James Byers on Aug 29 12:16pm

Ryan: The quote from Ward Cunningham strikes me as a little odd. Ward's a brilliant guy, and he's said many beautiful, insightful things about wikis and the communities that form around them:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Interview/Ward_Cunningham
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

The current quote doesn't capture any of that, at least not for me. It's not just the awkward phrasing (although that certainly doesn't help); rather, it's that Ward has already spoken about ""the wiki way"" in much more compelling ways. It seems a shame not to take advantage of that for this article.

(Bill -- I'll put up some more of my interview with Ward which can then be quoted off. Wired News policy is generally to use the quotes from the interview whenever possible rather than quotes from another source. --Ryan Singel)

(Bill -- I'm going to put some more of the interview with Ward Cunningham up, but first I need to explain my note-taking process. I usually tape interviews (after asking for permission) and type them up as I talk on the phone. Then later I review my notes, decide which portions I want to quote verbatim and then return to the recording to get the quote exactly. So I'm putting up some of the notes, which are incomplete in some spots, but should be close enough for you or someone to decide what is a better quote. Then drop me a note or post in here what you want to use and I'll clean it up from the original recording. Reporter's Notebook --Ryan Singel)_

contributed by Bill Odom on Aug 30 1:37am

Moving this comment from the main page to the Comments section...

Ryan,
Definitely agree on adding particularity - Vicki Davis is a very good person to talk to (http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com). Also, take a look at The Science of Spectroscopy (http://www.scienceofspectroscopy.info) which I started 7 years ago and converted to a wiki 3 years ago. Look at the Contributors page and you'll see they come from all over the world. Not too much activity over the summer, but it gets busy once the academic year is in full swing.
Stewart

Stewart - I haven't heard back from Ms. Davis -- but I'm also wary of including much more into the piece. If anyone has another wiki educator I should talk with let me know. I'm not totally convinced the piece needs it, but I'm open. -- Ryan Singel

contributed by Stewart Mader on Aug 30 10:18am

contributed by Andrew Lebrun on Aug 31 6:31am

Couple of things.

One, the information on the anniversary of BarCamp is now dated. It was held last weekend and I believe there were only seven, not the 10 to 14 anticipated by Chris Messina. If someone wants to update that good info can be found at barcamp.org

Two, I think the paragraph talking about other wikis needs to be fleshed out. Perhaps something along the lines of Large, active wikis on the web cover topics ranging from"http://www.armchairgm.com/ to travel to tax information and how-to advice."

contributed by Ryan Singel on Sep 1 11:39am

Also if anyone is interested, Jon Gordon who does the Future Tense tech segment for public radio had a short piece on this experiment (mp3 RealAudio) yesterday. Please pardon my stammering in the interview. I'm a print guy, not a radio guy.

contributed by Ryan Singel on Sep 1 11:47am

Ryan,

I added a paragraph on using wikis to create light-weight wiki applications. This is a realm of the wiki world that is not so well known, but it is quite extensively used in the corporate world. I am currently working on a book on wikis for the workplace; we interviewed many companies on their use of wikis and identified some trends, such as creating custom tailored wiki applications. On supporting business processes, see my recent presentation on wikis for LinuxWorld and my blog on wikis. Please feel free to contact me for further details.

Peter AT StructuredWikis DOT com.

_contributed by Peter_Thoeny on Sep 1 04:05pm_

For readers who want to get started with a wiki it might be useful to mention WikiMatrix, a popular site to compare opens ource and commercial wiki products.

contributed by Peter Thoeny on Sep 1 5:43pm

: on

Comment: Thanks for contacting me, Ryan. I've posted a little to the article. There are some other great resources in this area -- Andy Carvin has blogged about how to harness Wikipedia http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2005/07/turning_wikiped.html in the classroom.

I think it is about educating effective Internet citizens who have information literacy skills (what is accurate?) and effective Internet teamwork skills while protecting their privacy.

Stewart Mader also has some great resources - http://www.scienceofspectroscopy.info/edit/index.php?title=Using_wiki_in_education#Ways_to_use_Wiki_in_Education. I'll check back later.

contributed by Vicki Davis on Sep 2 11:15am

FYI, I added in the section on wikis in university classrooms, as I was a TA for the Cyberlaw course that made extensive use of wikis. I obtained the quotes from Zittrain, and would be happy to provide fact checking contact info if need be.

I also added a paragraph on wishing the rest of the world were more wiki-like, condensed educational information, and removed an oudated graf on BarCamp that I thought was superfluous. Will also copy to the discussion page. contributed by Elizabeth Stark on Sep 2 5:52pm

Hmm, so an interesting observation here is that wikis seem to work well when you're trying to acquire long, detailed sources (a la Wikipedia), but it can be hard when you're trying to make something more concise. For example, people keep adding things to the educational section of the article, and while they're all great initiatives, I'm not sure they're all necessary to make the point of the section. I vote to remove some of them, but I'm not sure we've developed a Wikipedia-style community consensus/voting system here (which may be another downside to this project).

contributed by Elizabeth Stark on Sep 3 8:25am

Here's a critcism of the Wired Wiki experiment by a blogger with the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He says the result so far is too encyclopedic.

I'd suggest that unfortunately a large number of the contributions have been vendors and project owners adding their names, links and positioning.

Elizabeth points out that there isn't a consensus or voting system here. As such, out of consideration, most of the changes have been adds for personal gain, instead of trimming it down or cleaning it up for the reader. Instead, I would suggest that if you want to make major edits, and can justify them in the discussion -- do it.

Let's bring this article back to telling a story. Make sense to you, Ryan?

contributed by Ross Mayfield on Sep 3 9:22am

Yup. I think Mathew's article echos some of the feelings I had about long, encyclopedic entries that are more conducive to wiki-style editing as opposed to concise, journalistic articles. At the same time, I have worked a lot with groups on wikis, and when you have a common goal (read: catchy wired news article about wikis) and perhaps more of a guideline (read: word count/suggestion), it can make achieving the end result easier.

This page has been useful in discussing the outcome of the article, but it seems to have attracted more comments than the discussion page (which even I had not been using). I agree that we should ask people to justify entries on the discussion page where the various editors should collaborate. Also, we were working from a pre-written article, unlike the collaborative article-writing process that occurs on Wikipedia.

I also think it's somewhat problematic that it took a day's turnaround and the provision of personal information to get an account on SocialText, so we may have a very small, wiki-centric demographic of editors working here.

contributed by Elizabeth Stark on Sep 3 10:23am

Hi Ryan:

I added the stuff about armchairgm. Found it via techcrunch on a recent article on sports web2.0 sites. I want to object to your idea to include it in a list of other wikis. I made my addition not because it's a niche wiki, but because its one of the few (uncyclopedia being the other obvious one) that is not an encyclopedia. the wiki is being used, it seems, as a CMS -- which in and of itself is interesting.

contributed by Joseph Obemo on Sep 3 7:59pm

I'm not saying it isn't a valuable contribution, just that it doesn't belong in the lead of the article. If it did, it wouldn't tell a story (the contribution broke up the lead of the original story, at least) and others would follow the example. So, I moved it into another section, lets see how it evolves. Ross Mayfield

I think it works nicely. The subheads are effective. --Joseph Obemo

Ryan and all, I rearranged the list of wiki farms, moving the new Wiki.com to the second to last and adding Wikipedias Wikia. Wiki.com just started and doesn't really have a spot at the front of the table as far as I am concerned, not yet at least. I would also like to point you to a few things. First the wiki of wikis, http://wikiindex.org. We have a vibrant category for exceptional wiki. We also have over 3000 wiki listed, not including over 500 expired wiki. Also, we have a weblog, http://recentchanges.info. There are three wiki focused conferences that may be mentioned. Wikimania, WikiSym and RecentChangesCamp. Finally one of the wikis that I am interested in is from the internet video blogger Zefrank, which has been fun to watch grow.

contributed by Mark Dilley on Sep 3 8:54pm

Doesn't wiki.com just redirect to the highest bidding wiki farm? You should know, Mark. Ross Mayfield

Ryan,
Added a reference to "Live Documents" - an offering from my company (InstaColl).

Considering the amount of discussion happening around the WYSIWYG/formatting aspects within a Wiki and the challenges discussed about bringing Wiki to mainstream enterprise use, endowing a Word document or Excel spreadsheet with Wiki-like capabilities - security, version control, transparency and auditability -might be something worth considering for inclusion.

With Live Documents, multiple people can edit shared documents within familiar Microsoft Office application and all changes are automatically merged back into all copies of the document with a full change history - there is no uploading of the document required.
PS: If this seems like an unwelcome vendor plug/troll that is tangential to the article message, I apologize in advance.
Cheers,
Sumanth

contributed by Sumanth Raghavendra on Sep 5 3:43am

Hi Ryan/All,
Added a paragraph to discuss Wikipedia's recent forays into content control (workflow) and why. I include links to a c|net article, a Wikipedia page discussing a much publicised vandalism incident, as well as a blog post of mine discussing ways you can introduce content control efficiently in wiki's.

Apologies for the plug of my blog, however I do believe the article is relevant for this document.

Thanks Everyone,

Geoffrey

contributed by Geoffrey McCaleb on Sep 5 4:08am

A few words on timing.

The deadline for edits is going to be 3:00 Pacific time Wednesday. At that point, our copy desk will come in and do a final edit, which will be limited to correcting errors of grammar and punctuation, and bringing the copy into conformity with Wired News style.

That means Wednesday early-afternoon would be a great time for some brave soul to give the prose a final polish -- perhaps give the story a more integrated feel, and do some trimming. That's your call, of course. The main story is at about 1,900 words now, which is a long piece for Wired News, but not excessive.

In addition to the main story, we now plan to run the Enumeration page as a sidebar. Both pieces will run Thursday morning, along with a meta-article by Ryan describing the experiment and his impressions of the process.

Thanks to everyone whose been participating, and especially to Ross for hosting the wiki and shepherding things along.

contributed by Kevin Poulsen (Wired News) on Sep 5 11:39am

This really is a fascinating process, but I'm not entirely convinced it is a good example of where wikis shine.

Rather than leave a whole diatribe here, I've written up my thoughts on my blog:

http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/archives/000736.html

contributed by Mike Cannon-Brookes on Sep 5 2:11pm

Mike, take note of the comment immeadiately above you. The enumeration page has enough room for you.

contributed by Ross Mayfield on Sep 5 2:21pm

Ross - I was under the impression that the Enumeration page was for the diaspora of wiki vendor links, rather than comments about the writing-journalism-in-a-wiki process? Or are you saying my comments are invalid because of the existence of this page? It's still being published in the magazine? And people still want to be in the main article rather than the sidebar?

contributed by Mike Cannon-Brookes on Sep 6 12:59am

I'm saying the Enumeration page is the appropriate place to plug your company. And to the topic of your blog post, for others to do so as well, while letting the article remain as a valid story.

contributed by Ross Mayfield on Sep 6 8:56am

It's late but I wanted someone to add in something to clarify how wiki companies are stepping up to the usablity challenge.

Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText gave me a great comment when I interviewed him a month ago (way before we thought about this experiment).

"I'd like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the PTA."

contributed by Ryan Singel on Sep 6 2:51pm

I added the quote in context, using words from the original unedited article, and it supports the flow of the story where the first section quotes Ward's call for WYSIWYG:

Some of these wikis already allow WYSIWYG editing. "I'd like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the Parent Teacher Association," said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. Socialtext is attempting to make its WYSIWYG click-and-type editor more widespread; at this year's Wikimania conference, Socialtext announced that it was working with Wikia and Wikimedia to integrate Wikiwyg into Wikipedia's software.

contributed by Ross Mayfield on Sep 6 3:01pm

contributed by sarah moor on May 7 5:32am

_contributed by Sicilia Eve on May 25 1:22am_