Wiki's explained

[Preacherman]

I've used Wikipedia, as have most of us, I'm sure, but was never really sure what a "Wiki" was.  This article from CNN's Money section (http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1119112,00.html?promoid=cnn) helps explain it all.

What the Heck Is a Wiki?

Think of it as e-mail for the blogging generation.

By Erick Schonfeld, October 17, 2005

No one understands the wiki, the poor cousin of the blog. But the wiki may end up having a deeper impact on how we do our work. A wiki is a group blog that can be edited by its readers (as opposed to a regular blog, which one person writes and everyone else reads). Wikis are more like conversations. The few well-known wikis include Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia where anyone can submit an article or edit an existing one), Wiki Travel (an amazingly comprehensive travel guide written by travelers), and Wikibooks (textbooks written collaboratively). But most wikis are limited to private groups and are used to manage corporate projects or to collaborate in a quick and dirty way with colleagues.

Although the name sounds like a pathetic woodland creature, wiki actually is the Hawaiian word for quick. (The wiki creator was in search of a name for his new project and found his inspiration while waiting at the Honolulu airport for the airport shuttle bus called the Wiki-Wiki.) A wiki is usually started by someone in charge of a project who is looking for collaborative feedback on his or her idea. Startups like Socialtext and JotSpot provide hosted wikis for as little as $9 a month (free in some cases). Even major companies like Nokia and investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein are adopting wikis. (Dresdner is gradually replacing parts of its intranet with them.)

Instead of drafts of contracts, marketing materials, or lists of potential hires being distributed as e-mail attachments, the information can more simply be posted to a wiki. There, other people on the team, who are all invited to the wiki and have passwords to access it, can read it, add to it, and make corrections if necessary. As chaotic as this may sound, there are built-in safeguards: Every version is saved, and every change can be tracked back to who made it.

What we are doing is blurring the distinction between reading and writing, says Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. As users become more familiar with wikis, their usage patterns start to evolve. At first the ratio of inactive to active users is 10 to 1 -- basically, the project manager does all the work, and the rest of the team goes there to keep up on the project. But that ratio quickly shifts to something closer to 2 to 1 as more and more readers start to become writers themselves. The beauty of a wiki, Mayfield says, is that it starts like a webpage, then people discover that they can edit it like a Word document.

But thats just the beginning. It gets interesting, he says, when people realize they can add Web links to the wiki. The ability to link to other webpages is what makes the wiki itself a social document (interacting with other documents). This social context simply does not exist with Microsoft Word. Although its hard to get an accurate count, Mayfield estimates that there are more than 1 million wikis out there, many behind corporate firewalls. Today every significant enterprise has a wiki deep inside the bowels of its organization. The market is growing at over 200 percent per year, accelerating as wikis get simpler and easier to use, just as blogging did.

Of course, there are many sophisticated collaborative software tools on the market -- from IBMs (IBM) Lotus Notes to Microsofts (MSFT) newly acquired Groove Networks -- that essentially let you do the same thing: collaborate in groups. But they all require some mastery of new user interfaces and technology. With a wiki, the barriers are much lower. All you need is basic literacy to use this tool, Mayfield claims. Since its hosted on the Web, you can access it from anywhere in the world. And its so cheap and easy to set up that you dont need to persuade your tech department to sign off on it.

Mayfield explains it this way: Enterprise applications are top-down. They are defined by rigid business rules designed to help coordinate people. The problem is that every time something changes, the process breaks down and we end up e-mailing information that cant be easily handled with the enterprise application. This causes users to play e-mail volleyball with attachments.

As someone who is trying to win the world over to wikis and prove that enterprise collaboration software just doesnt cut it, Mayfield obviously has an ax to grind here. But his logic rings true. E-mail is the path of least resistance. Just think: How often do you get occupational spam because some yo-yo in the office decides to send a message to everyone in the group every time he makes a change to some document youre all jointly responsible for? Wouldnt it be better if he just went to the wiki and made the change without bothering everybody else? And the people who want to be notified when such changes occur can set up alerts to that effect.

Its true that nobody will stop using e-mail (even as an attachment passer). But that doesnt matter; wikis can receive e-mail too. Send a message to the wiki, and it will automatically convert your subject line into a headline and the body into a posting, while filing away any attachments in a directory. This way people can read your message whenever they choose.

Wikis can look clunky (sort of like a webpage circa 1997), but they are rapidly becoming slick and sophisticated publishing tools. Still, their appeal is their utility. John Gage, Sun Microsystemss globe-trotting chief researcher, keeps an internal wiki with his schedule and notes. If a colleague is an expert on a topic that Gage is working on or knows someone hell be talking to, that person can make a note on Gages wiki about his or her thoughts or suggestions on the topic. Since its not unusual for Gage to travel 20 days in a given month, this is actually a very effective way to communicate with him. And the knowledge passed on can be shared with anyone else who looks at the wiki as well. Also, Gages assistant can make changes to his schedule on the wiki, which he can access from anywhere in the world.

If we all had wikis, we wouldnt be clinging to e-mail as our only communications lifeline. Wed be spending a lot more time linking to one anothers wikis instead.

[Standing Wolf]

What we are doing is blurring the distinction between reading and writing...

That's part of it. What we're really doing is allowing anyone and everyone to participate in ways that weren't even imaginable when I was a lad.

Personal computing and the internet are as radical a technological development as the printing press.

When I was young, information flowed downhill. Somebody wrote a book or a newspaper or magazine article. The library had it or could get it. I could slap down my card and borrow it. It might take the author weeks, months, or years to produce the original information, and years more often passed between publication and my finding it. How to find it? Start with the library card catalogue for books, and magazine indices for articles. I knew plenty of kids in high school who had no idea how to look for, still less find things. They were up the creek. If I happened to disagree with something in the piece or felt it was of great value, I was free to write my own piece and reference it. I could even write to the author in care of the publisher. In fact, I did so a few time; in further point of fact, I never once heard back from anyone I wrote to that way.

When the news came on the idiot box every weekday evening, we were free to watch it or not. We could comment upon it among ourselves, but to the best of our knowledge, it was the news. Same with the local news on the radio every hour on the hour, brought to you by something or other. It just was. Nobody's opinion was solicited. Obviously, people could write to T.V. stations, but so what? Obviously, we could write letters to the editor of the local fish wrapper, but again, so what?

Information still flows downhill in many respects, but it no longer stops there. Anybody in the United States with $500 and a telephone line can find any piece of any information anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, and actively particpate in the world's events instead of merely passively watching and reading edited accounts of them.

To the best of my knowledge, neither of my parents ever wrote to an elected misrepresentative. I do it all the time in mere minutesand I get responses, too. When I wanted to buy a Smith & Wesson model 29 in the boonies of northern Michigan in the late 1970s, I was up the creek: no matter how many gun shops I drove to in however many towns, there weren't any. Today, all I have to do is visit some web sites, make some telephone calls, and send the cashier's check.

If wikis cut down on the raw quantity of E-mail, so much the better; their real value, however, is that they enable more people to participate in more information sharing and decision making processes. Top-down expertise carries less weight. Lateral thinking and organization are moving forward so fast, the leftist extremists will never know what happened. China is struggling in vain to censor its subjects' internet use. Representatives of the Democratic (sic) party have figured out how to raise money over the internet, to be sure, but all the lateral conversations we have these days just make it harder and harder to tell lies.

It's a whole new world.

[brimic]

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution
September 28, 2005 | Issue 41"39

WASHINGTON, DCCongress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40990

[brimic]

I learned everything I needed to know about Wiki from The Onion

[Standing Wolf]

Thanks, brimic!