To me blogs and wikis are the original social software. My blog emerged as a personal knowledge management tool (Harold Jarche is the go-to source for PKM). Knowledge management to me has always been a very people centered, social thing. Learning through distributed conversations, networked learning (George Siemens and Stephen Downes‘ connectivism). My friend Lilia Efimova did her PhD on it, with our shared blogger network’s conversations as an empirical case. At some point social software morphed into social media, and its original potential and value as informal learning tools was lost in my eyes.
Blogs and wiki’s, they go well together. Blogs as thinking out loud and conversations (also with oneself). Wiki as its accumulated residue. I had a wiki alongside this blog for a very long time (until it succumbed to spam), both a public external one, and a private one. My friend Peter Rukavina still has his wiki Rukapedia alongside his blog. It serves in part as an explainer to his blog readers (e.g. see his wiki entry on me). Boris Mann, also a long time barcamp/blogging connection, runs a wiki which is editable by the public in part.
A year ago I felt the need to accumulate things in a more permanent way next to the timeline like blog. As I am the only one editing such a ‘wiki’, I opted to use WordPress pages for it (but you could open pages up for wider editing with a separate user-role). I added a few plugins for it, e.g. to add categories to pages so I can build menu structures. Kbase in the top menu leads to this wiki-for-just-me, although it doesn’t show all pages it contains (search will surface them though).
Neil MatherSo I am very intrigued by Kicks’ mention of the linkage between blogs and wikis. I like the idea of the blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time.
‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’
I started the Rukapedia (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Main_Page) after returning from the Reboot conference for the first time (https://ruk.ca/content/rukapedia).
And originally it was, true to the form, an open wiki that anyone could edit. But it quickly got hijacked by spammers, and so I restricted access to me and a few familiars (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Special:ListUsers) and it’s only been me who’s been active in the last decade or so.
The Rukapedia isn’t quite dead, and I still find it a useful resource for historical things, like the list of every mobile phone I’ve ever owned (https://wiki.ruk.ca/wiki/Technology#Phones). But I find that moving back and forth between Drupal, where I blog (https://ruk.ca/) and MediaWiki (which I use to maintain the wiki) is just cumbersome enough that I no longer actively maintain it and, like you, I’ve a plan to repatriate the information there into my main CMS, outside of the flow of the day to day blog, as time allows me.
One thing the Rukapedia has allowed me to understand is that the reverse-chronological post form of the blog is lovely for blogging, but doesn’t work well as a reference. Linking to my Letterpress tag page (https://ruk.ca/topics/letterpress) is a poor substitute for giving someone the context of my life as a letterpress printer; a full-text search for “amrusb1” (https://ruk.ca/search/site/amrusb1) doesn’t document well my work with this device. The “blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time” is a perfect metaphor for what I set out to create in the Rukpedia, and I hope to build on this inside Drupal.