Tag: wiki

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In reply to Introduced to infostrats by Neil Mather

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).

I find it odd that after 17 years of Wikipedia’s existence, its Mediawiki software is still so very crap in terms of usability, styling and adaptability. Having spent 4 days working on project documentation in Mediawiki in the past 2 weeks, I wonder how all Wikipedians learned to ignore the many hurdles their tool of choice has.

In reply to Wunderkammer by Frank Meeuwsen

Thanks for posting this Frank. I really love the notion of Wunderkammer, although my own mental image of my blog is probably closer to a Commonplace book, and I realise that in practice my Evernote collection is actually the real Commonplace book in my information processes, of which the blog is a selection and reflection tool.

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I added a page-based section to this blog, to serve as a wiki-like extension. Where blogs are a stream of content, I find I have need of a more static part of the site, with content that can serve as reference, as a jump-off page to blog content, or to document things.

In the 00’s I used to have a wiki living alongside this blog, and think of ways of connecting my blog to a wiki (in 2004 I wrote a WordPress and a Movable Type plugin to let blogposts and wiki-pages synchronise). The wiki I ran was wikkawiki, which based on functionality would still be my goto choice for an open source self hosted wiki.
The issue with running a wiki exposed to the public was that it attracted loads of spam attacks, something that in practice never was outweighed by the use bona fide visitors made of the wiki to alter or add content.

In short to add wiki-style functionality to my blog, the only functionality that is really needed is that 1) I myself have a edit button on static items, 2) the ability to categorise and tag those items, and 3) keep those items outside of the blog posting stream on the front page, and outside of the RSS feed. WordPress pages fit that description, when I’m logged in, and after adding a plugin to allow categories and tags on pages. So a page based section it is, or rather, will be over time.

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I have been watching, and sometimes using SocialText ever since Ross Mayfield and his group started it. In the beginning I was enthusiastic about the wiki, and feeding back experiences and needs and wants in terms of functionality. I may not have been following quite close enough, but over time it felt like SocialText didn’t evolve anymore. There was loads of buzz around this ‘first wiki for the enterprise’ (a point where Atlassian might beg to differ), but it looked and felt the same to me. When Seb joined SocialText he sort of fell of my radar, which I thought strange. But apparantly they were very busy cooking stuff up, or it was just me after all.
Because at Jonas Luster‘s, who recently joined SocialText, two major things are announced:
Dan Bricklin has joined SocialText, and with him wikiCalc, which they will be busy integrating.
By OSCON 2006 SocialText intends to go open source. So More on that also by Ross Mayfield. I guess I know what I’ll be writing about around the end of July.
(via Boris Mann)