eekim.com: EEK Speaks

Wed, Sep 21, 2005

The Brilliant Essence of Wikis #

Over the past few weeks, I've had an unusually large number of discussions about the essence of Wikis -- why they are so beautiful and important as CollaborativeTools. I realized I've never posted my thoughts on the topic, so I'm correcting that here. (JTE)

Wikis have this brilliant feature, a feature that's so simple and obvious, it's often overlooked, yet it's largely responsible for the success of Wikis. Incidentally, it's also an intentional feature, which is yet another reflection of WardCunningham's design genius. (JTF)

In a nutshell, that feature is the ability to LinkAsYouThink by writing the name of the page, even if the page you want to link to doesn't currently exist. (JTG)

While you're letting that sink in, let's look at a measurable way this feature is valuable. A lot of folks view Wikis as a crude CMS. I don't dispute this perspective -- you can certainly use Wikis that way -- but it's not what makes Wikis interesting. Nevertheless, I see queries all the time on various nonprofit technology lists asking to compare Wikis to other CMSes, so here goes. It takes at least three steps to link to a new page with most CMSes (create new page, go to old page, create link), whereas it only takes only one with Wikis (write page name). That's significant. (JTH)

What really makes the Wiki's LinkAsYouThink feature special is that it facilitates the creation of SharedLanguage among the community that uses it. As I've said so often here, SharedLanguage is an absolute prerequisite for collaboration. The lack of SharedLanguage is the most common roadblock to effective collaboration, be it a small work team or a community of thousands. (JTI)

Look at the page index of any Wiki, and you'll see the vocabulary of that community. Thanks to the other affordances of the tool, that vocabulary accomodates multiple definitions while encouraging convergence where appropriate. Most importantly, that vocabulary is SharedLanguage that has emerged from the community itself and that continues to evolve. (JTJ)

Here's a real example. At the AdvocacyDev Wiki, which BlueOxenAssociates hosts, the top six most linked-to pages (out of 363 total) are: (JTK)

VoIP (31) (JTL)
VoIPSprint (18) (JTM)
AsterixPBX (18) (JTN)
IndyVoter (13) (JTO)
CarlCoryellMartin (13) (JTP)
CivicSpace (13) (JTQ)

From this very small sample, we can see that VoIP (and Asterisk in particular), IndyVoter, and CivicSpace are all much discussed tools among folks working on online advocacy tools. We can also see that CarlCoryellMartin is an active member of this community (or at least one of the more diligent members when it comes to documenting). (JTR)

The Wiki's ability to facilitate SharedLanguage -- a direct consequence of LinkAsYouThink -- is what makes it so important as a CollaborativeTool. In the future, when enough developers recognize this, we'll see widespread integration of Wiki functionality in other CollaborativeTools, such as blogs, online forums, and more. It's already started. Blog-Wiki integration (such as what I use) is not uncommon, and software like TWiki and JotSpot are showing the benefits of custom applications that use Wikis as the fundamental data structure. (JTS)

/tech/wiki | Posted at 6:52pm