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)
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
EEK Speaks
A blog about collaboration, community-building, and the various
goings-on at Blue Oxen
Associates, with occasional digressions on food and other vital
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