Brain Candy #77 - Wikis and Blogs

The Internet, as befits a novel mechanism for communication, has begun to spawn new methods for communicating information. For example, I've talked in the past about peer-to-peer file sharing (issues #44 , #45 , and #46 ), perhaps the most well known example. If you're reading this column, you almost certainly like information, at least of some kinds. Finding what you're looking for, when you're on a mission of discovery, is the best kind of brain candy.

While looking for some information today, Google directed me to a wiki (pronounced weekee.) I wanted to know the half-life of sodium-24, to test a programmable calculator for my PDA that I was trying out (www.infinitysw.com/products/poweronegraph.html , if you're interested.) I typed "sodium half life" into Google and looked at the results. The first few hits weren't useful, dealing either with commercial sources of nuclear materials or the biological half-live of sodium. The first promising hit was "Sodium - Wikipedia." The Google abstract itself gave the half-life of sodium-24, which is about 15 hours, but I decided to visit the page anyway, to see what else it had that might be interesting or useful. Clicking on the link sent me to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sodium . The article was very good, and I spent a few minutes looking at what was available for other chemical elements. At that point, I decided to change the topic of this month's column.

A wiki is a collaboratively authored hypertext document. Wikipedia, at en.wikipedia.org , is a wiki dedicated to providing a complete, accurate free-content on-line encyclopedia. As a wiki, it is maintained and enhanced continually, by volunteers. The first wiki was the WikiWikiWeb, also known as Ward's Wiki or just Wiki, and is still active at c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors . Its focus was intended to be software development, but as the original wiki, it was the first wiki experience for many users, leading to some content drift and subject to the growing pains of the wiki concept. Indeed, it has some interesting notes on things like WikiSquatting, WalledGardens, ChatMode, and WikiSpam - some of the problems you have in a relatively uncontrolled collaborative environment. Wikipedia discusses another problem I wondered about - site vandalism. Apparently, the more advanced wiki software can undo edits that are deterimined to be detrimental to the wiki. If for example, I went to the sodium entry for Wikipedia, and deleted the fine article there and replaced it with a description of the time I blew up a piece of sodium in my high school chemistry lab, in very short order, I expect the original article would be back. Some wikis implement mechanisms to register editors, or block the malicious, but such controls in most wikis are often surprisingly loose.

One thing considered very bad form in most wikis is for an author to use the wiki as a blog. "Blog" is a slang term for "weblog." A good definition for blog/weblog can be found in the Wikipedia at en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog. A weblog is a website that contains periodic postings in a common webspace. The individual posts can share a particular theme, or be under the control of a limited group of authors, often just one. This definition of a blog would allow lists of links, like mine at home.neo.rr.com/catbar/b_links/bar_link.htm to be considered to be a directory blog. I believe that our ecomonline digest on Yahoo! also fits the definition of a news blog. Personal blogs are online journals that allow an author to communicate pretty much anything to an audience. Growing in prominance are political blogs, such as the one at www.andrewsullivan.com . Related are the watch blogs, that monitor information sources (even other blogs) for bias. Try www.blogosphere.us , if you would like to view a rather large collection of links to blogs.