Brain Candy #83 - All Things Wiki

I've mentioned wikis, collaboratively edited websites, several times in recent articles (Brain Candy #77 and #80 ). I don't believe that they will be the "next big thing" since there are too many people who are indifferent or even hostile to literacy. But I do believe they will be a persistent mechanism for communications and knowledge propagation in our future, as they have some features that haven't been commonly seen in communications technologies.

In case you're interested, some of the inspiration for this column can be found at web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf in an article called "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" by Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave. The paper documents a method of analyzing collaboratively edited documents to ascertain their properties. Since wikis are a new type of communications tool, there is no guarantee that "common sense" expectations about them will prove to be true. Indeed, most people would expect that such projects would fall prey to vandalism and user conflicts which would render them ineffective. At least so far, this has not proven true - successful wikis foster cooperation, manage conflict, and heal vandalism quite effectively even with the relatively primitive tools available to date.

Collaborative editing for the Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia project (en.wikipedia.org for the English version) has led to the development of significant quality content by non-professional authors. Collaboration is a source of this success, but managed conflict is also critical. There are few topics that can truly be described by an individual without some point of view creeping in. It is desirable that encyclopedia articles should be free of any particular point of view (nPOV in Wikipedia lingo). It is generally true that the initial author of an article will be interested in the subject he writes about. This often manifests itself in a positive or negative point of view. This may be tolerable if mild, in a non-controversial topic, such as "snake" or "Ghostbusters." It is not tolerated by the community in a topic which has controversial aspects, like "abortion," "Israel," or "George W. Bush." It also isn't tolerated if extreme - it isn't uncommon for a rabid fan of a particular music group to initiate an article about them in worshipful or hyperbolic prose. The article will usually be toned down in short order by later, less smitten readers. Sometimes, the conflicts can be very difficult to manage. In some cases, the very name of the article is a serious part of the controversy. Some rather long and pointed edit wars have occurred in the English Wikipedia over whether "Gdansk" or "Danzig" is the appropriate name for an article on the Polish city. Attempts of authors to use terms like "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" are met with tremendous resistance, if not used with care. A recent example concerned the Iraq prison scandals, where early on, guard Lynndie England was labeled a "war criminal" by one author. Consensus eventually formed on stating that many considered her to be a war criminal, which is a verifiably true statement, rather than a judgment.

Lest this become too much of an academic article, I'm going to stop expostulating on wikis, and give you some links to other interesting wikis beyond the English Wikipedia. If you know another language, there are a number of Wikipedia sites in languages such as Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Esperanto, Cherokee, Hindi, Tatar, Catalan and Welsh. The Wikipedia Project has committed to providing a wiki for any language that people are willing to support. You can find links to the foreign language editions of Wikipedia at the bottom of the English Wikipedia Main Page.

An interesting place to start exploring other wikis is from the "Wiki" entry in Wikipedia. The article offers a detailed definition of wikis and then lists many resource links pertaining to wikis. Just to pique your interest, one wiki I've become interested in is Memory Alpha - the encyclopedia for all things related to Star Trek. You can find it at www.memory-alpha.org . You might want to also check out the Meatball Wiki at www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki , which specializes in discussions about online communities.

The "Wiki" article also mentions "Wiki bus tours" which are web rings which link related wikis together, so that they might be easily accessed by visitors. Participating wikis usually have a "TourBusStop" page which links to other "bus connections" on the tour. To access the pertinent Wikipedia page, search Wikipedia for "Wikipedia:TourBusStop".

I believe that wikis will be a significant part of the lives of people with active minds in the future. Establishing a familiarity with them early in their lifecycle is something I've found very worthwhile.