One of the interesting topics that came up during this last summer at various conferences -- dare I call it the Summer of Wiki? -- was the idea that experienced wiki community members need to share our cultural values and community-building experience with new wiki sites and developers. Christoph Sauer coined a term for this effort: Wiki Ohana, based on the Hawaiian concept of ohana, or extended family.
I was glad to see that the tireless Mark Dilley has started a new wiki at http://wikiohana.net/ to organize the Ohana effort. I plan on taking some time to work on this site; I think it's going to be crucial for riding the publicity wave that wiki is on right now.
tags: wiki ohana mark dilley
Wikitorial triumphant
Last summer, the Los Angeles Times tried an extremely interesting experiment in creating a wikitorial, or wiki-based editorial. The experiment was a notorious disaster: due to excessive abuse and fighting, the Times cancelled the experiment before publishing the results. The entire experience stained wiki's reputation for an entire year.
Fast forward to 2006: oh, how times have changed. Ryan Singel of W I R E D magazine put up a 1000-word article about wikis on a wiki at SocialText. He invited the general public to edit the article. The result, which is a reasonably cohesive article on wikis, was published in wired under the title Veni, Vidi, Wiki. It's not the best article in the entire world on wiki, but it's not half bad.
Some people have been down on the project -- mostly wiki businesses who felt they didn't get prominent enough coverage -- but I think that the bar was set so low by the LA Times that it's hard not to call getting to publication a success. Looking back, what were the possible factors that made the WIRED article work when the LA Times one didn't?
- Point of view. The LA Times article was an editorial, while the WIRED article was ostensibly a news story. Editorials are intrinsically opinion-oriented. Wiki can work for expressing personal opinions, but it's not easy, and the result usually isn't a very good read. It's much better as a means for expressing agreed-upon consensus information.
- Topic. The LA Times decided to use the extremely divisive issue of the war in Iraq as the subject of its editorial. How they expected to have a collaborative editing success with this topic is hard to understand. By concentrating on the wiki method itself, on the other hand, the WIRED article covered a much cooler topic that lent itself better to dispassionate discussion and consensus.
- Shared goals. The Times tried to reach out to a mass-market audience that was extremely passionate and divided on the topic at hand. The discussion of the Iraq war had already largely degenerated to name-calling and demonization at that point; the people who were participating had more to gain from keeping the other side from getting a say than from getting their own opinion across. For the WIRED article, the audience was experienced wiki community members -- people who know and understand the technology and culture. They had a shared goal with WIRED and with each other -- to spread the word about wiki in a way that's easy to understand. Although Angela Beesley's point and Mike Cannon-Brookes's article correctly note that the increasing commercial interest in wikis did bring some baggage along, I think there was some common ground that participants could reach.
- Organizational commitment. This, I think, was the key success factor. The LA Times posted their wikitorial as an experiment -- they dipped their toe in the water and pulled back as soon as the going got tough. As far as I know, they had no community management or leadership, and no seasoned wiki community members participating. On the other hand, Ryan Singel's article was hosted on SocialText, and SocialText has made a good business out of teaching companies and organizations the Wiki Way. They've got some of the best wiki minds around on their payroll, and it shows in their ability to manage a wiki project.
Although I think that these experiments are interesting, I don't think they make a very good measurement of whether wiki can work. Obviously, we have thousands of examples that wiki works (see WikiIndex if you need more convincing). I think that people's engagement with a wiki is proportional to their belief in the importance of their own work. If wikis are relegated to a tiny part of a Web site or publication, participants pick up on this de-emphasis and don't put much effort into the project; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that to be healthy, a wiki needs to be a major part of its parent project, if not the whole thing. That's why, I guess, WikiNews is going to continue to be more relevant and important than one-off wiki article stunts.
tags: wiki wikitorial W I R E D latimes ryan singel socialtext
Hyperscope
I'm psyched to see that Hyperscope has achieved its 1.0 milestone. Hyperscope is the extension of Doug Engelbart's ideas about hypertext and human intelligence augmentation into the technologies of today's World Wide Web. Eugene Eric Kim has been working hard on the project and gave a great demo of the tool at Wikisym in August. Congratulations to EEK and the entire Hyperscope team!
tags: hyperscope hypertext doug engelbart eek