It’s a Wiki, Wiki World | | 5.29.05
Want to add your 2 cents to an encyclopedia? Join the crowd
Being the founder of the Internet’s largest encyclopedia means Jimmy Wales gets a lot of bizarre e-mail. There are the correspondents who assume he wrote Wikipedia himself and is therefore an expert on everything — like the guy who found vials of mercury in his late grandfather’s attic and wanted Wales, a former options trader, to tell him what to do with them. There are kooks who claim to have found, say, a 9,000-year-old, 15-ft.-tall human skeleton and wonder whether Wales would be interested. But the e-mails that make him laugh out loud come from concerned newcomers who have just discovered they have total freedom to edit just about any Wikipedia entry at the click of a button. Oh my God, they write, you’ve got a major security flaw!
As the old techie saying goes, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in 76 languages—and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. (An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last.) Loyal Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox is more robust than for-profit competitors because thousands of amateur programmers get to look at the code and suggest changes. It’s the same principle that New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asserted in his best seller The Wisdom of Crowds: large groups of people are inherently smarter than an elite few.
Wikipedia is in the vanguard of a whole wave of wikis built on that idea. A wiki is a deceptively simple piece of software (little more than five lines of computer code) that you can download for free and use to make a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all members of your team are in different time zones? Start a wiki. In Silicon Valley, at least, wiki culture has already taken root. “A lot of corporations are using wikis without top management even knowing it,” says John Seely Brown, the legendary former chief scientist at Xerox PARC. “It’s a bottom-up phenomenon. The CIO may not get it, but the people actually doing the work see the need for them.”
Inspired by Wikipedia, a Silicon Valley start-up called Socialtext has helped set up wikis at a hundred companies, including Nokia and Kodak. Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations. …
The father of the wiki is Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb in 1995. The name came from his honeymoon in Hawaii, where you catch the “wiki wiki” (a Hawaiian term for “quick”) bus from the airport. …
If it has made to Time Magazine, then it has made it. Wikis are very interesting forms of social software — from the highly successful Wikipedia to the commercial variant like SocialText and the beta implementation JotSpot — to what is in essense a singular or very limited version of a wiki in the form of a weblog. The other main distinction between a wiki and a weblog is that in the former the content is highly distributed, whereas the latter is primarily chronological. The wiki is related to forum software in it’s distributed nature, but dissimilar significantly in terms of content where they more resemble group chats for group instant messaging. There appears to be at least three axes at play when reviewing social software: authorship (singular/limited v. open), content (goal oriented v. conversational), organization (distributed v. simple hierarchy, e.g., chronological).
My interest lies in the distributed and goal oriented aspects. Powerful applications can be seen in both the open, public and massively contributed Wikipedia, as well as, private application to large quantities of information that may or may not have obvious relationships or the relationships evolve over time. There are many platforms on which wikis may run — the most attractive to me are the ones, like MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia), that utilize the MySQL relational database. Key to its attractiveness is its platform independence and power of the open source database MySQL. I’ve been in the process of moving all my law school notes and projects from TexNotesPro and Mindmanager to a private MediaWiki installation. The notes are now platform independent and accessible anywhere there is internet access. I’ve even installed MediaWiki under EasyPHP onto a 1 GB USB 2.0 keychain fob and unto my desktop — simply sync’ing the MySQL databases removes the issue of internet connectivity as well as allowing all my notes to literally fit in my pocket.