Wikis {Tools}

See also pmWiki in particular

From personal use

• MediaWiki (thus Wikipedia) syntax cheatsheet
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup
• why integration matters
  • 05/06 ~3pm discussion with Paola on modularity
• River Of Time you can not step into the same river twice.
• general lessons from pmWiki and Wiki should be imported here
• :help : the MOST important command ;)
• Presentations.Introduction To Wikis
• ReadingNotes.Wikipatterns
• wiki software I tried
  • tiddlywiki
  • mediawiki
    • through Wikipedia
  • SemanticMediaWiki
  • pmwiki
    • here and on several other personal websites
    • AAAI
  • dokuwiki
  • confluence
  • few others for GE40 at UTC
    • cf notes
  • "wiki-like" software
    • Google Wave
    • Google Docs through collaborative mode
    • Microsoft Office through shared file (over email or LAN) and revision mode

WikiFest (or "live wiki-ing")

Discovered during (a somewhat self-frustrating) presentation of the wiki during MBE07

• Tikizens meet! : Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware - community site meeting between Tiki contributors (that usually only meet online).
  • http://tikiwiki.org/Model -> This is what we do
  • This is what we use for screensharing: http://tikiwiki.org/live
  • freenode/#wiki 16/062010 22:40 with mlaporte
• leverage live coding practices described in Programming
• I think seeing the result of your work instantly is one of the key aspect of Wikipedia, it's a very short feedback loop

Radical changes invisible to the reader

• changing from the default edit page to the edit page was like changing for a new pen
• changing from AllRecentChanges to the minimalist and goal oriented entry page is more like changing the private table of content
• yet the content itself and the cover didn't change so for the reader it's still the same yet, hopefully, in the long run content will improve thanks to those invisible changes
• it's really like the brain
  • you do not move content around and shuttle data here and there but with few connections changed you can turn the entire system around
  • major changes are not about adding a lot of content but rather about how easily you can re-organize the whole system based on new principles
  • quality of your system based on how flexible yet efficient it is
    • how it can handle changes to adapt in order to respond to new constraints
  • cf Cognition#WikiBrainMapping
• regarding gradual changes see also http://www.ourp.im/Papers/InvisibleToTheEye

Video tutorials

• Wiki in general
  • Wikis in Plain English by Commoncraft
• Wiki modules
  • IBM QEDWiki (nice visuals but ending with IBM's logo)

Events

• RecentChangesCamp aka RCC or RoCoCo
• WikiSym International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
• Wikimania operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
• Wiki Wednesdays held (mostly) the first Wednesday of each month

References

• The duality of knowledge by Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble, Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, 2002
  • mentioning the "Autopoietic View" discovered earlier through Francisco Varela in Cognition

See also

• Five myths of enterprise wiki deployment Cynapse.com Blog
• WikiMatrix Compare them all
• Wikis as a Complex-Adaptive System by Martin Cleaver, Guest Blog, Cognitive Edge June 2010

To explore

• Meatball:WikiFractality
  • http://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wikidev.cgi?FrontPage
• Meatball:WikiPediaIsNotTypical
• session Dynamics of Knowledge Creation in Wikis of Power & Knowledge conference, September 2010
• Many Eyes Wikified, Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research
• startups
  • Imindi "world’s first Thought Engine", CrunchBase Profile
  • iGlue raises $550K in Series B round to “wikify the web“, TechCrunch May 2010
  • FluidDB Aims To Become The Wikipedia Of Databases, TechCrunch May 2010
• scientific wikis
  • Citizen Science - A wiki encompassing all science experiment in a new form of scientific discourse.
  • Tricki brand new Wiki-style site that is intended to develop into a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques.
• distributed wikis
  • synchronization and merging
    • inspited by CVS/SVN/Programming#SCM?
• wikifs file system interface to the wiki data stored in dir (based on Plan 9)
• Hatta Wiki by Radomir Dopieralski (aka TheSheep on #wiki/freenode)
  • easily started in any Mercurial repository
• Wiki Creativity Index monitor the evolution of creativity (and activity) in the wiki world.

Note

My notes on Tools gather what I know or want to know. Consequently they are not and will never be complete references. For this, official manuals and online communities provide much better answers.