Wiki Developer Meeting Today; WikiWednesday Tomorrow

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Two important events are happening in Wiki-land today and tomorrow. First, this afternoon at 2pm PDT (21:00 GMT), there will be a worldwide IRC meeting for Wiki developers on #wikiohana at irc.freenode.net. The main agenda item: WikiCreole. This was one of the outcomes from RecentChangesCamp last month. The cool thing is that folks have been hanging out regularly on the channel, and that Andreas Gohr whipped up an IRC logger for us. If you do any Wiki development, please join us!    (MBM)

Tomorrow night, WikiWednesday will be moving to Citizen Space in San Francisco, and I’ll be the inaugural speaker at the first non-Palo Alto event. I’ll be talking about my recent work on Wiki Interoperability:    (MBN)

Market growth is healthy for everyone in the Wiki world. More Wiki companies and technology means greater market awareness and innovation. But Wikis are also about community and collaboration. Are we as a community collaborating as much as we could? Are there opportunities we’re missing by not collaborating more? Eugene Eric Kim will preview his upcoming paper on Wiki interoperability, where he describes real-world end-user pain, concrete opportunities (especially ways Wiki developers can help the entire space by improving their own tools), and a practical strategy (WikiOhana) for achieving interoperability.    (MBO)

Hope to see many of you there!    (MBP)

WikiClock: The Next Killer Wiki App

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Got back from Montreal and RoCoCo 2007 last Friday with a pile of notes and a case of the flu, which pretty much killed my productivity this weekend. Fortunately, spring conference season for me is over, and I’m boycotting all summer conferences with the possible exception of Wikimania in Taipei this August, which means I’ve got plenty of time to digest and regurgitate. As usual, it’ll come in bits and pieces, starting with this post.    (MAV)

RoCoCo pretty much kicked butt. Much props go to Evan Prodromou, Anne Goldenberg, Antoine Beaupre, and the entire Montreal Wiki community for pulling off such a great event. Lots of participants traveled to attend, including several Europeans, which made the experience much richer. This included representatives from every PHP-based Wiki (Tim Starling of Mediawiki, Andreas Gohr of Doku Wiki, Reini Urban of PhpWiki, Patrick Michaud of PmWiki, and Marc Laporte of TikiWiki), which was awesome. I was happy to see old friends from afar and from not-so-far, and I met several great new folks. WikiOhana is a wonderful thing.    (MAW)

The best session was Evan’s, “Wiki And…,” which he nefariously scheduled at the same time as my Wiki Interoperability session so I couldn’t attend. That didn’t prevent me from learning about his incredibly brilliant idea: WikiClock, made possible by Gordon McCreight‘s most excellent service, pageoftext.com.    (MAX)

What is WikiClock? It’s a clock on a Wiki that tells you the current time in GMT. How does it know the current time? Someone edits the time. Who edits it? Whoever feels so motivated.    (MAY)

WikiClock is a great example of a totally ludicrous application of a Wiki. The point of Evan’s session is that Wiki-enthusiasm can lead to overly narrow thinking. Wikis are great, but they’re not the end-all-and-be-all of collaborative tools. There are a whole slew of good tools out there. Use the right one for the right job.    (MAZ)

The story doesn’t end there, however. What makes WikiClock all the more ridiculous is that people are actually using it. You heard me right. The buzz from Evan’s session started propagating pretty quickly. If you check WikiClock right now, chances are the time is correct. And if it’s not, well, correct it!    (MB0)

WikiClock is that rare breed of joke, where you laugh, then you stop and think, “You know, it’s really not that bad of an idea.” Next thing you know, it’s no longer a joke. I know of only one other joke like it: Parrot, the virtual machine for dynamic languages that started off as an April Fool’s joke.    (MB1)