BarBar Redux

Thanks to those of you who dropped by BarBar last night! Not surprisingly given that Scott McMullan and I organized, it was a very Wiki-oriented crowd: folks from JotSpot, Socialtext, and Atlassian were there to relax.    (LAT)

https://i0.wp.com/static.flickr.com/120/260460715_429ee26d12_m.jpg?w=700    (LAU)

If you want to know what makes Silicon Valley great, this picture says it all. Where else in the world is it commonplace for competitors to get together for beers after work and talk openly about their work and their lives? We had great conversation (not all of it Wiki-related), and I had the chance to preach WikiOhana to my enterprisey peers.    (LAV)

The highlight of my evening was enjoying the sweet fare of the Tamale Lady for the first time.    (LAW)

https://i0.wp.com/static.flickr.com/94/260460413_25cb3c9a58_m.jpg?w=700    (LAX)

They were ridiculously tasty. How is it that I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over ten years, and I had never heard of the Tamale Lady before? Ah well, now I’m in the know (and so are you).    (LAY)

Angry Rant on Wikis

Earlier this month, Jonas Luster invited me to speak at WikiWednesday. I didn’t have anything prepared, and I didn’t feel particularly motivated to prepare anything, so, I told Jonas that I was just going to rant. Jonas, being Jonas, loved the idea. So after IIW wrapped on May 3, I headed up to Palo Alto. I promised folks at IIW that I was going to give an angry rant on Wikis, and so several people decided to come watch, including Phil Windley, who blogged it. Feedback was great, except for a few complaints that I wasn’t all that angry. I promise to get more worked up next time, folks.    (KK2)

I’ve made all the points I made in my rant before in some form or another, often on this blog. Nevertheless, it was the first time I shared these ideas as one semi-cohesive thought, and so it’s worth rehashing the points here.    (KK3)

Overview    (KK4)

There are two things that make Wikis cool:    (KK5)

Lots of folks have latched onto the open access part, and there’s been some interesting exploration in this area. Very few folks know about or understand the Shared Language aspect. I think this is a huge loss, because it’s what makes Wikis truly transformational.    (KK8)

Open Access    (KK9)

Since I had just come from IIW, I started with digital identity. First, I said that all Wikis should support some form of distributed Single Sign-On, be it OpenID or something else. Implementing Single Sign-On does not imply loss of anonymity. Most Wikis give you the choice of logging in or not; implementing Single Sign-On would give you the additional choice of using a single identity across multiple sites.    (KKA)

Why would this be useful? Consider Wikipedia. As my friend, Scott Foehner, commented in a previous post on this topic (to be visible again when I turn comments back on), Wikipedia actually consists of a number of different Wikis, one for each language plus a number of special Wikis, such as its community site. Each of those Wikis require a separate user account. Not only is this a huge inconvenience, it effectively prevents you from having a single digital identity (along with your associated reputation) across each of these sites.    (KKB)

Simply having Single Sign-On across all of the Wikipedia Wikis would be valuable. More importantly, the identity community has converged to the point where it doesn’t make sense to roll your own protocols. There are several good existing protocols to choose from, and many of those are in the process of converging.    (KKC)

Reputation is closely associated with identity, and it’s also been one of the most popular topics in the Wiki community over the past year. However, most people have a misguided notion of what reputation is and what we should do about it. Reputation is what others think about you. Reputations exist in every system, whether or not they are explicitly represented. Reputation cannot be quantified. However, you can identify the factors that determine reputation and make those factors more explicit.    (KKD)

In Wikis, this could manifest itself in a number of ways. For example, one way to determine the quality of a page is to view the number of people who have edited it. You could make that number explicit by subtly changing the background color of that page — slightly yellowed for a page with few contributors and bright white for a page with many contributors.    (KKE)

The important point here is that you are not making a value judgement on reputation. You are not saying that a page that has many authors is better than a page that does not. All you are doing is making it easy to see that a page has many authors. Readers can determine for themselves how much weight (if any) to place on this factor for the reputation algorithm in their heads.    (KKF)

The most important button on a Wiki page is the Edit button. That button implies Permission To Participate. It should be one of the most visible buttons on any Wiki. If a Wiki looks too good, that discourages participation. Who wants to edit something that looks like a finished product? Ward Cunningham used to suggest sprinkling typos across a Wiki page to encourage others to participate.    (KKG)

At this point in the rant, I plugged both Ward and MeatballWiki. The Wikis success is no accident. A lot of the fundamental design features that make Wikis powerful were completely intentional, a testament to Ward’s brilliance. Additionally, most of what I ranted about is not new to the Wiki community. A lot of it — and more — has been discussed on the venerable MeatballWiki. If you really want to get a deeper understanding of how to improve Wikis, you should be on Meatball.    (KKH)

Shared Language    (KKI)

Last September, I wrote:    (KKJ)

What really makes the Wiki’s LinkAsYouThink feature special is that it facilitates the creation of SharedLanguage among the community that uses it. As I’ve said so often here, SharedLanguage is an absolute prerequisite for collaboration. The lack of SharedLanguage is the most common roadblock to effective collaboration, be it a small work team or a community of thousands.  T    (KKK)

It bears repeating over and over and over again. Wikis are transformational because they facilitate Shared Language. This is a feature that should be propagated far and wide, both in Wikis and other Collaborative Tools.    (KKL)

I noted two possible convergences. The first is Wikis and tagging. They both share a similar principle, namely namespace clash, and we should look at ways of combining these two concepts. For example, where’s the tag cloud view of a Wiki’s page index? Another idea: Clicking on a tag should also return Wiki pages of the same name. Technorati should be indexing Wiki pages and treating their titles as tags.    (KKM)

The second is implementing Link As You Think in all tools. Blogs that are built on top of Wikis (such as TWiki and JotSpot) have these features, but you don’t have to build a tool on top of a Wiki for this to work. This blog runs on blosxom, but it has Link As You Think. Chris Dent‘s blog runs on MovableType, and it has the same feature. It shouldn’t just apply to blogs, either. It should work in web-based forums and other Collaborative Tools.    (KKN)

SDForum Collaboration SIG

I’m now the co-chair of the new SDForum Collaboration SIG. Looking forward to working with the other co-chairs: Scott McMullan, Patti Wilson, and Charles Welsh. If you’re interested in participating, check out the shiny new Wiki, courtesy of Scott and JotSpot.    (K0M)

The first meeting is Monday night, November 14, 6:30pm at Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara. The panel is entitled, “Show Me The Money!” Panelists are Joe Kraus (JotSpot), David Hornik (August Capital), William Glazier (Redwood Ventures), David Coleman (Collaborative Strategies), and Sam Pullara (Gauntlet Systems). Charles will moderate. It’s free for SDForum members, $15 for everyone else.    (K0N)

Should be a great event. Hope to see you there.    (K0O)

The Brilliant Essence of Wikis

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an unusually large number of discussions about the essence of Wikis — why they are so beautiful and important as Collaborative Tools. I realized I’ve never posted my thoughts on the topic, so I’m correcting that here.    (JTE)

Wikis have this brilliant feature, a feature that’s so simple and obvious, it’s often overlooked, yet it’s largely responsible for the success of Wikis. Incidentally, it’s also an intentional feature, which is yet another reflection of Ward Cunningham‘s design genius.    (JTF)

In a nutshell, that feature is the ability to Link As You Think by writing the name of the page, even if the page you want to link to doesn’t currently exist.    (JTG)

While you’re letting that sink in, let’s look at a measurable way this feature is valuable. A lot of folks view Wikis as a crude CMS. I don’t dispute this perspective — you can certainly use Wikis that way — but it’s not what makes Wikis interesting. Nevertheless, I see queries all the time on various nonprofit technology lists asking to compare Wikis to other CMSes, so here goes. It takes at least three steps to link to a new page with most CMSes (create new page, go to old page, create link), whereas it only takes only one with Wikis (write page name). That’s significant.    (JTH)

What really makes the Wiki’s Link As You Think feature special is that it facilitates the creation of Shared Language among the community that uses it. As I’ve said so often here, Shared Language is an absolute prerequisite for collaboration. The lack of Shared Language is the most common roadblock to effective collaboration, be it a small work team or a community of thousands.    (JTI)

Look at the page index of any Wiki, and you’ll see the vocabulary of that community. Thanks to the other affordances of the tool, that vocabulary accomodates multiple definitions while encouraging convergence where appropriate. Most importantly, that vocabulary is Shared Language that has emerged from the community itself and that continues to evolve.    (JTJ)

Here’s a real example. At the AdvocacyDev Wiki, which Blue Oxen Associates hosts, the top six most linked-to pages (out of 363 total) are:    (JTK)

From this very small sample, we can see that VoIP (and Asterisk in particular), IndyVoter, and CivicSpace are all much discussed tools among folks working on online advocacy tools. We can also see that Carl Coryell-Martin is an active member of this community (or at least one of the more diligent members when it comes to documenting).    (JTR)

The Wiki’s ability to facilitate Shared Language — a direct consequence of Link As You Think — is what makes it so important as a Collaborative Tool. In the future, when enough developers recognize this, we’ll see widespread integration of Wiki functionality in other Collaborative Tools, such as blogs, online forums, and more. It’s already started. Blog-Wiki integration (such as what I use) is not uncommon, and software like TWiki and JotSpot are showing the benefits of custom applications that use Wikis as the fundamental data structure.    (JTS)