Long-time followers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed my habit of smooshing seemingly harmless words together. I often do it with people’s names — for example, Eugene Eric Kim. Some of you may have guessed why I did this, but most of you probably figured my space key was broken. (GB)
Starting today, my reasons should be more clear. Notice that “Eugene Eric Kim” is not only improperly written, it is now also a link. Browse through my older blog entries, and you’ll notice that all of the smooshed words are either links or are followed by a question mark link. This is blog-Wiki integration at its finest. (GC)
Why I Turned WikiWord Integration On (GD)
My purple plugin for Blosxom always had this WikiWord feature, but I kept it off until today. The main reason for this was that I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use it. (GE)
I already use several Wikis quite actively — the Blue Oxen Wikis as well as a private one for my personal notes. I try to use the Blue Oxen Wikis for my ideas on collaboration whenever possible, so that they would become part of a collective repository of ideas rather than a personal one. Even though a personal Wiki is publically editable, the individual’s name can act as a kind of branding. Because this blog acts as a work log (my occasional food entries aside), my ideal would have been to integrate this Wiki with the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory Wiki. Unfortunately, that feature is not available. (GF)
At minimum, I knew a personal PurpleWiki installation would be useful as a support glossary for this blog (more on this below). Nevertheless, I decided to write as if I had Wiki integration, but to wait a while before actually turning it on. This wasn’t hard for me: using WikiWords is practically second nature. Most of my entries ended up chockful of WikiWords, leading many to question my competence with the keyboard. These questions reached critical mass recently, and so I decided to turn the feature on. (GG)
More importantly, I decided how I wanted to use my new Wiki overall: as a support structure for this blog, and also as a place for publishing essay drafts, design notes, and other random thoughts. Stuff I publish there will be implicitly labelled, “Work In Progress.” This will serve as a disclaimer that will make me more comfortable publishing my half-baked ideas, while also encouraging others to contribute while the ideas are still half-baked. (GH)