You are viewing a read-only archive of the Blogs.Harvard network. Learn more.

The Longest Now


Wikis : Information, communities, and feedback loops.
Thursday June 23rd 2005, 6:15 pm
Filed under:

Wikis are cool.

People who wiki are part of a community

People who are part of a community make a difference

If you don’t have much information to process,
don’t have a community, or don’t want others to
make a difference, you don’t need a wiki.
(but they’re still cool)

Wikis enable people to cooperate to build new information and push boundaries.

Wikis are changing our world

Implementations include Mediawiki, Twiki, Socialtext.

Wiki is Hawaiian for fast; keeping up with fast things is what this talk is about


Communication:

Recentchanges.

Talk pages for every article.

Special community pages; other community baggage (Mailing lists,
IM, Skype, etc.)


Soft Security and tradeoffs.

Robots and vandals. Mechanisms, tradeoffs.

Troublemakers and trolls. Community mechanisms, tradeoffs.

Advantages to not being too hard : exponential growth varies on the time to make an edit. 95% of users are good.

Slowing down edits; imposing delays.


The unexpected

Having no structure means having to make all structure; almost all parts of the site/km can be changed. Slower to do known things, but faster to do unknown things. many unknown things are simply impossible with other tools (separate sidebars, page-changing templates and other inclusions, extended namespaces for disambiguation as meta-content grows)

Comments Off on Wikis : Information, communities, and feedback loops.







Bad Behavior has blocked 174 access attempts in the last 7 days.