2004-11-28 Wikis

Went to Bern, visited my uncle and aunt, and went to the blogger meeting... See Bloggertreffen BE.

Talked with Heather about wikis:

There’s a sense of ownership in blogs both in claiming what you write and in the ability to lock out trolls.
Wikis have the ability to replace the dialectic back and forth of a discussion with the conclusion (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), without requiring future readers to go through the entire thread again.
She was sceptical and felt reworking ThreadMode was “changing history” (à la 1984, I guess). If you need to illustrate the conclusion with selected arguments from the discussion, you are free to do so. Use the discussion as raw material for case studies.
On a wiki, documenting the process of how we arrived at a document is not as important as the resulting document itself.
When conflicting parties share the same wiki, there’s a problem: If unchecked, an EditWar follows. WikiPedia uses the NeutralPointOfView (NPOV) to counter this. The NPOV means that value judgements are difficult to make in a diverse community, because WikiBasedDecisionMaking is hard.
In a diverse community, value judgements are replaced by a list of conflicting view points presented in a “balanced way”. Where as diversity is thus cultivated, something else is lost in this process: A strong sense of direction. You may be able to regain it by splitting pages into various dedicated pages.
Often wiki communities emerge arround technical topics such as software, so this is not often a problem. When wikis are used like blogs with a strong sense of ownership, there is no problem either. The problem appears only if you claim RadicalInclusiveness.

Unfortunately the discussion with Heather seemed much shorter and more disjoint, now that I think of the points I tried to make. Oh well. 😄 I guess I should added even more links to CommunityWiki and MeatballWiki. Who knows.

#Wikis