It’s going to be over 24°C in mid October. My wife tells me I should
stop reading OK Doomer.
At the end of 2021 I was exchanging emails with @Greta@fosstodon.org, author of Gretzuni, her wiki-like digital garden. At the end of 2023 I was also exchanging emails with @bouncepaw@merveilles.town, author of Melanocarpa, a sort of online encyclopedia and a wiki. This post grew out of these conversations.
What is "wiki culture" and how do wiki contributors get to know each other? That makes me wonder: how many people do we need for a behaviour to be a culture? How does it get transmitted? If people use Org Mode and Zettelkasten, are they participating in a wiki revival? Is Bullet Journaling part of wiki culture? Do you need to be acculturated to wiki culture? Where would that happen, since we don’t meet up. We only see us by the traces we leave. Hardly anybody reads Meatball Wiki these days; it used to be the wiki about wiki, and Life In Text.
Mostly I guess the problem is that there are so few sites acting as wikis the way I wanted them to work. Wikipedia has so many editors that hardly know each other. I only edit pages occasionally and I don’t know anybody. I run Emacs Wiki and I have hardly met anybody, nor talked to them. I exchange some emails with a very active editor, mostly when he writes in to tell me that the site is down or that he no longer has his favourite theme for the site.
So, is following signposts a culture? Here are the rules of writing stone tablets, on a stone tablet. You write another stone tablet and place it next to it. Is this stone tablet culture? I guess what I’m getting at is that there is no wiki culture because there hardly are any wikis as communities left. Wikis are simply those strange content management systems that are weird and disorganised. Or at least that’s the impression I get.
There was a time in 2012 when I was angry about people criticising Emacs Wiki and I wrote the best rant about wiki culture: How Emacs Wiki Works.
I just read through it all again, including the comments. Oh my.
Anyway, I think I have felt a sense of community with the people on the `#emacs` IRC channel; conversation enables a sense of community. I don’t think editing pages per se does that. It needs a purpose that unites. If you love something and then keep a wiki for the love of it, then the community has a nice site. But other than that, I don’t know.
For a brief moment, @bouncepaw@merveilles.town was very enthusiastic about a wiki revival. Perhaps there is something to it, but perhaps there simply is something to writing hypertext. Alone.
In that way, Oddmu is also a hypertext authoring tool that you use in public, but you use it alone, most likely. If I were to set it up for me and a bunch of friends, I might consider adding more social features such as noting who changed something, or implement a git back-end that monitored the filesystem for writes and checked any files written into a repository. Not now, though.
So what is wiki culture? Now that most wikis are dead with the exception of encyclopedias, there are two cultures: Encyclopedia writing culture and single author hypertext writing culture.
As far as single author hypertext writing culture goes, to have a wiki means to have a hypertext authoring setup with minimal guidelines.
A wiki is the simplest way to author hypertext: edit text files and link them to each other. The files live in a collection of pages hosted by the wiki. Perhaps there’s a folder hierarchy, perhaps there is not.
Editing text requires few user interface interactions: click the edit link on the web, and there’s the text, and there’s where you put the words, and then you click the save button, and – bam! – it’s live. Or you edit those files with your editor. The wiki serves the changed files as soon as you save them. It’s live.
This ease of use and this freedom brings with it some responsibility. We cannot rely on the user interface to guide us, we must make our own rules, our own wiki culture. We need to decide what’s on topic and what’s off topic, how to review changes, hold ourselves to our own standard, our norms. Writing remains as hard as ever. There are no editors and moderators except for us.
On the other hand, there’s also freedom gained – the freedom of being independent, like a blogger. When I had a conversation with @bouncepaw@merveilles.town via email, we wondered whether to summarize the conversation on a wiki page. I said that I’d like to put up my own summary of the discussion and that if he were to put up a summary on his site, his summary would probably be different, each reflecting our own priorities and background. Having two distinct wikis allows us to reflect that multifaceted reality. That is a good thing, as he succinctly put it.
That is, until one of our sites goes down. But that is a story for a different page.
#Wikis #Oddµ
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On fedi, @Greta@fosstodon.org answered:
$0.02: Wikis are ikiban: some can/should get cut away over time -
with the care of noting that which recurs; I have little experience
with open communities - but think "open" goes back to the idea of
xenia/hospitality, which means some level of trust. Or some
magnanimous good will and vision of togetherness that will overcome
any misuse. What are we daring to do, together?
I feel this like a hole in my heart. With the pandemic, I fear I have lost a lot of trust in people, in strangers. Having my wiki locked down seems natural to me, now.
Sure, I like the email conversation. But I also like the fact that nobody is commenting on the site without me looking at it. An uncomfortable level of control. Where is hospitality, now?
I don't know. I no longer dare, even though I dared for twenty years.
As a developer, I can't help think of ways to have it both ways.
I could check it all into a repository for complete undo. Or I could save a "snapshot" of the current state, and update that every now and then. A snapshot could be as simple as an archive. Or it could be a backup directory (or a series of directories) maintained by rsync. Or it could be a way to keep changes made by strangers in a sort of patch file, a proposed change that has to be confirmed by somebody else.
Then again, I keep hearing that rasping voice in my head: "This meeting could have been an email." And by that I mean, this technical solution to leaving comments and having them approved could have been based on emails. Specially since I already discovered that I like emails.
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Continued: Writing alone, together.
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On her blog, @Sandra@idiomdrottning.org writes:
… the entire thing is permanently in a state of rough draft. That “wiki-like-ness” has made me feel a li’l guilty about not turning on public write-ability, at first. Then, the more I used it, something happened. I found myself feeling less like the curator of my own garden and more a part of something bigger and interconnected. – Wiki on the wider web
I like the emphasis on things being drafts and revisions always being possible. This is not print.
@ratfactor@mastodon.art also talks about this:
I think the lasting impression of "wikis" on the Web, whether huge and social like Wikipedia or tiny and individual like my website, is the interconnectedness of pages and the editability of the content. (Whether or not they actually are, there’s an *intention* to update the pages.) – Wiki