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Ok, geminauts, prepared to get a li’l confused since we normally use the word “web” to mean the HTTP, JavaScript-laden muck that’s not Gemini, or at least I do, but in this one I’m gonna use “web” to mean an interconnected web of texts. Even though some of, or even most of, those texts live in Gemini or on Gopher.
Perhaps there is something to it, but perhaps there simply is something to writing hypertext. Alone.
I mean I don’t just make internal links. I link to other people and to Wikipedia. Ideally the entire web is one big web. “Wiki” was invented by Ward to make web quickly. Wiki means fast or quick.
Before wiki, most (not all, but most) people made web in one of two ways: bug-ridden GUI hells like Macromedia Dreamweaver, or hand-writing HTML the long way. M4 and other shortcuts weren’t something we, the slovenly post–Eternal-September arrivees, were familiar with. Wiki made “text-near, minimalist” markup mainstream.
And yes, Wards wiki was also publicly editable. If someone’s gonna argue that that’s an inalienable part of the definition of a wiki, that’s fine. When I switched from UseMod to Jekyll, I first thought “this is gonna be a blog, not a wiki” but I made some decisions early on, like “no dates in URLs” that has led me to keep editing and polishing old pages. It’s like 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. I make links to my other pages, sure, I do write interconnectedly, but I also link to Wikipedia and to other blogs.
It’s all one big world wide web.