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This weblog post is a little more personal than my other post

The process of organizing the wiki community - already parts of it that are organized, but for the most part, it is a bunch of interesting people doing interesting things.

“The Universal “Wiki” Edit Button leads to a page where you can collaborate, not just comment, commit or comply.” — Ward Cunningham, Inventor of Wiki

Personally, I am most excited by the Oddmuse implementation and am looking forward to extending that wiki out to more people’s attention.

It was very exciting to see wiki developers and wiki hosts extend their wikis into this idea and add themselves to the list.

All in all, this has been a fun few weeks, culminating in an exciting 30 hours or so. As with wiki, I look forward to what others will make of this.

“The amazing quality of many wikis, especially wikipedia, makes people afraid to contribute. But wikis want you to edit them. This button is meant as an invitation for surfers to contribute as much or as little as they want.” — Ehud Lamm

Angela’s session at WikiSym 2006, titled “How and why Wikipedia works”, gave the audience an inside look at the culture of Wikipedia and some of the keys to its success. There was lots to learn for anyone involved in a larger public wiki. Here are five Wikipedia pillars:

Five Operational Pillars:

1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

• though it does cover more than that
• no original research / secondary source - this allows article sources to be verified
• accuracy
• no vanity pages

2. NPOV

• advocates no single point of view
• multiple points of view
• verifiable sources

3. Wikipedia is free content

• GFDL / can use for any purpose anyone wants to
• Allows anyone to get into disrtibuting content

4. Code of conduct

• Civility
• No personal attacks
• Three revert rule (per day)
• Assume good faith

5. Wikipedia does not have firm rules

• “Ignore all rules”
• Be bold / you don’t have to read all of the policies

Having grown as much as it has, Wikipedia has an entire sets of guidelines for things that most smaller wiki’s do not. For example, when editors can’t agree on an article, there is a documented escalation path, starting with Avoidance, Discussion, Discussion with others, Opinion Polls, Mediation, Disengagement and finally ending with Arbitration. Quite a process!

Equally impressive are the mechanisms for maintaining community, which include person to person interaction, barnstars, regional meetups and even a welcoming committee.

Wikipedia is great and if you don’t believe me, then just check out “Why Wikipedia is so great“, and just to make sure that is presented from a balanced perspective, you may also wish to check out: “Why Wikipedia is not so great” — but mind is already made up.

(Previous article on Angela)

This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Gil Penchina, Angela Beesley, and Jimmy Wales about the launch of their new “world travel guide”, world.wikia.com. I’m the co-founder of another Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel, which just merged with a rival project, World66. I was disappointed when I heard about the launch of world.wikia.com, and I thought an email was appropriate.

Gil, Angela, Jimmy,

I’m writing to you about world.wikia.com.

As wiki service providers, we straddle two very different worlds: the competitive world of Web business, and the cooperative world of Free Culture.

From a business perspective, nothing is more natural than having two or more competing Web sites in the same space. It stirs us to provide better products and service to our customers.

But from a Free Culture perspective, having two incompatible, uncooperative projects working on the same problem is wasteful and wrong-headed. It splits the community’s effort and time; it wastes energy on needless antagonism; and it makes people sit out entirely as they wait to see whether either project will succeed. (read more)

Evan is co-founder of Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/) — the free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide, and Gil is the new CEO of Wikia (http://www.wikia.com/) — which offers free MediaWiki hosting for your community to build a free content wiki-based website.

I hope that Wikia can figure this one out.

via O’Reilly Network comes a good basic Wiki 101 article:

“This article was written using a wiki, as were most of the 100 hacks in our book, Mind Hacks.” … “They’re (wiki) messy, immediate, and a powerful way of sharing thinking space with your collaborators.

Once you’ve used a wiki for a project, you’ll find it hard to go back to regular methods. You’ll find yourself using wiki syntax in emails, and your own WikiWords in conversation.”

WikiIndex link to article

From [[Wikinews]] comes thin story:
: [[Wikipedia:Yell|Yell]], the worlds biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down [[Yellowikis]], the wiki based yellow pages directory.

: They accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of “misrepresentation”, “passing off” and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could “constitute an ‘instrument of fraud’”

: Yell are demanding that Paul and Rosa Close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. (Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, Yellowikis made a loss of $500 which was used to print t-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt)

”’editors note, does anyone know how to make WordPress correctly format MediaWiki markup?”’

An excellent article, The Independent: New Media: Who are the real winners now we’ve all gone Wiki-crazy?

What wiki does for its users is what blogging did for web publishing: it provides an easy, quick, means to an end. In the words of Ward Cunningham, an author and an inventor of wiki technology: “Wiki does for knowledge what the assembly line does for material.”

Refreshing to see others with the hopeful vision, nice work Ana Kronschnabel and Thomas Rawlings

This article from Asbury Park Press makes an interesting point about how companies will have to manage their PR in the “free-wheeling online world of Wikipedia.” It seems to me the writer either doesn’t understand wiki or is just choosing to focus on a large website, Wikipedia.

What is more interesting to me is what companies and governmental organizations are going to have to do, or not have to do, in a “free-wheeling online world of” wiki.

They mention Eli Lilly and Co. and the edits to that page on Wikipedia, but what I can imagine is companies having to figure out what to do with an entire wiki dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry or even to Eli Lilly and Co. itself. This forces transparency. This forces companies to change the way the operate their business. (for example see what SourceWatch is doing in terms of think tanks and the like.) Of course this all centers on the idea that people will embrace the simplistic self organization of wiki, which I excited to see. (see Why wiki is good for work)

Over at the wonderful video weblog zefrank, he has opened up the script writing up to contributors of his wiki

The wiki is used to write the script for the show: Fabulouso Friday. Was it successful?

“Congratulations on 1,500+ script edits and over 15,000 views of the Fabuloso Friday script!”

I found this interesting mashup, WikiMapia, which is very cool even though it is missing some of the basic wiki tools. I am having trouble adding pages, but other people aren’t. The process seems to be similar to the way Flickr tags photos.

Wikimapia is a new project created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev aimed at “describing the whole planet earth”. They have created an excellent way to accomplish this goal. Using a mixture of Google Maps satellite imagery, a “wiki” editing mechanism and tagging, Wikimapia lets anyone add or edit a description for any place on earth

via Google Maps Mania: Wiki + Google Maps = Wikimapia

Demir Barlas, writing at Line56, pulls together an amazing, singularly pointed article on why wiki is good for work. Bravo!

A wiki, you see, is the voice and platform of the drone, and there are many, many more drones than managers. A wiki is a way for drones to organize themselves and to serve their own needs without waiting for the boss, the manager, or the Encyclopedia Britannica to do it.

via Web 2.0: Ready to Go - A response to Nicholas Carr’s skepticism about emerging Web-based collaboration technologies