TheWikiWay
The Wiki Way is a book by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, laying out how to install and work with collaborative editing systems. It's on Amazon. For wiki designers, it's worth a read. We have a separate page TheWikiWayChap10.This wiki page address the perspectives writers and readers might take towards wiki-style writing and communication. Our starting points are
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiWay
and
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WhyWikiWorks
TheWikiWay can be characterized by
- Incompleteness
- Organic growth at micro- and macro-level
- Organic organization
- Engagement: passions
- A religious fervor
- An alternative set of aesthetics
- Interactive desire addressed by creation
- Discovery. You turn the corner, follow the link, and there's something half-familiar but new ...
TheWikiWay is the reader's engagement with the product - the thing, the wiki - and the project - the way the wiki is created of communally composed words and links. It's how the wiki can foster and house multiple purposes and cross-purposes. It's how the wiki is like Odysseus's ship: how a new plank can be added every day and yet the ship retains its identity.
It's engagement with how the wiki fosters invention, arrangement, and style by means of its delivery. It's a paradox of literacy. Socrates might be ok with a wiki because it can respond to questions.
Ted Nelson wrote about the moment when users of his Xanadu hypertext system would just "get it.": sense the implications of the system or the wiki right down to the ground. That getting it is part of TheWikiWay. [need Ted Nelson quote and link]
The wiki way in action
TheWikiWay does not have to be grandiose. It can be mundane, part of the everyday. Take this article on using a wiki for note taking. Nothing earth shaking here, but LifeHacker get TheWikiWay.We could use more examples here -
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95, photograph 1995. NGA, Washington DC. The work is incomplete without the viewers.
TheWikiWay in Architecture and Sculpture
Work that is process-centered and collaborative with the viewerTheWikiWay is manifest in architecture by Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Renzo Piano (designer of the Centre Georges Pompidou), and sculpture by British sculpture Henry Moore, and Christo. Their work is collaborative and process centered: Viewers need to be part of the scene for the work to be complete.
What's a Wiki?
by Sebastian Rupley
Rupley, a contributor for PCMAG.com, wrote a nifty, tight, little article on the rise of wikis and how they function last May. He makes mention of TheWikiWay, co-written by Ward Cunningham. Below are some key points that I found noteworthy.
- Wikis do not have the "star power" of weblogs yet.
- Wikis have grown 1,000 percent in 2013 (as of May 9).
- Wiki derives from the Hawaiian term: quick.
- First intended for software development
- Wikis are the "simplest online database that could possibly work." No HTML knowledge is needed.
- Articles added to a wiki are at the editorial mercy of the wiki's other participants. Cunningham calls this: fragility.
- "You can play, but only good players last."
- Only need a conventional browser
- "Blogs and wikis are polar opposites," said Cunningham. "A blog tends to reflect the biases and opinions of an author, while a wiki is more like an open cocktail party. In a wiki you try to speak without a strong voice, seeking consensus to create something permanent, while on a blog you're developing your own voice and it's very much about your voice."
*Most Wiki's are subject to GNU General Public License which prevents a program from being claimed as private property for commercial uses under copyright laws.
JackTuthill and SarahDahlheimer
WabiSabi
WikiZen
What is TheWikiWay? Who came out and said that we are to be working with wikis this way, why should we have to go with what they want, after all this is a free software platform that anyone can use. Why should we have to be forced to their rules. People conform to others' rules, but why should we be internally forced to follow them, why can't we work with the format and the content the way we want to.
JoeStusynski
