Preparing for Wikis
Readings and activities for WeblogsAndWikis, spring 2015.This week, get some background on wikis in a few readings and then explore some wikis and develop some notes and observations on them.
With wikis, we look at a collective and collaborative writing space - a different social model of knowledge than we see in the distributed network of blogs. On a wiki, participants cooperate to produce collective multi-paged hypertext documents. These pages are co-authored, even to the point of anonymity - a point where the authors of the page are no longer concerned about who contributed what. Wikipedia and the wiki you're reading now operate the same way.
Wikis tend to be more project oriented than blogs.
First, some reading
Three primers to get a sense of what wikis are and how they work.- Wikis in Plain English, video at Common Craft
- Wikipedia entry on wikis
- Wide Open Spaces: Wikis Ready or Not, Brian Lamb
A chapter from a book about wikis. Writing in wiki spaces is not the same as writing with paper in a private space
Second, a tour
Next, some wiki pages about wikis. With these you can begin to develop questions and frameworks for more consideration.Wikis are local communities of shared interests. They have developing customs and styles and values and approaches. These tend to be laid out in the local style guides (Ours is the StyleGuide). When you first visit a wiki, you're a visitor. Have a look around to get a sense of the customs.
Wiki pages are always in draft and under refactoring, so they may not be laid out and organized as you would expect in print. Wiki pages are occasionally experimental, and are exploring new not-yet-formed conventions of layout and composing. This part of the activities gives you a chance to get used to that and read through it.
(If you don't like the organization of a wiki page, you can change it. Go ahead.)
As you read these wiki pages, a reading that includes following links, make notes on how the pages are organized, what state they seem to be in; watch for uses of DocumentMode and ThreadMode, watch for ways the contributors identify their work, and for text that has become part of the collective wiki. Watch for calls of RefactoringPages. Watch, that is, for what the writers are doing.
at c2.com
at MeatballWiki
- MeatballWiki follow MeatballMission
[W]e are PublicArt. We strive to be beautiful. We want to shimmer and make people smile, and we want to do this by attracting and showcasing life.
A look at co-operating in a writing space, and how wikis address multiple perspectives.
- Why Wiki Works at c2.
- Why Wiki Works Not
- and WhyWikiWorks at MeatballWiki
A few pages on our wiki
- CollaborationConventions
- CollaborateRadically
- WritingOnAWiki
- TheTeaRoom
- TheCollective
- TheCollectiveNotebook
Third, post some notes to your blog
This post asks you not to compose an essay but some notes. Those notes, however, call for close observation, including close reading of pages and some inference of how those pages are developing. But you've been doing observation in your posts so far in this class, so you're used to it.I'm asking for a single post by Sunday midnight, but you might do this a multiple posts.
Post some notes on
- what you observe on the wikis regarding how the writers work
- questions that come up concerning wikis and using wikis (and links to pages that address those questions)
- how wikis operate as social spaces for collective / collaborative work.
- how content creation gets done.
- differences in reading and writing from what we are familiar with.
- ... whatever else comes up
