I had the good fortune to catch up with MarkDilley tonight. He just got back from WikiSym — an ACM conference on wiki in San Diego — and it sounds like he got some good ideas and personal connections from the trip.
Lately, my own interest in wiki stuff has been in watching wiki rhetoric and interaction design spill over into other genres of software. (And I’m not only thinking of stuff like VoodooPad or wiki-modes for existing editors, though this is not a bad place to begin.) There is something about the meat activity of typing out tags in a tagging system, or typing out WikiNames in a wiki — of typing a word on the keyboard — which acts as an empowerment (perhaps due to lowered transaction costs) and an aid to memory. Why is that? What do we we do with it?
One of the big ideas behind particular flavors of hypertext (such as that on the World Wide Web) is that of overloading content words, so that they become document structure in a more overt way than we are typically used to seeing. Another big idea behind hypertext in general is this utopian, Californian vision of democratic or open access. There are other big ideas, some sketchy, some idealistic, some technical. So which of these big ideas are essential to wiki? After wiki passes into dust like gopher did or after wiki culture atrophies like usenet culture, something will be left, and it’ll have more to do with Ted Nelson and Doug Englebart than anything else.
Mark and some of the folks he travelled with to WikiSym have started a blog called RecentChanges: all things wiki. I hope it can develop into an interesting discussion of some of these issues. Also, if anyone can suggest coursework at SI or elsewhere at the University of Michigan which might address some of these issues directly or obliquely, I’m listening.
Your commentary