WikiCulture

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What is WikiCulture? What was it and what is it now?

Discussion:

Wiki in the beginning was naturally 'WardsWiki centered' with Pattern Oriented Stuff. A growing audience with divergent interests experiences the need for distributed Wikiing with new options. (InterWiki).

The current dilemma seems to be: More and more people get infected by the WikiMeme?; they tend to contribute to WardsWiki, because it currently seems to have the widest audience.

Otherwise there is a growing resistence in WardsWiki to become overcrowded with stuff that is seen off topic by many.

The authors may feel free to choose their locations for contributing. It's a kind of voting. -- FridemarPache

See also CommonContext

From Wiki:WikiCulture

Some questions but no answers right now:

Not all online communities are wikis. So what is culture particular to wikis and what is more generally attributed to other communities? What other strains of cultures are there? Also, on Wiki, many people compared other hypermedia structures to Wiki and became confused. Rotate your viewpoint; compare it to XanaduProject/ZigZag. So what do you gather? -- SunirShah

: Wikis interest me, personally, for many reasons. They appeal specifically to the following interests of mine:

ComputerScience: 'nuff said.
Mathematics: graph theory, incorporating all permutations of links between people and information.
Sociology: interaction of personalities on-line.
ArtificialIntelligence / NeuroScience?: mapping of knowledge, ideas, and opinions. Analogous in many ways to the CycProject.

: I think that at least one major population segment which wikis attract is ComputerScience-types, in which group I place myself. An interesting question is how specifically one could characterize the interests of most ComputerScientist?s without constructing a stereotype. Somehow wikis appeal to my sense of elegance and integration, two sensibilities which I think most ComputerScientist?s share.

: Note that I am making the connection of ComputerScientist? -> Wiki, not implying the inverse. I am curious what other types of individuals are drawn to wikis (or turned off by them!), and why. -- anon.

Well, most OnlineCommunities are programmer centric because programmers create them and they generally want to talk about things that interest them: programming. Or at least that's the type of person they initially attract because programmers typically befriend programmers. That being said, there is BridgesWiki which is run by a lawyer for lawyers. And there are the WikiFarms. Currently on WikiWiki, a religious debate is being had out between the old guard and a new, non-programmer.

That being said, "getting wiki" seems much harder for non-programmers. I don't know why. -- SunirShah

Wiki achieves its minimalist design by offloading the user interface processing onto the user's brain: instead of WYSIWYG, the user has to use a markup language with an arcane capitalization convention for creating pointers. Wiki IS programming. It may be Programming Lite, but it's still programming. The non-programmers are all struggling with FrontPage or using MS Word's "save as HTML" function.

: I've started reading the Wiki:ProgrammersStone. It strikes me that wiki is a far more natural environment for "mappers" than it is for "packers", due to the interconnected nature of wiki knowledge. I would suspect that most people who invest their time fairly heavily in a wiki are "mappers". -- anon.

My hope is that EasySubmission will allow non-programmers to regard writing to a Wiki just like posting on a discussion board (or like IM, if that's what people want). However, the hypertextual nature of discussion will probably throw people also. I think that programmers can grasp that a little easier because, simply, in dealing with pointers (or references or objects or whatever), one's mind becomes a little more used to dealing with connections between entities (graph edges). I don't think using the web alone prepares one for this; all of the web has the potential to be organized in a highly "hypertextual" way, but wikis are one of the few places that actually are organized so. -- BayleShanks