Our April Wiki Wednesday was informal and fun. Over pizza and beer, Peter Kaminski and I showed off the hacks from the Wikithon. Leslie Wu from Stanford’s HCI group demonstrated “Programming by a Sample: Rapidly Prototyping Web Applications with d.mix”, a video demo of a web app that allows users to drag content by tag from places like Flickr into a wiki, annotating it with a simple interface. The ubicomp mashup wiki has some good information about the philosophy and tools used by Leslie’s Stanford HCI crowd, starting with this MashupDefinition.
When Gordon explained pageoftext.com, we all got excited at its simplicity, and talked about applications for it like “organizing the potluck dinner”. An extended family or a not-very-techy-group of people might use a simple app like pageoftext to list who’s bringing what foods as well as dietary restrictions. I like this example a lot, as I can imagine the 100 potluck dinner emails from 20 people, like a rampaging stampede of Too Much Information, cut off at the pass by a lone cowboy of a wiki page.
Stewart Mader walked us through some of the Wiki Patterns site, and I appreciated hearing about its history and development, as well as some of the wiki community sources it builds on, like MeatballWiki , sources from Socialtext, and other ongoing conversations. Since I’m a newcomer to the world of wiki theory (though not to wiki use), the history and sources for these discussions are particularly important to me so I can understand context. I appreciate Stewart’s community work and was happy to have representatives from Atlassian come and participate in Wiki Wednesday. In fact, I envision that developers and wiki theorists from other wiki companies like WetPaint and PBWiki will have many cool events where we can share ideas. While in some areas we might be competing, I firmly believe there is plenty of room, and that we will all benefit from a philosophy of openness. Eugene Eric Kim encouraged me in this and got me talking to folks from several other wiki companies, and I appreciate his acting as a wiki community leader.
Jack Herrick and Dvortygirl gave us a demo of WikiHow’s organization and administrative procedures. Jack apologized for the impurity and un-wikiness of their Firefox toolbar extension, but hey, if it works, it works. A lot of us got excited about WikiHow’s gardening methods, which connected interestingly back to Bryan Pendleton’s talk from last month’s Wiki Wednesday. (He’ll be giving that talk again very soon, at CHI2007, in case you missed it.) Anyway, here’s how WikiHow’s toolbar works. Featured articles are the most likely to be vandalized. In your WikiHow Firefox toolbar, you see a flashing alert sign when a featured article gets edited. As a signed in user, you can then go and patrol the article, checking it off as okay if it’s okay. If it’s been vandalized and you fix the article, your own edit will then fire off an alert, so another editor will need to sign off on the article. Then, everyone’s alert signs stop flashing! Jack vandalized an article by Dvortygirl, and within a couple of minutes, someone else had fixed the page and another editor cleared it.
The WikiHow toolbar also shows the number of unpatrolled edits to the entire community. Before this number was exposed in such a clear and consistent way in the toolbar, it hovered in the high hundreds or even thousands. Now, it mostly stays below 100. During Wiki Wednesday, it was at 20-30. Note that because it’s in a Firefox toolbar, WikiHow devotees see that information all the time, while they’re working on other things. I liked what Jack said about this feature: “People want to do good things; just give them information about what’s wrong.” That’s definitely wiki-ish philosophy! And that was the nicest thing for me about Wiki Wednesday. I had the feeling of being in the same room with people who were all on the same page in key ways, who all believe in the power of wikis and of collaboration.
Meanwhile, across the pond, the London Wiki Wednesday has been heating up. You can read a detailed report of it, with links to liveblogging and notes including a cool mindmap, over here in a great post by David Terrar. David also blogged the evening at Business Two Zero. Rather than repeat everything David said, I’m going to go right now and edit his page to add links to the people and companies that participated. That’s the Wiki Way, right? However, it’s the bloggity way to give people link love, so I’ll just add here that participants (named in pleasantly medieval style with blog or company appended) included people from Wetpaint, Scott Gavin and Simon Revell from Pfizer, Guillame Lerouge (using Xwiki), Dennis Howlett, Philip Woodgate, Andrew Black, Angela Beesley from Wikimedia, Stefan Szczkelkun, Paul Youlten of Socialtext and Yellowikis, Lars Ploughman, Mark Baker of Spikesource, Stephan Tual of Terapad, and Toby Moores of Sleepydog. Thanks for the great writeup, David! I think we both need a videoblogger so we can watch each others’ Wiki Wednesdays.
In Palo Alto, at our next Wiki Wednesday on May 2, 6:30pm, Rashmi Sinha will speak on “Building and Designing for Large Participatory Social Systems”. Please sign up on our wiki or on the invite at upcoming.org if you’d like to come!
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