I've been running a public wiki for
almost three weeks now. What, might you ask, is a wiki? Not having done a comprehensive
search for a definition, I nevertheless recommend the following from wiki.org,
which I will quote here:

Wiki is in Ward's [Ward Cunningham]
original description:
The simplest online database that could possibly work.

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and
edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and
has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal
pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the
organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and
subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any
page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the
Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

You might then wonder what the big deal about a wiki is. I would answer that
you have to try it to really believe it. Before I set up my own wiki, I tried
editing the page on Johann Sebastian Bach on probably the world's grandest wiki:
the Wikipedia. ("a multilingual
project to create a complete and accurate open
content encyclopedia") When I first encountered the page, it looked
a bit like a version
from Oct 2001, a very sparse beginning; I thought that the Wikipedia was, in principle, a good idea
but it would would not be able to attract enough writing or editorial talent
for the project to amount to much. I actually put more hope in Nupedia
project, which was based on formal
peer review, though I was sure that it would a very long time before either
the Wikipedia or the Nupedia could rival commercial encyclopaedic efforts like
the Britannica.

Now, about two years later, when I look at the current
state of the J. S. Bach article, I have become more of a believer in the
possibilities of the Wikipedia -- and wikis in general. The article is shaping
up nicely, to the point that I have made a small edit in an attempt to improve
the piece and consider making larger-scale additions, so that I could then proudly
point to it as the best single introductory article on the subject. (I am intrigued
by how being able to rewrite an article (as part of a collective effort) makes
me more invested in the final product.)

But as I wrote above, you have to try a wiki to grok it. Read, for example,
to the introductory page on the Wikipedia if you have a hankering for, editing
the article on Shania Twain
(Timmins-girl-made-it-big)
-- I just did to make the proper link between Twain and Timmins. Try editing
a page, either the Wikipedia:Sandbox
or the sandbox on my wiki.

It was (and still is) a bit disconcerting to be hosting a wiki in which anyone
can come edit the pages. I've worried about wiki
security or the lack thereof. But the FAQ gets it right (IMHO): "In
other words, the philosophy of wiki is one of dealing manually with the rare
(exception) case of a saboteur, rather than designing in features and overhead
(both in implementation and in usage) to avoid the damage caused by a saboteur."
Not having to deal with passwords and letting anyone edit my wiki -- while monitoring
my wiki for changes has worked so far. In fact, even if one invites a friend
to contribute to my wiki, he or she won't necessarily know how without explicit
guidance.

Besides being editable by anyone (by default), a wiki is made to enable new
documents to be added easily. To create a link to a page in a wiki, one can,
for example, write a WikiName,
"a word that uses capitalized words" that automagically becomes a
link. If the page doesn't yet exist, a person clicking on the link is invited
to create that page. Note the subtle shift from tradition web authoring,
where one has to create a link and also create the corresponding page -- else,
we get a 404 error. In some sense, wikis don't have broken internal links; rather
there are new opportunities to add to the wiki. Because it is so little work
to create a new page (or to mark out a page to be filled out later on by one's
self or another person), I have found my wiki to be a great place to do my braindumps,
to accumulate my ideas and thoughts and for the connections to start snapping
into place. After experiencing the thrill of a public wiki, I decided to install
a local wiki accessible only to myself where I can work my own stuff in private.
The question of whether to place content in my private vs public wiki or how
I should migrate materials from my private to public space are ones I ponder
these days. (And I certainly wonder about how to get group wikis running for
projects to which I want to invite a limited number of people.)

There clearly is a lot more to learn concerning wikis. Anyone know how good
is the book The
Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet? I would like to explore
Ward Cunningham's famous wiki
to get an understanding of how a body of work adds up in one person's wiki.
A while back, McGee's
Musings' useful summary of wikis helped me get oriented to the topic as
well as David
Mattison's gigantic piece on the topic. (Mattison's article points to discussions
on the relationship between blogging and wikis that I would I like to dig more
into -- I still love the chronological nature of blogging -- and the expectation
that one largely freezes a piece of writing (after some time). In a wiki, the
words are never finished (in general) but keep changing.

Wikis can be radically collaborative. Rick Beaubien and I have been drafting
our paper on METS/IMS-CP
interoperability in my wiki. I look forward to others collaborating on my
wiki on related interests.