(2003-05-03) Ward On Wiki Naming

Ward Cunningham on Wiki Name/Sister Sites philosophy. I see wiki as a place where people work out the names of things that they will say. Since our spoken vocabulary is small, we must struggle to find words that carry value commensurate with the space they consume in our brains (Naming Things). Where works collide in wiki they will also collide in our thoughts. Usually that is a happy circumstance. Still, we often establish the Context of a conversation so as to avoid or at least disambiguate many of these collisions. And we have to note the context switches we make in conversation. The analogy of context switching I've chosen for wiki is Sister Sites. Two sites are candidates to be sisters if the collisions in their vocabulary are likely to be useful.