(2003-10-24) Venners Ward Wiki Interview

BillVenners interviews Ward Cunningham about Wiki. A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know. For questions like, "What's going on in the project," we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what's not important about what's going on in the project. What's important about the project is the stuff that you don't anticipate (Project Wiki)... I didn't want there to be a chronology in wiki. If you're reading something in a wiki, I didn't want it to matter to you whether it was written a year ago, a day ago, or just a minute ago. That means that we needed some way for getting the Context. If you're writing just a page, that page has to be in response to something else. So what you do is say in a paragraph what the page is about in the context of all the other pages.

Dec1: part2 on Collective Ownership (of code and text). The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that... The program develops a resistance to a certain kind of knowledge - knowledge that wasn't anticipated - because you can't easily express the knowledge within the structure that was laid out at the beginning. It's not easy to put in anything that doesn't fit within that structure... I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. (Iterative)