(2021-06-05) Brander Wiki As A Commons

Gordon Brander: Wiki as a Commons. Wikis are like the Minecraft of tools for thought — very simple, very open-ended. (generative)

A wiki has two essential concepts:

• Everyone can write on every page.
• You can link other pages, whether or not they exist.

"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.” Interview with Ward Cunningham, 2003-12-01

Like Minecraft, and the wider world around us, a wiki is a shared, mutable world that we craft together. (co-creation)

Yet all page names belong to one global namespace. This creates a scarcity—who will define the meaning of each name?

Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interaction between those players. Without shared scarcity, there is no incentive to join our realities, and meaning-making becomes fork-only. (convergence)

Wikis are a commons

so why aren’t they also a tragedy? Elinor Ostrom’s Theory of the Commons outlines eight conditions under which a commons can be managed without tragedy....

My take: each individual should have his own Digital Garden that follows basic Digital Garden Standards to support interwiki links of TwinPages.

• see also Threading Across Twitter And Digital Gardens