(2023-10-11) Schroeder Wiki Culture

Alex Schroeder on Wiki culture. What is “wiki culture” and how do wiki contributors get to know each other?

If people use Org Mode and Zettelkasten, are they participating in a wiki revival? Is Bullet Journaling part of wiki culture?

Mostly I guess the problem is that there are so few sites acting as wikis the way I wanted them to work.

I guess what I’m getting at is that there is no wiki culture because there hardly are any wikis as communities left. Wikis are simply those strange content management systems that are weird and disorganised

I think I have felt a sense of community with the people on the #emacs IRC channel; conversation enables a sense of community. I don’t think editing pages per se does that. It needs a purpose that unites. (convergence)

For a brief moment, @bouncepaw (Timur Ismagilov) was very enthusiastic about a wiki revival. Perhaps there is something to it, but perhaps there simply is something to writing hypertext. Alone

So what is wiki culture? Now that most wikis are dead with the exception of encyclopedias, there are two cultures: Encyclopedia writing culture and single author hypertext writing culture.

As far as single author hypertext writing culture goes, to have a wiki means to have a hypertext authoring setup with minimal guidelines. (digital garden)

When I had a conversation with @bouncepaw via email, we wondered whether to summarize the conversation on a wiki page. I said that I’d like to put up my own summary of the discussion and that if he were to put up a summary on his site, his summary would probably be different, each reflecting our own priorities and background. Having two distinct wikis allows us to reflect that multifaceted reality. That is a good thing, as he succinctly put it.

I fear I have lost a lot of trust in people, in strangers. Having my wiki locked down seems natural to me, now.

As a developer, I can’t help think of ways to have it both ways.

Then again, I keep hearing that rasping voice in my head: “This meeting could have been an email.” And by that I mean, this technical solution to leaving comments and having them approved could have been based on emails. Specially since I already discovered that I like emails.