BIBLIOTHEKE

I just finished reading a pretty good intro article to the whole wiki thing. Check it out if you aren’t familiar with the concept.

What caught my eye, however, was this comment by Steven Cohen over @ Library Stuff:

When I think of wikis, my brain immediately turns to collaboration, but I can see how the single-user wiki thoery works when placed in mapping structure. My articles follow a stream of consciousness when I am in preliminary drafts. A wiki might help in putting all of the pieces together by working alongside my thought processes. Interesting…

What he’s referring to is a section in the article discussing the use of a personal wiki for brainstorming or mapping concepts:

They can map concepts; wikis are extremely useful for brainstorming. Exploring a topic by means of a wikiweb is a curiously comfortable feeling, and often very rewarding. Authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of web pages roughly analogous to a concept map, a visual technique for representing knowledge and information. More can be read about concept mapping in Novak’s online introduction.

Why limit it to these uses?

I’ve recently installed a restricted-access wiki on one of my sites solely for personal use. I’m in the process of moving all of my notes, papers and random files over to the wiki. What’s the purpose? A wiki is a great content management system for scholarly work. In my view, by moving all of my text work online I can seamlessly integrate online resources and really start working with the web as a full platform.

The weblog and the wiki both work toward this goal, although each has its own purpose and use. The weblog enables archiving of articles and ideas in chronological order. It’s flexible enough to support longer quasi-essays as well as brief blurbs pointing to something else online. Some posts will be immediately forgotten, some will repeatedly referenced and some will be pulled up with a quick search when a relevant use is encountered. Certainly one of the best examples of how to do this is Claire Stewart’s Current Copyright Readings since she includes enough info to find the article elsewhere once the link dies.

The wiki, on the other hand, is for work that demands more substance, needs to be accessed frequently/easily, information that will be directly compiled into a larger work or bits of info that need to be archived but aren’t complete enough to make up a weblog post. If I need to take notes during a lecture of some sort and there is wifi around, I can just open up the browser, go to the page and start typing. Resources can be linked off-the-cuff, just as I’ve done in this post. When I want to go back and find out where some scrap of info came from, it’s just a click away (or, for restricted resources, just a couple clicks). The structure of the wiki makes the collection modular, turning everything from essays to quick notes into a large toolkit and making my typed body of knowledge like a set of LEGOs.

A large part of what prompted this was finding myself referring to content I had previously placed online in other web apps (forums, for one) where I had no control over the fate of this info. Another factor was that I found myself repeatedly searching my old Word .docs of notes and papers for info to use in newer work. It was a pain, as you can image, but now I have simple, full-text searching of all of my writing that I’ve put on there. It’s fantastic.

For now, no search engine will see it and you need a password to get to it. Perhaps in the future it will be interesting to open it up, but for now I’m just experimenting and want to keep control over it.

The ‘web as a platform’ side to all of this is particularly cool, although it means my machines are moving that much closer to becoming dumb terminals. This is somewhat of a good thing, particularly at a time when my powerbook has been going in for repair. If I need to use another computer it’s not a problem at all and backing up everything to multiple machines is as easy as getting online and hitting some buttons or typing some commands.

Last, and this is just an FYI in case it helps, I chose the Wikipedia engine, MediaWiki since, AFAIK, it has the strongest development momentum. Sure, it’s cumbersome, bloated, slowish, hard to install, difficult to customize and just not generally the nicest to work in (still with the ugly buttons?), but if I’m going to put all of my data in something then I want to know that it will either continue to be around or that folks will be making tools to get my data out of there. Many other nice-looking wiki engines only have one developer, so I’m not placing my bets there just yet.

This isn’t yet the answer for everybody and the applications are still fairly crude, but it will be interesting to see how it goes over the next couple of years.

This entry was posted by William J Melody @ 8:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Note that there may be a delay when posting your comment because continued comment spam has forced me to turn on partial moderation.