Big IDEA

Is a specialized wiki the way to go?

06 August 2004

Alan asks where the shining examples of successful wikis (aside from Wikipedia) are. True, wikis are hard to get your head around–I’m still struggling with the concept–but should we use them because they are there? Obviously there has to be some need for a collaborative space, and I wonder if instructors are comfortable with students taking on the new role afforded them by wikis. And since a wiki involves a process of creation, are instructors willing to start with the tabula rasa as it were? The blank page staring back at you.

Mandrake Linux users have created a wiki, but it is not as current or as comprehensive as it could be. In fact, most of what is there is thanks to one user’s constantly prodding users to “add it to the wiki” in the email lists. The typical response is: What’s a wiki? A few days later the follow-up: I tried to add it to the wiki but I couldn’t figure it out. So, the wiki is supposed to be a simple technology yet the folks on a technical discussion list can’t figure it out. Maybe it’s just the engine, Twiki?

All of this got me thinking about a piece I recently read, Clay Shirky’s Situated Software. It’s a great read about how students in his class wrote applications for a very small, specific set of users. It caused him and some outside observers some conflict because the trend he was observing went against most of what they were taught about scalability and other stuff beyond my comprehension of software development. In any event, the apps were successful because they met some need, albeit to a small number of people.

So this is my thought about wikis: maybe they need to be really specific to a small set of people to be successful. (Wikipedia, then, would be an exception.) This kind of jibes with some ideas I’ve been playing with–a wiki cheat sheet for linux commands I can never remember, one as something of a learning journal but only for a single topic or theme in a class, one for group decision making. In short, what you might call a hit-and-run wiki–one that lives only for a short time to serve some specific purpose and then possibly dies. This wiki doesn’t want to be big.

I think playing with Instiki this past week has led me here. (Thanks to James and Tom for pointing this tool out!) Using Instiki you can create a wiki space in about two seconds; it really lends itself to hit-and-run wikiing. And the “coolness” factor is really high :). I like that it has good RSS feeds (headlines or full text–and none of those useless “HomePage was updated by Joe User” announcements) and that you can export an entire wiki to a self-contained HTML site.

There’s probably more I want to write about the newbie’s reaction to wikis, and I hope to be able to help create some of these hit-and-run wikis here. You won’t hear or read about them, of course ;).