Wiki Culture

This is a wiki. A wiki is a hypertext collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, that is – you and me. 😃

It's the simplest way to collaborate: we all edit text files, and link them to each other. Instead of all of us "owning" the various files, however, these files live in a collection of pages hosted by the wiki and we edit all the pages without any sense of "ownership".

Even if there's only one person editing it, this site is a wiki. It's the simplest content management system possible. Edit a file on the server, or click the edit link on the web, and there's the text, and there's where you put the words, and then you save, and – bam! – it's live.

This ease of use and this freedom brings with it some responsibility:

We cannot rely on the user interface to guide us, we must make our own rules, our wiki culture, and argue for it. On the mundane level of writing that means we need to agree on how to write, how to name the pages, how to organize them, and so on. But beyond that, it also means that we need to decide what's on topic and what's off topic, how to review changes, how to enforce our norms. There are no editors and moderators except for us.

If you're interested in wiki culture, there are two wikis that broadly talk about wiki culture. Meatball Wiki was one of the first wikis to talk about wikis (the first wiki being WikiWikiWeb, the Portland Pattern Repository that talked about everything...). Community Wiki grew out of Meatbal Wiki and has lain dormant for many years.

Before digital gardens there were people who believed in smashing together blogs and wikis, calling their site a bliki. Martin Fowler still does. His explanation from 2003: What is a Bliki.

Sadly, the Wikipedia page was deleted in November 2011. There's a copy available from the Internet Archive.