[Wolves] Wikis - an article

Matthew Revell wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk
Mon Jun 2 10:32:01 2003


On Sat, 31 May 2003 06:54:24 +0100, Aquarius <aquarius-lists@kryogenix.org> 
wrote:

> Matthew Revell spoo'd forth:
>> Okay, I reckon I'd quite like to write an article on wikis, for 
>> ContentPeople. I've got quite a bit of material gathered together and 
>> I'm getting a review copy of The Wiki Way through the post soon. 
>> However, does anyone here have any thoughts on wikis? Specifically, I 
>> think I'm going to write the article from the point of view that wikis 
>> offer perhaps one of the true implementations of what the web was 
>> created for - easy sharing of information amongst like minded people, 
>> for the sake of it. I think wikis are interesting because of their shift 
>> from top down to collaborative publishing. Does anyone have anything to 
>> say about it?
>
> Hm. Not a lot other than "I agree", although I think that the notion of 
> collaborative publishing is enabled but rarely actually *done* by wikis. 
> I see them being used quite a bit more as a place where a main author or 
> author group can put up things online which can be corrected by everyone, 
> rather than true collaboration (if such a thing exists...)

Is that the nature of most open projects? I mean, apart from the truly mass 
projects such as the Linux kernel, KDE, Gnome, PHP etc, I suppose there's 
always only a few hardeneded coders, with the odd bug fix or whatever from 
an outsider.