Category Archives: Wikis

500 Ways to Be Inspired by Wikis

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When I visualize a positive future for the world, it’s networked, interconnected, creative, and emergent.  It’s collaborative and aware of its history.  It looks like a wiki.

Like podcasting has, wikis (beyond Wikipedia) may still prove to be a technology that saw a burst of nerdly excitement, then a long period of obscurity, and then a break into the mainstream.  I’m hoping so.

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in Portland, Oregon in 1995.  It’s still up online!  Cunningham has now been working on something called Federated Wiki, a very cool project that celebrated its 7th birthday this week. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and in an era of rapidly increasing information warfare, there are few communities as experienced and prepared to help as the community of Wikipedia. Google, Facebook, and all of us should give it a lot more money.

One year ago this Summer, I was reading that first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, and thought – I want a wiki of my own!  And so my private, personal, mobile-responsive wiki was born.  (I use PMWiki software unloaded to my web host account.) It’s now my second-most visited site on the web (after Twitter) and I adore it so much! I put all my notes from reading in there, my notes from meetings, personal brainstorms, lots of things. I LOVE MY WIKI! I usually edit and read it on my phone. I love my “all recent pages” page, I love my “randomized list of 3 other pages” page.

I was talking to internet pioneer Howard Rheinghold about wikis on Twitter today, just because I noticed that we had discussed wikis on Twitter ten years ago in 2008! I brought the conversation back up, some other people joined in, we talked about what we needed today for a good wiki UI, and why it seems like wiki software development has slowed (Howard guesses Google Sites and Docs have filled a lot of the needs). It was great fun.

In celebration of the larger wiki world, here is a network map of 721 wiki experts, thought leaders, organizations, and more on Twitter. (zoomed in details below, graphs made by Little Bird, of Sprinklr) The accounts are the nodes, and the lines are a sample of the follow relationships between them. Sub-communities have formed where, for example, the community colored green was discovered by noticing that these people all follow each other more than they follow people in the yellow community. Flavors of wiki community – try them all!

Also notable, back in 2008 when Howard and I were talking on Twitter about wikis, only 123 out of 721 (17%) of these wiki community leaders had created their Twitter accounts yet! Ten years later, Twitter and at least Wikipedia are powerful, widely used platforms enabling public discourse. May many more wikis flourish in the coming years.  If you’d like some more inspiration, here are some people and organizations that are right in the thick of it!  Here are 500 of them in an easy-to-explore Twitter list.

Another good bot.

 

Finding new value in old notes

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One of the journals I keep is a Daily Q&A journal, which asks the same question each calendar day every year for five years. It’s a great exercise in seeing what’s changed in your life and what’s not; where I’m moving toward my goals and where I’m stuck.

That ability to better understand the present in context of the past is one of the many things that’s valuable about old notes. I’ve thought for some time that if I was going to start another company right now, it might focus on re-surfacing new value from old notes. I love thinking about how old wisdom or information sheds new light on new circumstances. That’s a phenomenon I’d like to think about a lot more. For now, some specific examples.

Today my daily Q&A journal asks “what was the best thing you read today?”

On this day in 2014, I said it was a Chomsky interview in The Sun. Incidentally, I’m reading a wonderful Chomsky book right now that I got in a Free Library walking down the street. (I live in Portland, there’s Chomsky just laying about here.) Why did it take me four years to get back to reading Chomsky? Because the interview wasn’t that good. The book is great though! It makes me think that a great author shouldn’t be judged from one piece.

On this day in 2015, the most interesting thing I read was my own Evernote file of important thoughts recorded in the month of May. I still keep a file like that and I still review it regularly! One difference is that I now transfer those thoughts to a flashcard app called Anki for review and I record them in the first place in a private wiki instead of Evernote. My beloved personal wiki turns one year old next month, in fact.

In 2016 the most interesting thing I read on May 30th was an HBR article on five key steps for building support for your ideas: show up face to face to describe them, give a good speech about them that frames the discussion, have strong allies, have strong moral beliefs, and be persistent. That’s been in my flashcards ever since then but it’s something I could really use right now. Thanks for another reminder, old journal entry!

Last year on this date I was reading Eric Barker’s incredible book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He tells a story about how comedians experiment with all kinds of jokes at small shows on the road, often telling jokes that fall flat, but taking note of those that land well. Then when they do a national show, that quantity of experiments provides enough proven wins that they can put together a show that’s 100% funny. That’s inspiring!

Have I produced enough content over recent years that I could piece together a really solid presentation or piece of writing where I know every item would make an impact? Not formally, but perhaps informally. That seems like a smart thing to make a wiki page about: points made that made an impact.

What did I record this year in response to the question, “what’s the best thing you read today?” I said, “my own note I took down some time ago that said, ‘when you say something powerful, stop.'”

“Should I write an article on Wikipedia?” Blogher as case study

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I noticed last week that there was no Wikipedia entry for Blogher, the women-centric blogging conference, blog aggregator and now VC funded company.  Shocked, I twittered that this was the case and my buddy Jeremy Pepper replied asking whether he should write an article.  

This was the second time in a month someone has asked me a question about whether they should be the person to write an article in Wikipedia so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.  A Blogher article in particular makes an interesting case study.

Wikipedia has great Search Engine Optimization, can be a good traffic generator and is a good reference source.  People like to have an entry in Wikipedia for their projects for a variety of reasons.  In this case, there ought to be a Wikipedia page about Blogher just so that people can go to this widely trusted source to learn about the project. Who should start writing that page, though?

In general – here are a few things I think are important when considering whether you ought to be the person to write about something in Wikipedia.

1. Conflicts of interest: If you have an antagonistic relationship with something, you probably ought not write about it.  If you have a financial interest in that subject’s success, I am of the belief that it may be ok for you to write about it so long as you practice…
2. Disclosure: Make sure your user page identifies who you are and what you do for a living.  Being open makes a world of difference.
3. Value add: In addition to a neutral point of view, make sure your post adds important value to the Wikipedia community by being truly informative.  Also, the more you have contributed to Wikipedia in general the more any specific contribution will be respected.  
4. Time invested: In some cases, like if a PR agent is writing about their client, I would recommend that in addition to disclosing the fact that you are a PR agent on your user profile page, you should also consider editing the article live in Wikipedia.  Multiple edits over time, even if from the same user, demonstrate time spent on the article in Wikipedia and help demonstrate respect for the platform.

To answer Jeremy’s question about Blogher I first searched in Technorati for his name and the word Blogher, to see what his relationship with the group was like.  He had written some supportive blog posts about the event, which received favorable comments from some people I understand to be leaders in the Blogher community.  I know that Blogher is generally supportive of participation by men.  I also did a google search for this query: site:http://blogher.org “for wikipedia.”  I found one forum thread about the fact that there is no Wikipedia article for Blogher.  The conversation seemed supportive of the idea, people were just wondering who should write it and how it should be done.  The thread seemed to taper off without any clear answers for that question.  That lead me to believe that there wasn’t any clear reason why the Blogher community did not want an article about Blogher in Wikipedia.

I suggested that Jeremy write one up and post it while logged into a Wikipedia account that was clearly tied to him personally.  That way people could see who was responsible and contact him to discuss it if they wanted to. He hasn’t written that article yet, but that’s ok. Eventually someone will write it and I think this is a good opportunity to talk about these questions.

If he does write this article, here’s how I suggest this and other articles begin.  In addition to maintaining a “neutral point of view” and sticking to the facts, it’s important that an article be long enough to satisfy the community of Wikipedians who dislike very short articles.  I’ve had articles be deleted because they weren’t substantive enough.

Since Blogher is an active online community there’s an opportunity to make sure that participants there know that a new Wikipedia entry about them has been posted.  Emailing them or posting to the Blogher forum could be good ways to let them know. Once they know about the article, they will have a chance to edit it as they see fit and help watch in case this new article gets nominated for deletion, as does happen frequently.

Finally, I’d suggest that if you add a new entry to Wikipedia that you check back daily for the first week after posting it to see if any conversation about the article has been posted or if the article has been nominated for deletion.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your entry’s history, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to track by RSS whether your article has been nominated for deletion.

If it is nominated for deletion, there will be a discussion and vote.  In that case, you can let people know and provide the URL for the voting page so they can participate in the conversation and respond to any concerns that the Wikipedia community may have.

Those are some of my thoughts about writing articles on Wikipedia.  There’s no guarantee of success in Wikipedia, but if you make a good-faith effort to contribute value to the community (with any interests of your own weighing less heavily than the interests of the community) then odds are good.  You’ll learn more about online social media from the experience of engaging, so in most cases I say yes – write that article.  

I’m going to email a link to this post over to one of my Wiki-loving buddies and see if we can flesh out answers to these questions all the more.

Kanter and Stein: Two New Interviews on the Changing Web

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This weekend I posted interviews with two long time non profit technology profesionals: Beth Kanter, a tech consultant and trainer, and Michael Stein, owner of a software company for non profit groups, over at Net Squared. Here’s a couple of highlights, I hope they’ll convince you to go check out the full interviews and the Net Squared experience.

Discussing the parralels between Web 1.0 and 2.0, Beth said:

Nonprofits would say in 1994 – the World Wide What? In 1995, they would say — it’s hype. A few early adopters set up simple home pages, but around 97 more and more nonprofits started to put up pages. Then nonprofits moved to the second generation sites – more professional graphics, interactivity, etc. Webmaster became a professional position and there were web specific graphic designers. I think it (Web2.0 for lack of better phrase) is here to stay. There’s still a lot of wild west ideas, but things like flickr and del.ico.us are not going to go away, I think. We had a lot of failures in early days of the Internet in adopting email and web pages, but there were valuable lessons learned. The early failures — while some point to these as reasons why nonprofits should ignore web2.0 — the early failures are important because they pave the way for more widespread adoption.

Here’s my favorite part of Michael’s interview:

Michael

Our clients with the most active websites are adding, in addition to their brochure-ish stuff, various forms of non-profit e-commerce – register for our meetings, make a donation, buy our publications.

But they are not providing information services, which is what all the blogging – wiki – rss stuff boils down to.

Marshall

Why should they?

Michael

In order to raise their visibility in the larger community that exists around their issues. In effect, for the same reason they have static pages about who they are.

I also put this little pop up box in the interview with Michael, it makes me think I should do more things like this.

If you’d like to subscribe to Beth’s blog, Michael’s blog and the feed for interviews at Net Squared – you can do so with this OPML file: nonprofitfeeds1.xml (I explained OPML files in this post. )

I have to sign off and take the next two days off, but when I get back I’ll post a podcast interview I got to do with Doug Kaye of ITConversations.

From the Garden to the Law Library: Web 2.0 Applied

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I just posted two new interviews over at NetSquared. The first was with Abby Rosenheck from Urban Sprouts, a SF school gardens project with a blog. I think she offers a great explanation of the support-building function a blog can play, especially for a small organization.

The second was with legal blawger Dennis Kennedy. We talked about a whole lot things, but the discussion about OPML was most exciting to me because I’m on an OPML kick these past 24 hours. We also talked about blogging, RSS, wikis, legal research and the law.

Edu Wikis Gain Cred

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Tim Stahmer has a good introduction to wikis in the newest issue of Technology and Learning magazine, titled “Think Outside the Blog.” (login or ttjo54@netscape.net and bugmenot via BugMeNot.com)

A couple of particularly interesting points from the article include:

  • Wiki power is described in the positive – a wiki is something that lets authorized users contribute content. I think focusing on contribution instead of changability when opening the conversation could be a good first step.
  • On Wikipedia: “The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia…Although Wikipedia’s success has been tarnished a little by vandalism, some misinformation, and fights over certain controversial topics, the wiki concept – an open site maintained by its users – has been a hit.”
  • Highlighted benefits include: the ability to write and research collaboratively and concurrently without the limitation of having to always schedule face-to-face time, the presence of the content in the larger context of the web – thus enabling participation and visibility via parents, other schools and the general public.
  • The article says that wikis are currently in use for school planning and interaction with parents, offering updates more continuously than printed newsletters and in some cases serving as a school’s entire web site.

The article then presents three options for schools interested in setting up a wiki:

  • Hosting your wiki on a wiki farm, examples provided include Wikicities, Wikispaces and PBWiki – all 3 great recomendations. I’m especially excited that PBWiki, the wonderful host of BlogSafer.org (anonymous blogging guides for people living under repressive governments) got a mention here.
  • Installing wiki software on your own server space, or asking your Internet Service Provider if they have wiki software ready to run (the article says wikis are popular enough that many ISPs now offer this).
  • Setting up a wiki behind the school’s firewall for security reasons. The author points to a narrative of his own set up of MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia and Wikicties, on a Mac with OS X. Other good options to look at include PMWiki and Kwiki, though those may be less user friendly for absolute newbies.

I am really happy to see this article appear in print. It’s a whole lot better than the episode of CSI I saw last night about a blogger involved in a murder! In order for these powerful new tools to be used to their potential, they need to be taken seriously and be discussed in detail in a variety of settings.

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