Wiki Philosophy

The Philosophy of Wiki

or "how to communicate with those of superior spiritual stature in three easy steps"

Okay, first off, the idea of a Wiki on the Not-back site was not my idea... The award for that belongs to Max, who has been playing with Wikis since the original at the Portland Pattern Repository. He thought it was just too kewl for words, and passed the idea to me.

I didn't do much, until one day, I discovered the PhpWiki software that SteveWainstead wrote... it was very simple, clean code, and easy to install. So I did. Thanks Steve, and thanks Max.

The original Wiki language was a tad harder to write, since making bullets required making 'tabs', which won't work under windows (Bad Mr. Gates! No Cookie.), and used apostrophes for bold and italic... two for italic, three for bold, five for both.... '''''pretty ugly and hard to read, żeh?'''''

So I re-wrote that part. My goal was to make Wiki readable in either form, plain text or rendered nicely in HTML... you've probably noticed that it's still easy to read when editing, yes? Good, then I've succeeded. the reason for the simplicity is so that almost anyone can sit down, click a few things and just know how to edit a page. It's quite possible to learn Wiki without ever reading AddingPages or HowToUseWiki (And in fact, most people haven't. I've looked at the logs and they're not accessed by many people)

Such simplicity is in line with many of the eastern concepts of WabiSabi, the Zen austerity that people think of as Oriental Beauty... I try to incorporate that into my life, so it seems rather attractive to me, and gret for carrying information.

I took out some linking code, and replaced it with footnotes[1]... that way it's more general purpose, and has fewer rules implied by the system (and can't hide Javascript in it and do something unkind) and lets you see the links before you click them. Also, the editing is a single page that way.

There's more to do... I've added color-changing links, so you can see if you've seen something before or if there's new information on each page, but sometimes it's impossible to tell what changed... so I'm going to add a function that will highlight the changes on a page since the last version. I'm also going to write a function for "time-travel", so you can look at older versions of pages. (Yes, that means it's going to archive every copy from the time I start that.)

• why do you want that, the bit about being able to look at past versions of the pages? For some reason the thought disturbs me... I guess I'd feel pressure to edit very carefully before I clicked save, where as now I'll often save several times in the course of editing or writing a page... I do like the highlighting idea though. Amazing how little technical things can make such a big difference in how and what we communicate. ~reanna
• Yes, they can make a difference. I think that I may only store previous versions if the authors are different: If I create a page, then you edit it twice in a row, what will be saved is My version, follwed and superseeded by your latest version. That way, small mistakes don't show up as changes and everyone is happy. Do, of course, consider your words because even if it's only there a day, lots of people will read what you write... but this happens as the Wiki is now. (Ari)

I hope this explains more about the theories behind Wiki,

 * Yup. Thanks for sharing that with the class, little Ricky... who's next?
;)

[1] Which Noam improved. Thanks.

I totally adore Wikiwiki on a philisohical scale.. Its so... :) well. unschoolerish in ideals. I like the freedom of speech, the disorgaization with spotontanouse organization... the colours, structure, footnotes, italics, all speaks of a very zen or discordian point of view towards the universe.

... Now i am finding as i bum around the universe that i get annoyed at web pages that arent wikiwiki style, because i cant add my thoughts as easily..

 -Dawn 

Talk about simple.

 -Daniel Pech