Wiki and Biscuits Suggested background listening: http://listen.hatnote.com/ By Ahmad Gharbeia for the Tea Time cyberparty at EUME 2020.05.11 under CC:By 4.0 license Wikiwiki A word from the language of Hawaii meaning “ quickly ” Wiki? ● A way of collaborative work ● A computer-system to do so utilising hypertext ● In a sense, the closest thing we have to the original vision of a read/write web: a global system for sharing and continuously enhancing a common body of knowledge ... ● Wikiwikiweb, the mother wiki created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, can still be seen today at: http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki ● Many software implementations of the wiki paradigm see Wikipedia:Comparison of wiki software ● Thousands of wikis on the web see some at Wikipedia:List of wikis and much more at WikiIndex.org) wiki ≠ Wikipedia ● Each wiki is independent: – subject / scope – policies: contributing, editorial – openness – organisation: of content and community An environment for authoring ● A collection of pages with no inherent relationships ● Structure and relationships laid over by authors; embedded in the body, using simple constructs ● Facilitates non-linear authoring by linking to the future ● Always morphing as relationships are changed ... ● Depends on self-motivation; encourages it ● Tolerates organic growth ● Doesn’t require predetermined design ● Forever a draft, a protype Who uses wikis ● universities’ departments ● research groups ● fans of creative works (TV, games, book, etc) ● oragnisations ● government bodies ● many others Uses ● organisation of domain knowledge ● complex manuals ● directories ● companion guides ● repositories of digital artefacts ● fiction Technicalities & Peculiarities ● Records every change by every contributor to every page ● Semantics and document structure first – Similar to TeX or HTML but much simpler ● Allows for discussions and reflection on the subject matter; and captures it ● Self-documenting Using a simple syntax, authors mark the structure of an article: Headers, lists, links, etc They do not occupy themselves with appearance A wiki page can have an attached discussion page were discussions take place about the body of the page/article Manuals of editing the wiki as well as editorial policies and governance bylaws find their place on the wiki itself, developed in the same working mode and the same technical process. Wikis as a subject of study ● Wikis, as cyber-societies 1 , have become a subject of sociological studies ● Wikis provide raw data and grounds to apply theoretical frameworks to linguists, epistemologists, sociologists, Internet historians and researchers in other fields 1. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community; Jones, Steven G.; Sage Publications; 1994 Example visualizations of data from Wikipedia from http://seealso.org To take into consideration ● The horror of T H E B L A N K P A G E ● Takes time to mature..gain momentum ● Non-intuitive for some people ● May require continuous gardening ● Issues of ownership: excessive / insufficient ● Power structures ● Conflicts in visions, interest, approach ● Governance Wikis I work on ● Wiki Gender : a knowledge base in Arabic on women and gender issues – https://genderiyya.xyz – Established in March 2016 with core in Cairo, sprawled to Beirut – Active, expanding in content with potential of further community growth ● Comics archive – https://mazg.org/archive – Established in March 2017 – No community + week ownership + conflicting vision = stale ● Umranica : a knowledge base on the issues of urbanism in Egypt and the region – https://umranica.wikido.xyz – Established December 2019 – Nascent, has ownership and enthusiastic community = potential of growth Wait there’s more.. ● Legisnomia.wikido.xyz: a map of Egypt’s legislation, with multi-layered annotation – Established December 2019 – Nascent, a single person’s project with potential for growth ● Social sciences knowledge base in Arabic – To be established soon; – archival + original content on the subjects, persons and literature – Save the work outcomes of initiatives like CILAS, Mobtada’, Sekkat AlMa’aarif and other