Bestiary of Bots

WikiWikiWeb

Wiki wiki is the first Hawai'ian term I learned on my first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals. I said what? He explained that wiki wiki meant quick. I was to find the quick bus. I did pick up a book about the language before my return home. I learned many things from this but wiki wiki is the word that sticks the most. (source)

Whose software are we using?

Video recording of Ward Cunningham talking about the wiki.

What is a wiki?

In 1995 Ward Cunningham described a wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work." The wiki was a way to share and collaborate on code and code-related ideas in a casual way. In fact, the wiki followed principles such as the collective code ownership, or code stewardship.

More design principles here.

The first ever wiki site was created for the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995 and it was called WikiWikiWeb (sometimes WardsWiki).

"Be prepared for a bit of CultureShock, though - there is no NPOV on WardsWiki and many clever people have visited with ideas that don't always play well together. The advantage of this Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers." 

Some of the components of this wiki were:

• The landing page.
• A section to welcome visitors.
• Indexes that serve as "roadmaps".
• A selection of pages that could serve as starting points.
• A listing of things to think about.
• Already back then, there was a significant number of wiki social norms:
  • The norm of norms; take everything with a grain of salt.
  • Use your real name and write in a way others will understand.
  • This wiki was created for the discussion of patterns, particularly software design patterns. Its users have chosen to broaden that focus.
  • There are two ideal forms for contributions; most pages contain a mixture of both.
  • Never intentionally misrepresent or suppress other people's opinions. Be especially careful about deletion.
  • Unless they say otherwise, don't mess with people's home pages, except to leave them notes.
  • EnglishPlease. This particular Wiki is in English, and thus non-English pages are discouraged (with a few exceptions, such as the InternationalOneMinuteWiki). However, PublicWikiForums exist in many different languages, and there even exist a few MultiLingualWiki?s.
  • If you care about literature, you can discard any of these rules to help bring down this and other base projects.
    • Huh?
• The site is still active today.

There were many other pages where the users of the wiki tried to self-regulate dealing with conflict, for example a page on only saying things that can be heard or how to react to a flame, or letting it be.

Today we will be taking an amateur design ethnography approach in relation to the wiki. What characteristics can you distinguish in Cunningham's wiki culture? Focus on one specific aspect of the wiki. What are the needs, language, concepts and beliefs that emerge from these pages? Take notes of your observations and don't worry about making assumptions for the purpose of this exercise.

Wikipedia's Eternal September

The Switch to Mediawiki

Wikipedia is often presented as an analogy for systems of governance in academic writing. It has been included in the discourse of collaboration, networking, transparency, knowledge production and horizontal ruling. However, as in any peer production project, there are a number of problems that Wikipedia is facing:

• declining number of (new) users,
• gender & race-based content and user imbalance,
• conflicts between the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the domain names and servers on which the Wikipedia content resides, and the community of volunteer contributors.

Please take a few minutes to consider:

Some Further Notes

• In our attempts as amateur ethnographers, we must observe ourselves in the process first and foremost: https://theconversation.com/decolonising-research-methodology-must-include-undoing-its-dirty-history-83912
• For more writing about ethnographic methods, see:
  • https://www.wordsinspace.net/course_material/mrm/mrmethnography.html
  • https://anthrodesign.wordsinspace.net/2020/portfolio/week-7-october-13-ethnography-for-design/
  • https://www.hesge.ch/head/sites/default/files/documents/de-x-book.pdf
  • https://nycstandswithstandingrock.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/linda-tuhiwai-smith-decolonizing-methodologies-research-and-indigenous-peoples.pdf