Opinionated Wiki

Most of the complaints are about things we do to make wiki friendly to visitors, which is not often a feature of online communities. Wiki aims for Hospitable Hypertext, even if the person who receives that hospitality is a future you.

A discussion in which people discuss conventions of federated wiki, not all favorably. Opinions mentioned are the privileging of internal links, the bias against commenting when pages might be edited, the lack of formatting and the policy of one idea per page. My positive take is towards the bottom. Artifact from the first FedWiki Happening.

Federated Wiki and the people building and promoting have some strong opinions about how one should wiki that not all participants will immediately agree with.

It is impossible to trace all of the cultures from which Fedwiki hails but Wiki, Github and Open Source will have been influential. There is also an emergent culture of Fedwikihappening, evident in participants' contributions and strongly influenced by statements from leaders like "What we try to do, in Federated Wiki, is..."

This can be seen as a solution that is assumed to suit the community associated with the wiki but also reinforces privileging of in-wiki knowledge by cultural (rather than technical) enforcement of local rules, as can be seen in this example of Wikipedia erasing women's voices.

A possible explanation is that short external link names free up namespace for internal links to be more descriptive. It's unclear how these namespaces are related, if at all.

Implies that there is an objectively better form for the document. Seems counter to encouraging dissent as valuable as consensus.

"I’d rather Audrey be able to take that article [that she disagrees with] and make it an article that reflects her vision..."

Mike Caulfield -- Hey Alex, I've been thinking about this post quite a bit over the past week. And I think I've come to (what may be) a defense, after reading the Splosky piece you linked from your excellent blogpost of the end of coding.

I think the issue is this -- federated wiki is actually the horizontal product to end all products. You can run it on Raspberry Pi, attach a sensor and generate all sorts of graphs as part of your home sensor network. You can use it as a movie database, complete with dynamic crowdsourced rating system. You can spin out Excel representations of manufacturing processes and walk through various data scenarios via hyperlink. You can model community pattern languages, and build community master plans with it.

And we did all that. We did each of these things. And no one really understood it.

So I think the thing that irked me a bit, is it's not really opinionated wiki. The wiki probably has a degree of freedom in it that would make von Hippel blush.

Rather, it's opinionated facilitation. It's a horizontal product in a vertical community.

Because what I've found is as I've moved my focus away from here's what the product could do to here's what a community could look like, people suddenly got it.

I pitched this for 6 months as the do-what-you-want erector set, and I failed for six months. I changed and said, hey, here's a community you could build with it. And it was like night and day. Everything changed overnight.

People realized that they were sick of the event-driven nature of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook be the only game in town. That they were letting a whole portion of who they were atrophy. That they were exhausted. They wanted a space where they could feel Timeless again, but still connected. They wanted to be part of that community.

So, aware that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, I want to engage in facilitation that pushes people towards the piece that attracted them here in the first place. And facilitation is my deal -- I've built large communities online a number of times before, and I'm always aware of that tendency of groups to defeat themselves.

Anyway, long Thread Mode response, you should clear it, but I wanted you to both know I took this critique very seriously, and I hope you are still enjoying the experiment.

Frances Bell Thanks for that really interesting response. I came into this chain whilst trying to follow Mike Caulfield's encouragement to have comment free idea-building, and that's why I forked the post away from the comments, whilst adding to the original post. I now see what might be lost when doing this, and it would b a pity to lose Mike's fascinating comments and ideas here. The history of FWH is almost unknown to me and I was fascinated by Mike's passionate response. For me, having this post entitled Opinionated Facilitator would have made it much more difficult for me to contribute. What is the best way to (re)name posts? and to capture the ideas here? I am wondering if Mike thinks that I am engaging in group-destructive behaviour, just like I am wondering if I am the 'right' person to be here. Anyway, I hope the above isn't lost. p.s. I didn't know what "privileging user voice over programmer choice" meant.

Mike Caulfield: Frances, if you have any doubt you should be here, then I'm failing at facilitation. Everyone here should be here, everyone invited was invited because I read or heard some of their thoughts on social media and was impressed, and wanted thier input into this idea.

As far as "group-destructive" behavior, the Shirky post is really worth a read. One of the smartest things I have read on online groups (maybe any groups really).

Years ago I co-founded an online community -- a state level politics community, Blue Hampshire. wikipedia

And we founded the site because we were sick of the relentless national focus of most online political communities, and because we hated the flame war culture that permeated many other sites. And it was a wild success. From our founding in November 2006 to around 2010 we garnered 5,000 members. We had over 100,000 comments, something like 12,000 blog posts. People said we'd die after the 2008 elections, and we just got stronger.

And every step of the way our users remarked that they loved the site because there were no flame wars and because the focus was relentlessly local, even national issues were seen through a local lens. And everyone said the reason other state blogs were failing is because they weren't local enough, and engaged in flame wars.

And those same users would then post on national issues and start flame wars. And we would try to act as the counterweight to that tendency, front-paging local work by users as part of the Mullet Strategy.

We watched the Colony Collapse of state blog after state blog, and we realized at some point that the reason we were surviving and growing was we were keeping the site meaning what the users wanted it to mean, despite the best efforts of users to change that.

In 2010 I left, in 2011 the last co-founder left, and we turned it over to others.

Many things probably contributed to what happened next, but after Dean left, we watched the site collapse under it's new leadership. They changed the software to Wordpress Multi-user, which was more user friendly, but was missing key ingredients of our buggy SoapBlox software. The site leaders didn't push the participants to produce local content, and the site became just another forum on national events. Flame wars weren't quashed, people weren't banned, member talent was not developed and promoted. It's now a husk, a sad thing I sometimes check out, with three people posting and two of them of questionable sanity.

Here's a snippet of the most recent conversation on the site (yes, the most recent conversation was 3 months ago), and here's a randomly chosen snippet from 2010, when the site was strong.

And that's a randomly chosen stream from 2010, a little bit snippy. The best conversations were beautiful things.

In the absence of some sort of steering, all sites go this way, because actions have a compounding effect. Again, Shirky captures this better than anyone I have ever seen. But it's not that the users want to be the repugnant samNH and joebuilder below, it's that a cycle happens that drives away all the people attracted to the idea and the site becomes just another sad little corner of the internet.

Anyway, I realize the irony of writing this response to you in one big comment. But I've run a number of online things before and I've found that social software is not like desktop software, because communities that don't develop shared values, idioms, and practices melt away and get taken over by the trolls, the spammers, the marketers, and the metas. (For a related read, see Cohen's Law).

As a simple example, people want to read nice clean prose, and have a feeling of peace when they read -- but they want easy access to markup. People hate coming into a community where they have to read through months of comments to understand what is going on, but they want extensive commenting capabilities. People want a focus that transcends individual assertions, but they want their distinct voice. People want their discourse to foster unique connections, rooted in the moment, but then complain that the site has become cliquish.

It's like everybody wants a Big Yard and a Walkable Neighborhood. But you do the math, and you can't have both. So eventually you start talking about how zoning laws can capture what the community wants, and protect itself from itself.

In days 1-14 I just want to try doing things in a certain way, and then in days 14-whenever I want all the smart people I invited to tell me the ways in which that worked and the ways it failed so that we can set the DNA of a future web intentionally, rather than go through another "natural" process of Incremental Caging. So it really is opinionated facilitation, not opinionated wiki. And I'm hoping to benefit from all your opinions as well.

The normal end of all communities is Colony Collapse, and the chances an artifically assembled community like this will survive are close to zero. Failure is the norm. But if it does survive I want it to mean something, and if it does survive it's likley to only because it does mean something.

I don't think there's a "better document" but there is a more useful document to the person reading it. I'd rather see their idea of a more useful document than a comment, most times.