Blog Posts About: wiki

Yaay! We have a page on Wikipedia. Now what?

As you may know, Wikipedia pages tend to evolve over time as users contribute new information and we're excited to see the Common Craft page evolve.  But first we're hoping to build on a solid foundation - and we need your help. The information that's there is a good start, but it can be better. 

As the owners, it's not kosher for us to edit the page, so we'll be adding suggestions to the "talk" section over time (a few are there now). If a Wikipedian deems the information verifiable, unbiased, accurate, etc. they should feel free to update the article.  Of course, the hope is that information in the article grows organically. We hope you'll consider lending a hand!

If you don't know what a wiki is, you might check out Wikis in Plain English.

My Dad has a saying about trying to get boys to do work.  "One boy is worth one boy, two boys is worth half-a-boy and three boys is worth no boys at all."

When I look at Wikipedia with my plain English glasses, I think the same is true about experts. Look at it this way...

Let's say you're trying to learn about digestion.  You can likely find an expert who can sit with you and make digestion very easy to understand. Now, lets say you're talking to two experts. Something changes - the experts are now double checking each other and looking for ways to relate their unique point of view. With each expert you add, the more accurate the information becomes and the harder it becomes for you to understand.

This is what happens on Wikipedia all the time.  Experts are looking over each others' shoulders to such a degree that the entries become very accurate, but very hard to understand for the general public.  Here are the first couple of sentences for the Digestion entry on Wikipedia:

Digestion is the process of metabolism whereby a biological entity processes a substance in order to chemically and mechanically convert the substance for the body to use.
And guess what?  A Google search for "digestion" reveals this wikipedia entry as the first result.

So what?

I'm not against Wikipedia or experts.  I just want to be sure that we're not assuming that:

1. Wikipedia is the end-all be-all for understand something, even though it's so often the #1 result.
2. Experts, especially as a group, will produce results that relate to everyday people.

Why is this the case?  I'd say it has a lot to do with what Chip and Dan Heath call The Curse of Knowledge in their book Made to Stick.  I'll cover that ground sometime soon.

Oh, one last note - I'm the third of three boys in my family, so my Dad knows what he's talking about.

Did you know that in a recent survey by Harris Interactive that only 16% of the online public know what a wiki is? For some, this will seem surprising. Others will say "what's a wiki?"

I had coffee today with my friend Kevin Flaherty of Wet Paint, the Seattle-based wiki company. He told me that they were perplexed that "wiki" was deemed one the 10 most annoying words on the web, so they ask Harris Interactive to do the survey comparing "wiki" to the terms social network, blog and online forum. Here's what they found (full results here):

16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is. Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.

Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.

For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper.

What does this mean? It means that we're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution.

What really gets me about this is that wikis, RSS, social networks and blogs are all accessible and potentially useful for the general public - but they're not being adopted as quickly as we'd imagine. The culprit, from my perspective, is the language we use to describe and promote them. It's too easy to forget that we're in the minority.

My advice to promote more awareness is to stop talking like a brochure and tell a story. Don't talk about what your product is or does - tell people why they should give a damn. Use real world examples and show how a problem gets solved. Look at every word you use and consider the simpler options.

You might not earn the respect of programmers, but you might just turn your Mom onto something that will save her time - and we all need more time.

Just after posting our first video on RSS , I learned a few valuable lessons:

1. Video is inaccessible for the hearing impaired

2. Video is not easy to translate into other languages

3. There is a new site that addresses both of these issues called DotSub .

DotSub makes it easy for me to transcribe the spoken words into text subtitles. Then, once the subtitles exist, it enables DotSub members to voluntarily translate the text into other languages and post the video to their blogs. This makes videos international and more accessible - for free.

So far, the Wiki video has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German and Swedish . The RSS video has been translated into 11 different languages . I'm just amazed.

Here is the Wiki video in a player that allows you to change languages. Use the Up^ and Down arrows at the bottom to see the subtitles.

Last night I got a chance to hang out with a majority of the folks from SocialText at Nancy White's House. Among other things, I learned about a resource by Chris Dent called Purple Numbers that I'd never heard about before.

In my words, it takes blog-style permalinks to the granular level. Using Purple Numbers, you can have permalinks to a specific paragraph of a weblog entry as opposed to one link for the whole thing. For instance, I can link you to a paragraph where Chris describes the original intent of Purple Numbers(The page scrolls to show the linked paragraph at the top- you can also see more Purple Numbers on Chris' blog).

I'm just starting to learn about it, but it seems to have a lot of potential.

Dina Mehta, who lives in Mumbai India, helped set up a great weblog to support relief efforts in the region after the earthquake/tsunami. Since setting up the site, she's wondering if it would have been better to use a wiki instead of a blog.

Because its a community that is open, a community of people wanting to pitch in and make a difference as we watch the horror unfurling in this part of the world. We know the magic of community in coming together for a cause. Perhaps a wiki might have captured the spirit better?

First I think Dina and her fellow supporters deserve a lot of credit for getting something out there to help. They can have a real impact when it is needed most.

Second, I think her question about blog vs. wiki is interesting. I don't know the specifics of the situation, but I would think this might be a good time for the use of a weblog in conjunction with a wiki- sometimes called a bliki.

I know the folks at SeedWiki can hook a wiki into an existing Movable Type or Blogger blog. In this case, you can post a blog post and make a word in the post a link to a wiki page.

In this way, Dina could continue the time-sensitive blog posts, but at the same time point the community to wiki pages where they can contribute content.

I think this is a combination we'll be seeing more of soon. Perhaps it can work for Dina- I'm going to leave a comment with her now.