Wiki
What, exactly, is a "wiki", anyway? Opinions vary.
I write about why I don’t call these cards or this website a wiki in: cards-why.
But it definitely is a wiki by certain definitions. In Rat-Tools, I mention this:
This wiki is edited and navigated locally in Vim with a plugin of my own creation, VViki. VViki is basically a stripped-down VimWiki (another Vim plugin) that natively navigates and edits AsciiDoc files.
(And someday I need to finish writing this before I even forget what it is/was: vim-wiki-ish-miniplug)
For me, the ability to navigate the pages by link in the same program I’m using to edit those pages is what provides the "wiki-like" experience. If I just had a directory of interlinked documents that I needed to open and edit separately, how would that be any different from any other website?
There’s also the intention to heavily interlink and continually curate these pages. I think that’s wiki-like as well.
Finally, there’s the social aspect to wikis that go back to Ward Cunningham’s original idea:
"The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier."
There are some very successful "social" wikis (edited by multiple people) besides Wikipedia. Here’s some I actually use:
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https://www.wiktionary.org/ - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (in 2023, this has finally surpassed Merriam Webster’s website for me as an English dictionary)
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https://wiki.osdev.org/ - OSDev, the operating system development wiki
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https://tvtropes.org/ - TV Tropes, the "all devouring pop-culture wiki"
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https://concatenative.org/ - The concatenative language wiki
Alex Schroeder writes in Wiki culture (alexschroeder.ch)
"In that way, Oddmu is also a hypertext authoring tool that you use in public, but you use it alone, most likely. If I were to set it up for me and a bunch of friends, I might consider adding more social features such as noting who changed something, or implement a git back-end that monitored the filesystem for writes and checked any files written into a repository. Not now, though.
"So what is wiki culture? Now that most wikis are dead with the exception of encyclopedias, there are two cultures: Encyclopedia writing culture and single author hypertext writing culture."
Sandra Snan writes in Wiki on the wider web (idiomdrottning.org)
"I mean I don’t just make internal links. I link to other people and to Wikipedia. Ideally the entire web is one big web. "Wiki" was invented by Ward to make web quickly. Wiki means fast or quick.
"…Then, the more I used it, something happened. I found myself feeling less like the curator of my own garden and more a part of something bigger and interconnected. I make links to my other pages, sure, I do write interconnectedly, but I also link to Wikipedia and to other blogs.
"It’s all one big world wide web."
I like that a lot.
I think the lasting impression of "wikis" on the Web, whether huge and social like Wikipedia or tiny and individual like my website, is the interconnectedness of pages and the editability of the content. (Whether or not they actually are, there’s an intention to update the pages.) This is in contrast to, say, printed media which is written to be published once and never edited again and which may reference other media but cannot directly link to it.
The social act of editing together on a single wiki or as part of a distributed conversation, as demonstrated on this page, is perhaps not required, but very cool.