This document provides an introduction and overview of wikis. It discusses wikis' history as a type of website invented by Ward Cunningham, their radical simplicity allowing direct editing through the web, and saved versions. Examples of wikis discussed include the first wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository, and the PHPWiki exercise site. Key differences between wikis and blogs are outlined. Academic wikis such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia are examined. The document explores wikis' structures of participation and how they relate to other media forms. It also discusses the semantic web and linked data projects like Freebase and DBpedia that aim to make wiki knowledge machine-readable.

1. Seminar 10
Wikis
Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts
MDST 3703 / 7703
Fall 2010

2. Business
• Any WordPress issues?
• Other issues to raise?

3. Review
• Blogging and RSS
– The Great Chain of Blogging
– Personal broadcasting meets established news
• MSM = “Mainstream Media”
• Are blogs useful to academics?
– Not the same asking if blogs can/should/will
replace the the academic essay and monograph
• Our concern is with effects which are still not
fully understood and evolving

4. Overview
• Today we look at wikis, one of the major
media genres of the web
– history, form, content, function/effects
• Learn to use a simple wiki
• Discuss the role of wikis within the ecology of
academic work
• Discuss future directions of wikis

5. What is a Wiki?
• A kind of web site invented by Ward
Cunningham
– The simplest database possible
• Radical Simplicity
– All pages are directly editable through the web
– All versions are saved
– Simple syntax, e.g. CamelCase defines a link
• Now hundreds of varieties of wiki software
and wiki sites

6. The first wiki: the Portland
Pattern Repository
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki

7. Exercise—using PHPWiki
• Go to http://ontoligent.com/wiki
• A PHPWiki site, based on the original wiki
• Everyone create a page
– On the front page, click on “MDST Student Pages”
– Find your page – the ? means the page has not yet
been created
– Start adding content ...

8. Some Basic Syntax
• CamelCase (aka WikiSyntax) creates links
– When you save, new links will show a question
mark
– Also square brackets can be used
• Image URLs surrounded by square brackets
will insert images directly
– e.g. [http://somewhere.com/myimage.png]
• Lists are made with * or # prefixes
• Headers are made with !, !!, or !!! prefixes

9. How are wikis different than blogs?

10. Wikis vs. Blogs
Personal wikis,
e.g. TiddlyWiki
WIKIS
BLOGS
Collaborative Blogs,
e.g. Daily Kos
Individual Collective
diachronicsynchronic

11. Other differences
• Hypertext—wikis have more links and greater
link density
• Aesthetics – wikis tend to be plainer, more
meat and potatoes
• Metacritical—wiki lexia tend to include
comments on their own condition

12. Metacritical comment

13. Are wikis useful for academic work?
Both tend to be open
(socially and editorially)
and to oppose the culture
of expertise

14. Academic Wikis
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
– http://plato.stanford.edu/about.html
• Arché TWiki
– http://arche-wiki.st-
and.ac.uk/~ahwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

15. Wikipedia
• Best example of wiki logic (wiki culture)
– Form: basic wiki
– Content: encyclopedia knowledge (tertiary source)
– Function/effect: ???
• Reviled (but secretly used)
by academics, librarians
and educators – Why the bad
rep?

16. Prestige?

18. “Structures of Participation”
• Media forms entail different structures of
participation
– Producers
– Consumers
– Relations between producers and consumers
– Relations between producers
– Relations between consumers
• Think of literature, newspapers, radio, TV
– The web has spawned several new media forms

20. Freebase
• Consists of Topics and Relations
– Everything is a topic, all topics have IDs
– Topics are linked by relationship types
• An attempt to build a knowledge base on top
of Wikipedia. Why?
– Meant to be machine readable
– Wikipedia doesn’t have an API
• Example of what we are building when we
build Wikipedia

21. DBpedia
• An attempt to reverse engineer an ontology
from Wikipedia
• Converts structured and extracted data from
articles in Freebase-like sentences
– Uses RDF
• Forms a machine readable resource for
semantic web applications
• See http://dbpedia.org

23. RDF vs HTML
• See http://dbpedia.org/page/Charlottesville
• A sample data record extracted from
Wikipedia
• Can be viewed in a semantic web browser
– E.g. OpenLink, a Firefox extension
• Connects to other RDF datasets on the web
– e.g. Geonames (owl:sameAs)

24. Hypertext as logical network
http://mikelove.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/why-freebase-if-we-already-have-wikipedia/

25. Web 3.0

26. The Machine is Us(ing Us)
People
Wikipedia
Facebook
Twitter
Semantic
Web
Machines
(Machines are participating too)

27. Technology, Culture and Academia
• Both blogs and wikis represent both a set of
technologies and a set of values and principles
– Blogging = personal opinion
– Wikis = openness (e.g. WikiLeaks)
– Both compete with traditional academic values
• Two responses
– Maybe academic values should change
– Maybe the technologies can be “worked,” as there
is no absolute requirement that culture and
technology would go together

28. The Three Webs
• Web 1.0 – 1991 to 1999 – HTML, Perl
• Web 2.0 – 2000 to 2010 – PHP, DHTML, AJAX
• Web 3.0 – 2010 to ??? -- RDF, HTML5