WIDE OPEN By Brian Lamb SPACES TheWayItWasMeantToBe Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in ar- WIKIS ranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. —Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web Remember when the Internet was about opening up access to information and breaking down the barriers between con- tent creators and content consumers? Think back to when spam was just a meat- OR like substance. To those heady days when Timothy Leary was predicting that the PC READY would be the LSD of the nineties. Before the DMCA. Before eBay. Back when the Web was supposed to be a boundless Borgesian “Library of Babel” and not a global supermarket. Forget that the dot- com era ever happened—if you were an investor or working for stock options back then, maybe you already have. In 1999, the World Wide Web inven- tor Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked back on the previous decade and lamented: “I wanted the Web to be what I call an inter- active space where everybody can edit. And I started saying ‘interactive,’ and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was ‘interactive,’ meaning NOT you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity.” That vision of a genuinely interactive environment rather than “a glorified television channel”—one in which people not only would browse pages but also would edit them as part of the process—did not disappear with the rise of the read-only Web browser.1 It’s churning away more actively than ever, in a vivid and chaotic Web-within-the-Web, via an anarchic breed of pages known as “wikis.” Brian Lamb is a project coordinator with the Office of Learning Technology at The Univer- sity of British Columbia, where he grooves on tools that are fast, cheap, and out of control. 36 EDUCAUSE reviewⅪ September/October 2004 Illustration by Paul Watson, © 2004 © 2004 Brian Lamb TheStandardWikiOverview ■ Content is ego-less, time-less, and never fin- ished. Anonymity is not required but is Making the simple complicated is commonplace; common. With open editing, a page making the complicated simple, awesomely can have multiple contributors, and simple, that’s creativity. notions of page “authorship” and —Charles Mingus “ownership” can be radically altered. Content “cloning” across wikis— It’s risky to talk about wikis as if they’re all sometimes referred to in non-wiki cir- Wikis are quick because the same. In practice, the term wiki (de- cles as “plagiarism”—is often accept- rived from the Hawaiian word for “quick”) able. (This attitude toward authorship the processes of reading is applied to a diverse set of systems, fea- can make citations for articles such as tures, approaches, and projects. Even this one a tricky exercise.) Unlike and editing are combined. dedicated wikiheads engage in perpetual weblogs, wiki pages are rarely organ- arguments about what constitutes true ized by chronology; instead they are wikiness. But some fundamental princi- organized by context, by links in and ples (usually) apply.2 links out, and by whatever categories or concepts emerge in the authoring collaborative systems. Access restrictions, ■ Anyone can change anything. Wikis are process. And for the most part, wikis rigidly defined workflows, and structures quick because the processes of read- are in a constant state of flux. Entries are anathema to most wiki developers. ing and editing are combined. The sig- are often unpolished, and creators What’s unique about wikis is that users de- nature of a wiki is a link at the bottom may deliberately leave gaps open, fine for themselves how their processes of the page reading “Edit text of this hoping that somebody else will come and groups will develop, usually by mak- page” or something similar. Clicking along to fill them in. ing things up as they go along. that link produces the page’s hyper- Newcomers to the medium may find it text markup, allowing instant revi- There are plenty of exceptions to each easiest to start with simple tasks. Wikis sions. Authoring software, permis- of these principles. Wiki practices sit on a work great as shared online sketchpads or sions, or passwords are typically not continuum. At one end is the radical as spaces for brainstorming. They are per- required. openness and simplicity of the wiki in- fect for creating perpetually updated lists ■ Wikis use simplified hypertext markup. ventor Ward Cunningham’s first system: or collections of links, and most users can Wikis have their own markup lan- the WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi- instantly grasp their utility as informal guage that essentially strips HTML bin/wiki), which was launched in 1995 bulletin boards. Because it takes only a down to its simplest elements. New and has remained remarkably true to its couple of seconds to set up a new page, no users need to learn a few formatting minimalist vision. But as wiki usage purpose is too trivial. tags, but only a few. Most wiki tags sig- grows in popularity with other online One common way to use wikis is to nificantly streamline and simplify cultures, even being touted in the busi- support meeting planning: a provisional their tasks. For instance, the minimum ness world as a knowledge management agenda is drawn up, and the URL is dis- HTML code needed to create a named solution, scores of emerging wiki systems tributed to the participants, who are then hyperlink to EDUCAUSE Review on- are adding functionalities such as re- free to comment or to add their own items. line, <a href=”http://www.educause stricted access, private workspaces, hier- Once the meeting is under way, the online .edu/pub/er/”>EDUCAUSE Review archical organization, WYSIWYG Web agenda serves as a note-taking template, </a>, would be rendered in a wiki editing, and even integration with cen- and when the meeting is completed, the within square brackets. The result, tralized content management systems. notes are instantly available online, allow- [http://www.educause.edu/pub/ On this more structured and feature-rich ing the participants or anybody else to re- er/EDUCAUSE Review], saves a mini- end of the continuum, it can be difficult view and annotate the proceedings. mum of twelve keystrokes and is to decide whether these are really wiki With some planning, more complex significantly easier to remember. Raw systems at all or are simply browser-based processes can easily be supported. A URLs typically require no markup tags HTML authoring tools. number of varied applications have been at all to be rendered live on a wiki defined by heterogeneous groups from page. WhyWiki? within my home institution, The Univer- ■ WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Wiki sity of British Columbia.3 page titles often eschew spaces to A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be allow for quick page creation and au- prepared to take the helm. ■ The Faculty of Applied Science In- tomatic, markup-free links between —Henrik Ibsen structional Support links wikis into its pages within (and sometimes across) course management system authoring wiki systems. Linking to related pages In many respects, the wide-open ethic of environment so that design teams can is easy, which promotes promiscuous wikis contrasts vividly with the traditional quickly and collaboratively build ref- interlinking among wiki pages. approaches of standard groupware and erence lists and outlines, brainstorm 38 EDUCAUSE reviewⅪ September/October 2004 “[The] wiki functioned in this context It’s possible that wikis might simply as an intellectually appropriate tech- represent the latest advance in online in- nology, aesthetically and politically in teraction—a cost-effective and readily keeping with the theme of the event, adopted knowledge management tool. which was the significance of ubiqui- But as wikis make their mark in higher tous media in everyday life and the education, the ultimate implications may ways in which accessible tools mediate prove to be far more profound than mere The structure of wikis is the construction of popular culture.”6 gains in efficiency. ■ Teresa Dobson, an assistant professor shaped from within—not of education, is using the wiki space in TheStandardObjection imposed from above. both her teaching and her research. Her graduate course on technologies Editing is the same as quarreling with writers— for writing employs the wiki as a sup- same thing exactly. port for collaborative experiments in —Harold Ross composition and “as a prompt for re- flection on the nature of online writ- There’s a very common reaction that instructional strategies, and capture ing and reading.”7 newcomers express when first intro- suggestions. Educational Technology duced to wikis: “That looks promising, Coordinator Jim Sibley reports: “The What is most remarkable about these but it can’t work for me.” Their objection ability to spawn whole sites or a series diverse outcomes is how they came to wikis is nearly universal: “If anybody of pages astonishes people when they about. In all instances, the users decided can edit my text, then anybody can ruin first see it. You can quickly map out for themselves how the wiki would fulfill my text.” Human nature being what it is, pages to cover all aspects of complex their objectives. Technical support and to allow free access to hard-earned con- processes or projects.”4 training was minimal: at most, one hour tent is to indulge open-source utopi- ■ The Career Services unit uses wiki of instruction was needed, and in most anism beyond reason. pages to store and organize content for cases, orientation was handled by a sin- This concern is largely misplaced. a major new job posting and career de- gle e-mail. Even confirmed techno- Think of an open wiki space as a home velopment Web site that it is develop- phobes have grasped and mastered the that leaves its front door unlocked but ing.