[-empyre-] WIKI Historigraphy

[Marco Deseriis]

Hi everyone,

here is Marco, one of the authors of Networked. I am supposed to discuss 
my chapter later this month, but I'll take to freedom to jump ahead of 
the line to say something about wiki as used in Wikipedia vs. wiki as 
used in Networked. As we all know, wiki is an Hawaiian word that means 
"fast" and the potentiality of the software is harnessed at its best 
when there is an active community using it constantly and frequently.

In his recent Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky points out that wiki's 
popularity (and Wikipedia's success) lies in its openness, i.e. in its 
ability "to take a staggering  amount of input with a minimum of 
overhead." (p. 120) This allows a large number of contributors to 
participate, no matter how amateurish or idiosyncratic their 
contributions may be. Everyone can start an article on Wikipedia (in 
Wikipedia's jargon "write a stub"). No matter how short and rudimentary 
this article may be, argues Shirky, a stub "can be the anchor for the 
good article that will eventually appear. *It is very inadequacy 
motivates people to improve it.*" (pp. 121-122) We may say that 
ultimately the power of Wikipedia lies in a low-fi, DIY punk ethics. (An 
ethics which is perhaps also an "aesthetics," depending on how you 
define the term).

Networked on the other hand is making quite a different use of the wiki. 
We have been invited to use a wiki when the chapters were still 
unpublished, i.e. for the editing process. After Helen, Jo, and Eduardo 
finished commenting on our drafts, and we responded to their comments by 
editing more or less extensively our writings, the chapters were moved 
to the current Wordpress blog, which enables readers to add comments, 
but not to change the main text. So the difference is not only, as Anna 
says, that readers cannot access previous versions of the chapters, but 
mostly that they cannot intervene in our chapters with the same level of 
freedom a wiki user would have. In other words, Networked is based on an 
entirely different model of publishing from Wikipedia, less based on 
collaborative production and more on a diffused social testing of some 
critical and theoretical positions.

Obviously, one may say that a Wikipedia contributor can benefit directly 
from his/her own intervention, in that he/she can see the result of it 
immediately. Networked on the other hand may not advance such a clear 
"bargain" (another keyword in Shirky's book) in that it is unclear what 
kind of pleasure and reward a user may get from posting a comment on the 
Wordpress blog. But here is where, I believe, the fact that the chapters 
are not bound together and do not form a coherent whole (yet) becomes 
crucial. Because each chapter is, in a sense, part of many possible 
books, there is a gap there for readers to pick what interests them, 
develop a dialog with one or multiple authors, use a chapter for a class 
or a performance for instance, thus slowly contributing to the migration 
of the book from its current 1.0 phase to the 2.0 and 3.0 stages Jo was 
mentioning in her previous post. It obviously requires time and 
dedication to do that, but empyre seems to be one likely conversational 
space where people may be attracted to some of the themes developed in 
the book.

Cheers,
Marco Deseriis







Lichty, Patrick wrote:
> Wikipedia has the advantage of being a wiki which means that it also allows for an archiving of its own textual history. While its true that events change its most recent text, it's also the case that one can return to older histories/archives of the entry at hand. In fact this is something I spend a lot of time pointing out to my students as one of its most salient features and I get them to spend time with which and what version of information they are using.
>
> *****************************
> Now, THIS is something really interesting (and new) when considering the historiography of electronic media.  Imagine actually being able to map the revision change of one's historical records!  This could be a thesis paper in itself - the historiography of the revision chain.
>
> So then, what does it mean in terms of a WIKI to be able to see the arc of one's revision over time spread out before them.
>
> Excellent question!
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