Kicks, apologies for attempting to “bait” you, but this is almost exactly what I had hoped your response would entail. However, I didn’t expect it would be as deep as it is in experimentation already! I had looked at a few of the wikis involved, but couldn’t discover how to directly create an account or contribute to them to push into the conversation. I’m far from a Tiddlywiki expert and just couldn’t figure out the direct means of participating. I’ve got more experience in some of the MediaWiki space which makes a bit more sense to me. 

Quite often in contributing to the IndieWeb wiki, I feel like I’m having a conversation both with the wiki and also the broader community, though it’s often a longer tail conversation instead of a faster moving social media sort of conversation. I do often wish that MediaWiki supported incoming Webmention so that I could just mention a wiki page and have the link to my post added to the “See also” section or a Webmention section so that it could be copied into the wiki as an example. It certainly has the potential of adding knowledge to the content of such a site.

The ability to be able to log into a community wiki with my own site and contribute to it is a powerful thing. Even better if the wiki tells me about updates to pages I contribute to, so I can continue to be a part of that discussion. I also frequently watch the recently updated page to follow changes in the broader-ranging conversation.

Wiki-based conversations like this also remind me a bit of the recent Blogging Futures conversations done with the concept of the “blogchain”. In some sense it is a different linking method than webmention, but works roughly the same, though without all the sides being able to necessarily own the entirety of the conversation or necessarily having pointers/links to the main conversation. Webmention and syndication links help to solve both of these problems.

Each individual works on writing master pages for specific concepts (Find The Others has been a topic that we’ve fleshed out together) or even for specific people (such as h0p3’s page on Sphygmus or my page on h0p3.) These personal pages are just good fun – a reminder that the point of our conversation isn’t just to explore a topic, but to get to know each other and goof around.

I almost immediately grok the idea of “whostyles” and think that’s a brilliant sort of way to do some of these conversations and differentiating, particularly on a wiki. Scaling it into a broader non-technical public may require some work though.

I’ll have to look closer on what is going on in these cases and figure out how to contribute. In particular, I’d like to look at your note that webmentions aren’t necessary and how that works out in practice. One of the things I love about Webmentions is the ability of both sides to “own” copies of the conversations, so that even if one side of it disappears, the other can live on as a reference, even if only to the site owner.

I set up my own MediaWiki site last year, but it has a few technical problems that need fixing to get it working the way I need it to. I’ve also started looking into TiddlyWiki as well.

For me, ideally, I’d love to be able to span the bridge of traditional CMS/blogging-based websites and wikis to get the best of all worlds. I keep referring back to Mike Caulfield’s article The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral for philosophical guidance. I know he’s done some interesting wiki-based experimentation before, including building a WordPress-based wiki set up in the past. Some of that work was based on Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki ideas, but it’s been a few years since I’ve experimented with any of it.

Of course a lot of this goes back to an idea of Tantek’s: 

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb

And isn’t that the dream?

 

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