wikis | Chris Aldrich

Small progress in my wiki explorations and a fix to my MediaWiki administrative user email address

I’d looking into maintaining a wiki a while back and have recently been determined to get back to it. As a result, I’ve been looking at TiddlyWiki since that’s what some of Kicks Condor‘s group has been using. (Yep, I’ve still got that tab opened and am tinkering away slowly on the ideas–but mostly the technology.)

I’ve been having some issues in self-hosting a TiddlyWiki the way I’d like to. If anyone has any clear cut documentation on how to host a TiddlyWiki on one’s own domain name, I’d appreciate it. The documentation doesn’t seem as clear as I would expect (or perhaps more likely my server is having issues propagating/connecting?). If anything it’s muddled by the fact that they can seemingly be hosted in dozens of places one might not otherwise expect. My primary reservation is that it looks to me like they’re designed as single user instances, so I’m not exactly sure how Kicks et al. are effectuating their hyperconversations. Part of my issue is my mental model of some of the wikis involved in addition to the busy-ness of the sites’ themes, not to mention some of the non-standard conversational style on some. (I’ll get there eventually.)

I’ve also been using the IndieWeb’s MediaWiki for several years, so I’ve become much better at how it works as well as the ins-and-outs of the markup and how to do some slightly more advanced things using it. I’d set one up nearly a year ago this month and used it sporadically at best.

One of the bigger problems with my MediaWiki install was that somehow I wasn’t able to log into the primary account to do some of the necessary administrative functions. Today I got fed up with being hampered a bit and went spelunking into my install to see where things went wrong, suspecting that it was a one button install issue.

After digging through some documentation, I dug into the mySQL database and found a daunting looking [Blob] in the user_email field. Why couldn’t it be an easy-to-edit field? I not knowing anything better to do, I downloaded it, opened it up in my text editor, and discovered that I’d managed to leave a letter out of my own name in the email address! No wonder it wouldn’t work and the system wouldn’t let me reset my email address or password. A quick text edit later, the email was fixed, I uploaded the (now less intimidating) [Blob], and did a reset of the password in the admin interface, and we’re back in business! I’m always glad not to have borked the entire database and site.

If nothing else, it’ll help me in my explorations. Onward.

Some sketch thoughts about OER to come back and revisit

Does anyone/organization maintain a wiki or centralized repository of OER textbooks? (Especially a consortium of institutions which provide financial support).

It should contain a list of people/departments who’ve adopted (an indicator of quality).

It could maintain lists of people with technical expertise that can help to reshuffle pieces or allow customization? Maybe create easier methods for customization with related UI.

How to best curate resources and put them into a searchable repository for easy later use?

Can we create an organization that somewhat models the instutionalization of traditional textbook publishers that organize and track their assets? This institution should be supported by a broad array of colleges and universities as a means of supporting the otherwise invisible labor that is otherwise going on.

How can we flip the script to allow students to choose their own materials instead of allowing professors to do this? Their economic pressure alone will dramatically help the system. (Especially the hidden labor issues.)

Read Building a personal knowledge base by Kirill Maltsev (kirillmaltsev.net)

I try to unload all information that has any meaning to me from my brain to external storage because I don’t like to rely on my memory nor do I trust it. In this blog post, I’m going to describe my current approach of working with a personal knowledge base.

He’s got a solid listing of tools here, many I’ve either tried or am currently using myself. Looks like he hasn’t come across Roam yet which I like for it’s ability to change tags across many linked pages. I wish other tools had that one killer feature.

Read The discovery metadata field by Matt Maldre (Matt Maldre)

The internet would be a really interesting place if every article that was shared automatically had a “via link.” Ok, so the internet is already interesting. But what makes the internet such a great place is its connectivity. Everything is linked together. We can easily share a link to an article. So many links all … The discovery metadata field Read More »

I’ve been fascinated with this idea of vias, hat tips, and linking credit (a la the defunct Curator’s Code) just like Jeremy Cherfas. I have a custom field in my site for collecting these details sometimes, but I should get around to automating it and showing it on my pages rather than doing it manually.

Links like these seem like throwaways, but they can have a huge amount of value in aggregate. As an example, if I provided the source of how I found this article, then it’s likely that my friend Matt would then be able to see a potential treasure trove of information about the exact same topic which he’s sure to have a lot of interest in as well.

One of the things I love about webmentions is that these sorts of links to give credit could be used to create bi-directional links between sites as well. I’m half-tempted to start using custom experimental microformats classes on these links so that when the idea takes off that people could potentially display them in their comments sections as such instead of just vanilla “mentions”. This could be useful for sites that serve as inspiration in much the same way that journalistic outlets might display reads (versus bookmarks, likes, or reposts) or podcasts could display listens. Just imagine the power that displaying webmentions on wikis could have for their editors to later update pages or readers might have to delve into further resources that mention and link to those pages, especially when the content on those linked pages extends the ideas?

Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for hypertext was rejected because it didn’t bake bi-directional links into the web (c.f. Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web at 13:39 into the video). Webmentions seems to be a simple way of ensconcing them after-the-fact, but in a way that makes them more resilient as well as update-able and even delete-able by either side.

Of course now I come to wonder just how it was that Jeremy Cherfas finds such a deep link on Matt’s site from over a year ago? 😉

↬ Jeremy Cherfas‘ update on the IndieWeb wiki ᔥ the IndieWeb-meta chat (2020-01-29)

Read Hyperchatting by

Jack Baty (baty.blog)

People seem very focused on technological solutions to online communication (ActivityPub, Indieweb, this absurd BlueSky idea), but the hyperconversation approach is trying to prove that the problem is a human problem. If you read and listen to each other and try to respond thoughtfully and carefully - and try to

Replied to a tweet by

GSV Steen Comer [Shunn SMF] (Twitter)

Thank you. I'm working on a piece right now about alternate/ rhizomatic modalities of communication in opposition to "social networks" and this is really timely.
— GSV Steen Comer [Shunn SMF] (@mediapathic) December 13, 2019

I’d recommend taking a look at the Blogging Futures experiment using the blogchain idea.

The IndieWeb is using the idea of Webmention to allow site-to-site communication and commenting. This allows interesting things like Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter. Here’s a good recent example with the copy on my website and a separate copy on Twitter.

And finally there’s an interesting wiki experiment that Kicks Condor and friends are doing that is worth checking out if you didn’t dig deep enough into @AGWilsonn’s links to see it. (See the comments on that link for more details.)

Read Blogging Futures Prompt 3 (Write.as)

Reflection

This is the last week of Blogging Futures!

The final prompt is looking back on the conversation that has grown on the blogchain...

What have you learned from reading or participating?

Primarily I’ve been heartened to have meet a group of people who are still interested in and curious about exploring new methods of communication on the web!
–November 17, 2019 at 02:41PM

Is there a particular project you want to pursue?

Though I joined late, the course has spurred me to think about the concepts of mixing blogchains with webmentions, and resparked my interest in getting wikis to accept webmentions as well for building and cross-linking information.
–November 17, 2019 at 02:42PM