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Lion,
I think “wiki” is pretty done, as far as a movement goes.
Wiki as SenseMaking device isn’t even on the radar, as far as public understanding is concerned; If you try to explain it to people, you just get blank stares.
I wish WikiEngine developers focused on: “What is my wiki for?”
Possible answers:
I think you could make more efficient document store/edit/retrieval systems, if you said, “This is what it is, this is what it is about. SenseMaking is not what this is about.”
If we are clear that SenseMaking is what a WikiEngine is about, then I suspect that there are ways to direct a given WikiEngine more explicitely around SenseMaking.
If it’s for collaboratively making documentation for software, or for collecting tutorials and such, I think there’s things you could do for that. For example, translations support (and progress metering of said) becomes much, much, much more important.
Seems like it is now merging into the fabric of the way people use applications online in general. Google Docs, Opera Unite, etc etc etc. There are lots of co-editable or even rea-time co-editable document apps floating around out there now.
SenseMaking in wiki actually is very time consuming, and I have fallen from grace and started using stuff like http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/ and am working on ways to merge the objects that go into a system like http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/ together into a page, then publish that way.
The pattern in CommunityWiki for SenseMaking (and TheoryBuilding ) is still awesome and valuable to me, but we are club, and it’s tough to get others to join
(most of them get lost, though not all)
I agree with you about MediaWiki etc not being the greatest document storage retrieval system. I think many start to use it because others who also don’t know suggest that they do. OpenMeta? http://code.google.com/p/openmeta/ is a better example of DocumentStorageRetrievalSystem?, in my opinion, and some of the things you can do with Zotero also are related. Many organizations are not yet ready to distribute document and archives management. And so, perhaps wiki makes it still seem “manageable” yet collaborative at the same time, in their eyes?
Agreed: It is expensive. It is basically: “the editing and publishing business.”
Further, we are not only a club, but also: a ConLang?.
I saw recently on twitter, someone in the wiki world (I forget who!) saying, “The vision of wiki as a sense-making vehicle has basically been lost.” I think this conversation originated in the BlueOxen community.
They’re right. So what happens now?
In my mind, I’ve started to connect wiki SenseMaking with ConLang?, and what KennethBurke? called, “the TerministicScreen?.” We’re much more about language construction than we are about software.
Language construction is the “resonant frequency” of wiki.
The problem is that most people just aren’t very interested in language construction.
The thing to do then, I would think, is to approach people who are about language construction, and share wiki with them.
My thought is to refocus the conversation from software to language construction, and use a wiki to do so.
Interesting Lion the idea that wiki is more about ConLang? than anything else. Although it does appear that most people are not currently interested in ConLang?, as a “futurist”, one question that surfaces in my mind is: “will most people eventually be interested in this?”
I think there is a chance that this could happen, that as more people do more “things” with text in networks, as more data that is findable via MetaData is stored in and accessible via networks, that ConLang? will re-emerge as a vital basic operating need.
But, I think in many cases, that the co-contruction of language will end up being compressed and then sybmolized. So that simple words are symbols, or symbols themselves are employed. Care co-construction of language takes too much time for most people. Plus, co-construction is rejected outright still by many institutions. People who could probably uptake the easiest, and benefit the most, plus sustain, are networks of independents. If they understand the value, I believe they would uptake. I think it is possible to do anywhere, not just within wiki, now. (provided there is a way to pull together those items that are part of a network of discussions).
I mention our discussion here, in this facebook discussion.
Risto mentions a book http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5050.html which may shed some serious light on ConLang? approaches. Or, at least could provide some newer background.
See this review http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/thagard.html
Software upgrade! I’ve installed Oddmuse:Mail Extension. I think it’s ideal for people who rarely come here and for people who have a narrow range of interests.
Check out the subscribe links in page footers as well as the Your mail subscriptions link on the Administration page.
A cron job will send you all the changed subscribed pages once per day.
This is all very new. Let me know what works, what doesn, security & privacy issues, SoftSecurity solutions, interface issues, mail issues, mail content. I want to know it all. 
There is currently one nagging issue I have no answer for: Since Oddmuse maintains no protected accounts, it is trivial get (and change) the subscription list of other people if you know their email address: Just tell the wiki that you’re using their email address, and there you go. This can be exploited to annoy your fellow human beings by automatically subscribing them to every single page of a huge wiki.
One soft security solution that still manages without server-side accounts would be to mail the list of current subscriptions (including unsubscribe links) to people instead of displaying them.
Another option would be to generate a password, eg. a random number, to protect the info, set it in the cookie so that the user doesn’t have to remember it, and include it in all the mails the user gets as a reminder.
If we’re going to talk more about this, it might be worth moving to a separate page.
I didn’t realize that you can now do server-side Javascript, and/or compile Python to Javascript:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MonkeyPylons
http://pyjs.org/ is wild..!
I just installed a big Oddmuse upgrade. Let me know if there are any problems.
seems to be working overall faster, honestly
Wikipedia hopes to make editing user-friendly… this link is only good for 7 days… http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081204.wgtwiki1204/BNStory/Technology/?cid=al_gam_nletter_techweekly
On HansWobbe’s wiki, we’ve found an interesting bug/interaction;
The conflict is between NearLink and the Comments feature.
If there’s a page that’s common on several wiki (say, InterMap,) then the comments page is: “Comments_on_InterMap.”
But ah-hah! Lots of wiki will have Comments_on_Intermap.
But it won’t show up as a NearLink on the bottom of the page, because it’s not a link within the page. (It’s rendered outside the page.)
..!
I don’t like the Comments module, but a lot of people do, it seems.
You are right. What I did instead was to make sure that comment links do not redirect to remote sites. I hope that fixes the problem in near-links.pl v 1.6. Thanks for letting me know.
Thanks!
Thank you very much indeed, Alex!!