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WikiNet

wiki-net

see the draft on wiki-net, please.

what is the wiki-net / what is our wiki-net?

"physically"

The wiki-net consists of several pages on every wiki automatically gathering contents from other wikis which help you to find communities of interest for a given topic.

"philosophically"

The wiki-net is also an offer to wiki-communities to create stronger relations to each other in order to use synergic effects by integrating certain rss-driven node-pages into their wikis to stimulate interaction.

wiki-neighborhood

It is based on the assumption that wiki-communities are able to develop an idea about a “neighborhood” of wikis - topically, technically or structurally related wikis that an interaction with is more likely than with other wikis. These get collected on the wiki-node.

decentrality

The wiki-net is a cross-engine idea and entirely decentral. Every wiki-community is responsible for its part of the wiki-net called our wiki-net, all these together shape the wiki net.

dynamic selection

Communities make dynamic selections of the neighbors listed on their wiki-nodes. This selection is called our wiki-net and it triggers three rss-driven internal wiki-pages that are nodes to the “outer wikiworld”.

1.) wiki-net changes

The first is wiki-net changes. It shows the recent changes of the (selected) wiki-neighborhood and the recent changes of the wiki itself merged. You see a recent changes page for several wikis. It’s like zooming out in a picture, the view is more wide-angle. Recent near changes was the old name for this page. The contents of this page tends to be confusing - as recent changes itself tend to be confusing.

2.) wiki-net blogs

The second is wiki-net blogs. It assumes that wiki-communities are able to write a common blog - a blog integrated in the wiki itself and automatically attached to the end of its home-page. On their blogs communities summarize what goes on on their wikis. The common blog is like a face to the outside. A new reader reads the last blog entries and knows about the wiki without having to dive into its recent changes. The blog is an act of politenes to the public, a help for the communities themselves to get aware of their own activities and it keeps the members of a community together. To put it simple: “A wiki-community without blog is like a band without gigs.”
Similar to wiki-net changes the page wiki-net blogs merges the blogs of the (selected) neighbors and the blog of the wiki itself.

3.) hints

The third is wiki-net hints. Assuming the selections for the first two interaction-nodes on a wiki are pretty stable (though still dynamic, like good friends, some are friends for life-time, some change) the hint part of the wiki-net offers a possibility to give a wiki-community a hint to an interesting wiki. It is more about the short term attention of a wiki-community. Likely the selections for the first two wiki-net pages will be taken within a wiki-community, outsiders shouldn’t edit the selection or will be reverted. The hint section of the wiki-net gives outsiders (just as wiki-community members) the possibility to point the wiki-community to another wiki. Unlike the other two wiki-net pages the hints are limited by number and added/removed by date. Getting a new hint the oldest wiki in the selection is removed, thus hints wont’t stay in a wiki’s attention for very long. On hints changes the recent changes of the wikis given a hint to get merged.

syndication

There is an own rss-feed for all these three wiki-net pages + there is an rss-feed for a wiki’s selection of neighbors (its wiki-net) called wiki-net feed.

wiki-net server

The wiki-net feed is machine readable (machine code block). Using a cron-job wikis connect to a (contemporarily only imagined) wiki-net server like once a day. The wiki delivers the information about its current selection of neighbor to it and receives information about what ofther wikis currently have it - the wiki - in in their selection. That makes it possible to show on a page “who is watching us?” which other wikis currently have the “watched” wiki in their focus (that is on their wiki-net). “Feeling somebody’s gaze on your skin”. Showing who watches you creates a further interactive node, people will take a look at the watching wiki, interaction gets more likely.
See also wiki-net: wiki-net server.


older

The wiki-net are all wikis-connected by a wiki-node.

wiki-net is the former page FavoriteNeighbors now.

There is the wiki-net, which is the sum of all our wiki-nets.

Our wiki-net is the small part of the wiki-net we know and interact with.

See the wiki about the wiki-net called wiki-net.

The page WikiNet is a day-page set. On the respective day-pages a MachineCodeBlock? readable lists of the wikis currently in our focus gets pubished. Only the last entry in this list is valid. It determines our current WikiNetFeed?.

The entrances on the latest wiki-net day-page trigger which wikis are includesd on “wiki-net changes” (former recent near changes) and WikiNetBlogs.

The wiki-net-feed tells which wikis are where in “our focus”.

We are feeding our wiki-net-feed to a “wiki-net-server” - many wikis do so - and it feeds us back what other wikis are currently “watching” us. We see them listed here on WhoIsWatchingUs.

About the technical part - you probably understand (more) about it - there are some things in the ting on 2005-06-25. ting-wiki: ting 66

participants

Excerpt from it

ma: Wiki-net, especially the wiki-net-feed. It’s the feed from wiki-net-pages, like for example we have it for the blog-pages (the wiki’s blog) already.

The day-pages in this day-page-set list the wikis in our current wiki-net - the ones that are included on wiki-net changes and wiki-net blogs.

I’m thinking about lion’s machine code block. A block on top of a page that can be read by a program.

sh: like moinmoin’s metadata? ACLs, pragmas, keywords, etc.

ma: guess so, yes.

Couldn’t one make a wiki send its information about what wikis are currently in it’s focus (respectively its wiki-net-feed) to a big, big server? And this server feeds back to it the information about what wikis currently have the requesting wiki in its focus?

What I want is to make wikis know what other wikis are watching them. A delay of a day is no problem at the moment.

sh: Something like rss backlinks? Maybe you could use the referer field when serving the RSS feed, similar to the automatic backlink extension. There is an extension for oddmuse that will add ‘backlinks’ to any extrnal pages that link to your page – at the bottom of that page. Kensanata uses it on his blog, and on oddmuse wiki too, I think.

You could use similar mechanism when serving feeds.

ma: very important, most important at all is to keep it always cross-engine. Never exclude.

sh: well, you could write such an ‘extended’ RSS module for multiple engines, but I don’t think there is any other way. Unless you did all the rss serving via the main, central server that could keep track of who’s getting which feed. The drawback is that all the wikis would have to use the server’s address for the feeds, not their own. Like http://central-server/my-wiki-feed.rss

ma: that’s fine then.

Our wiki-net-feed could contain all kinds of date-page-feeds, calendars, events. You could all synchronize it. One wiki plans a party and automatically comes to know that a similar wiki in another town is doing the same and subito they can get together, such stuff, blah. (dizzy again)

sh: So the server would do caching and re-assembling of the feeds, not just redirect. That’d make the wikis less loaded too – all the bandwidth would be on the main server, which would get the feeds from wikis only several times a day. This needs disk space and bandwidth :(

A simple redirector script would, on the other hand, just need very small bandwidth and almost no disk space, and it would still be able to keep track of who’s reading who.

ma: sounds good to me.

Maybe one could decentralize it and make the big servers amongst each others periodically exchange data, like every two days. So a wiki in your “category” gets informed about the fact that you are watching it within a day, but a very different wiki from another category using a different server wouldn’t be informed faster but within two days. Dunno.

sh: this kind of decentralized software is pretty hard to write and debug. And note, that if you push this approach to the extreme, we are back to each wiki having their own module to keep track of these things.

Wait a minute, you can make it possible to use with any wiki engine – just make the ‘redirector’ script, but install it together with wiki, so that if you normally access the wiki via http://wiki/wiki.cgi?action=rss, you’d now access it via http://wiki/redirector.cgi, and the script would check your, referer, update the stats, and then redirect you to http://wiki/wiki.cgi?action=rss.

ma: starts a big <*g>, very big.

sh: Of course you don’t have all that interweaving of the feeds and stuff – but at least you have the ‘backfeeds’. Once this works, you can go further.


It would be helpful if it was a bit more descriptive on the characters here, who is saying what.

It’s something bigger. I didn’t know that. Found it searching for wiki-net.

Quote from stillwaters-blog: Freedom Thought - Why I dislike Wikipedia

Since Mediawiki was specifically developed for Wikipedia, why could the developers not design a p2p protocol specifically for Wikipedia? Despite the money going into Wikipedia, the servers are almost always slow beyond belief. Instead of asking for spare change from people, why not let them contribute bandwidth? Why not start a Wikinet, and revive the Freenet movement?

Why continue the assumption that anything good must have “respectable” corporate backing? Freenet was despised and ignored, because people are uncomfortable with genuine freedom, and as a result few practical uses ever came out of the slow network which has never grasped mainstream attention. However, a project as large and ambitious as Wikipedia could easily help promote true freedom, the kind that is not as shallow as modern democracy. /quote

freenet, I mentioned it before, I think. wikipedia-en: freenet, video: 22C3: Lecture on Freenet's new algorithm

Maybe it is a task for the community-wiki-bank to build such a wiki-net, not the minor idea of a wiki-net I had (though it fits it like a glove) but a big, a real wiki-net. Kinda to create something that - for the change of it - deserves the term freedom.

I never was a blind WikiPedia enthusisast but I do not share this kind of “it is not free” criticism.

Having said that, WikiNet (the ProWiki version at least) has the potential to provide that kind of decentralized, non-engine-specific freedom that is sought for. It means to connect servers and to transport all kinds of (wiki) data efficiently between them.

I though from the beginnig on both ideas would have a lot in common - more imagining what yours is, actually there was no time for it yet, really. I look forward to the comparison you proposed on meatball-wiki: wiki-net.

Concerning freedom - which possibly isn’t neccessary a minor burden btw - its range is deternined by what you know and what you imagine, like npov, what you know and imagine. Take your time.

for me it’s very clear, that we should give no one cent of the cwb corporations fund to wikipedia .

btw. npov is a lie . it’s jimbo wales point of view .

WikiIndex and the TourBus are two projects with a similar goal, making wikilandia interact. We should start with that.

Copying in Lion’s comments on 2006-10-11.

  • WikiNet” – I am glad to see BlogControlledByWiki, WikiNodes, and RecentNearChanges rolled up into a single vision, “WikiNet.” The software to back it up does not exist yet, but it is not difficult to write. What is required is (A) a spider, to traverse the WikiNodesNetwork?, and (B) some guidelines, so that the spider can pick up RSS feed information. From there, you can make a webpage that publishes a summary of what the spider has discovered, and so on. Then, you can make a number of applications that allow you to visualize the network, to quickly navigate it, to collect statistics, and so on, and so forth. This is a course that can tangibly lead to the first visualizations of the ProjectSpaceNetwork.
  • Another thing about the WikiNet, is that it should be communicated with the people working on WikiOhana.

Stuttgart / Germany, Venice / Italy, Melbourne / Australia. Not related to each other except for the fact that I use the wikis for these cities to demonstrate the wiki-net. On the wiki-net events of all three you see the local events of the three pretty distant places merged. Doesn’t make any sense but if they were physically close to each other it would make sense. Melbourne-oddwiki: wiki-net events. It’s just for demonstration.

There is an interesting effect I recognized and it makes me wonder if the muse isn’t hiding something from me. The events don’t sort by the date of the event, they sort by last edited. Precisely they sort by last edited as a major edit. In other words: they behave just like our regular RecentChanges. If the pages were about a theme commonly discussed on wikis like WikiSpam we had a nice overview-page about the recent ongoings in three communities to one topic. wiki-net wiki-spam. She hides something from me, the muse, or I’m just too blind to see it.
More:
Contribution on day-page from yesterday, answer to it on day-page from today. That doesn’t make sense as in fact it reverts the natural sequence of reading from the top to the bottom. So answers should be placed below what is answered to. The “thread” should be titled like “date / title” The date marks the beginning of the thread. It would allow us to have multiple discussion threads to one topic (described on a document mode tightly written first-class wiki-page on top of all these different threads. The thread the most recently major edited is on top (right below the wiki equator - the dividing line between document and thread-mode). Many of our pages have long old discussions between the document on top and the recent discussions on the very bottom. These “ended” threads would be not lost but deeper down on the page as they haven’t been recently major edited. I’m referring to the wiki-equator on wiki-net: wiki-net server. Sorry for not being clearer at the moment.

That’s because the default RSS feeds are just like recent changes. If you want a RSS feed that acts just like a journal page, you need to install the Oddmuse:Journal RSS Extension.

My lightning talk on 23C3 “What is the wiki-net?” VoilĂ .

Hi Mattis, although I installed the newest versions for Realplayer and Windows Media Player, it wasn’t possible to play your video. What special Codec is needed and how do we have to integrate them. – FridemarPache 2006-12-31 00:12 UTC PS.: After installing Winamp with the actual codecs, again the video couldn’t be handled. So I looked into the properties section of this downloaded avi-file and I found: 1000 (one thousand ) frames per second. This must be an accident. – FridemarPache 2006-12-31 00:49 UTC

Aargh! It is playing nice with only few video stops on my average machine on kubuntu, Automatix tuned. Sound is allright. A buddy recorded the live-stream, RadomirDopieralski put it online then. :) There will be a better version from the official 23C3 side of all footage of the congress soon, hopefully.

Time passed, I worked on the wiki-net idea. Isn’t it much less trouble for a wiki-community to keep the outgoing information about itself updated and in turn receive updated information about all other wikis than to update links all the time?

See odd-wiki-hive / hive-list once again, please.

mutante thinks using planet to cache the wiki-net pages loading them faster and maximum five minutes old would be cool and SamRose could imagine a stripped down planet in python and modules for every wiki software to use it.

I started ning: wiki-net today. Maybe it helps.

I started get satisfaction: wiki-net today. Maybe it helps.

EditNearLinks: TourBus MeatballWiki WikiIndex PatrickAnderson ProWiki

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