odd-wiki-hive / 'wiki-net' odd-wiki-center-en edit
today's
talk
what is the wiki-net? changes special

TheNeuronOfTheHiveMindWiki

The neuron of the hive-mind: wiki

The text for a lightning-talk on 24C3

See also the links for the lightning talk, please.

There are 29 different wiki-hives. A wiki-hive means you can create a new wiki with a click, no silly questions like “What is your wiki about?”. The hive-wiki lists them. Cool.

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/HiveWiki/HiveList

But the communication among these wiki-hives and the wikis sitting in them is painfully poor. Mostly they don’t even know about each other. That’s neither cool nor wiki.

For connecting wiki communities it would take certain “interfaces to the public” for each wiki, I thought. These should put out rss-feeds so every wiki can include interface pages of neighboring wikis locally. For example wikis should have a face telling what’s going on in the community. The page wiki-net faces as its counterpart shows faces of wikis in the neighborhood. Every community chooses its own neighbors. I made up several of such interfaces to the public starting with single wikis, then gathering wikis of a certain context in center-wikis. Recently I connected some wiki-hives. The hive-list of a wiki-hive lists all living wikis in it. The page wiki-net hive-lists lists all wikis in neighboring wiki-hives.

http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/ObmWikiList/WikiNetHiveLists

I whish it would be easy for a wiki community to connect to other communities having information about them locally and updated automatically. All it takes is each community to care for its “face”. I even whish it would be easy for a wiki to move “physically” closer to its neighborhood by migrating to another more adequate wiki-hive, and thus enabling the conglomeration of collective intelligence. “Wikis are nomads”.

A center-wiki is common platforms for a certain type of wiki. For example all wikis in a wiki-hive using German are gathered in a wiki-Zentrum. But center-wikis gathering wikis from differnet hives are just as well possible: city-wiki-center, political-wiki-center, etc. Each wiki has a home page in the center-wiki including basic information about it and including the recent changes to the wiki. The center-wiki runs a wiki-list linking to the home page for the different wikis in the center-wiki and it puts out a wiki-list-feed. When a wiki has a home page in a center-wiki the wiki-list of the center-wiki is included into the wiki-node of the wiki. That results in a local and automatically updating list of likely neighboring wikis and it is only one (in words 1) click to see each wikis recent changes.

I think it’s a little sad to see competitiveness among different wiki-hives which all host wikis, which are basically collaborative.

Neurons get stimulated and they “fire”. A band isn’t a band before it gets on stage. Hmm?

In a nicely running network - such as the human brain which certianly is one of the most impressive “nicely runing networks” known - the nodes get stimulated and they “fire”. All the little stimulating and firing together makes us stand upright and think. We think: “Couldn’t there be a way to make humans think together, similar to how the neurons in my brain collaborate, kinda under one roof?”. We think: “Similar to people worldwide create a free online encyclopedia using wiki software”. Isn’t wikipedia just a first appearance of what will come? Hmm?

The neutral point of view is excellent to make an encylopedia using wiki software which is both a successful and respectable project. A good part of human communication though is not npov but still worthwhile. Communication on wiki is transparent. That’s enough and the decisive difference, I think. Not everybody has to talk to everybody. But the right people have to talk to the right people.

I made up a model for wikis to communicate information about themselves to neighboring wikis and receive information about neighboring wikis and display it locally called “wiki-net”. With the help of my friends I can demonstrate it on four different wiki-hives. All use the Oddmuse wiki software which provides two essential capabilities: You can transclude contents from another wiki into it using a rss-feed. You can create so called day-page-sets, summing up specific day-stamped pages and putting out a feed that adds new entries on top, similar to the recent changes. Whenever a day-page is created or modified the day-page-set changes, the rss-feed for that specific day-page-set changes and the pages on neighboring wikis it is transcluded to change. Every wiki-community chooses its neighbors and watches them locally on different wiki-net pages. Every wiki-community cares for its day-page sets and if all do it all have the current information about which wiki ever including any wiki any community thinks is interesting and thus chooses as a neighbor. One big soup.

Get on stage. Become a band. Care for your day-page-sets. It’s your face.


A wiki works on his own, having a “private” talk which is not syndicated. Certain “public interfaces” though are syndicated.

A wiki-hive hosts wikis. The wikis using the same working language sitting in the same wiki-hive are automatically listed on the wiki-node.

The same page on other sites:
WikiNet:TheNeuronOfTheHiveMindWiki