Seminar 10Wikis

Introduction to the Digital Liberal ArtsMDST 3703 / 7703

Fall 2010

Business

• Any WordPress issues?• Other issues to raise?

Review

• Blogging and RSS– The Great Chain of Blogging– Personal broadcasting meets established news• MSM = “Mainstream Media”

• Are blogs useful to academics? – Not the same asking if blogs can/should/will

replace the the academic essay and monograph• Our concern is with effects which are still not

fully understood and evolving

Overview

• Today we look at wikis, one of the major media genres of the web– history, form, content, function/effects

• Learn to use a simple wiki• Discuss the role of wikis within the ecology of

academic work• Discuss future directions of wikis

What is a Wiki?

• A kind of web site invented by Ward Cunningham– The simplest database possible

• Radical Simplicity– All pages are directly editable through the web– All versions are saved– Simple syntax, e.g. CamelCase defines a link

• Now hundreds of varieties of wiki software and wiki sites

The first wiki: the Portland Pattern Repositoryhttp://c2.com/cgi/wiki

Exercise—using PHPWiki

• Go to http://ontoligent.com/wiki• A PHPWiki site, based on the original wiki• Everyone create a page– On the front page, click on “MDST Student Pages”– Find your page – the ? means the page has not yet

been created– Start adding content ...

Some Basic Syntax

• CamelCase (aka WikiSyntax) creates links– When you save, new links will show a question

mark– Also square brackets can be used

• Image URLs surrounded by square brackets will insert images directly– e.g. [http://somewhere.com/myimage.png]

• Lists are made with * or # prefixes• Headers are made with !, !!, or !!! prefixes

How are wikis different than blogs?

Wikis vs. Blogs

Personal wikis, e.g. TiddlyWiki WIKIS

BLOGS Collaborative Blogs, e.g. Daily Kos

Individual Collective

diac

hron

icsy

nchr

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Other differences

• Hypertext—wikis have more links and greater link density

• Aesthetics – wikis tend to be plainer, more meat and potatoes

• Metacritical—wiki lexia tend to include comments on their own condition

Metacritical comment

Are wikis useful for academic work?

Both tend to be open (socially and editorially) and to oppose the culture of expertise

Academic Wikis

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy– http://plato.stanford.edu/about.html

• Arché TWiki– http://arche-wiki.st-and.ac.uk/~ahwiki/bin/view/

Main/WebHome

Wikipedia

• Best example of wiki logic (wiki culture)– Form: basic wiki– Content: encyclopedia knowledge (tertiary source)– Function/effect: ???

• Reviled (but secretly used)by academics, librariansand educators – Why the badrep?

Prestige?

“Structures of Participation”

• Media forms entail different structures of participation– Producers– Consumers– Relations between producers and consumers – Relations between producers– Relations between consumers

• Think of literature, newspapers, radio, TV– The web has spawned several new media forms

Freebase

• Consists of Topics and Relations– Everything is a topic, all topics have IDs– Topics are linked by relationship types

• An attempt to build a knowledge base on top of Wikipedia. Why?– Meant to be machine readable– Wikipedia doesn’t have an API

• Example of what we are building when we build Wikipedia

DBpedia

• An attempt to reverse engineer an ontology from Wikipedia

• Converts structured and extracted data from articles in Freebase-like sentences– Uses RDF

• Forms a machine readable resource for semantic web applications

• See http://dbpedia.org

RDF vs HTML

• See http://dbpedia.org/page/Charlottesville• A sample data record extracted from

Wikipedia• Can be viewed in a semantic web browser– E.g. OpenLink, a Firefox extension

• Connects to other RDF datasets on the web– e.g. Geonames (owl:sameAs)

Hypertext as logical network

http://mikelove.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/why-freebase-if-we-already-have-wikipedia/

Web 3.0

The Machine is Us(ing Us)

(Machines are participating too)

Technology, Culture and Academia

• Both blogs and wikis represent both a set of technologies and a set of values and principles– Blogging = personal opinion– Wikis = openness (e.g. WikiLeaks)– Both compete with traditional academic values

• Two responses– Maybe academic values should change– Maybe the technologies can be “worked,” as there

is no absolute requirement that culture and technology would go together

The Three Webs

• Web 1.0 – 1991 to 1999 – HTML, Perl• Web 2.0 – 2000 to 2010 – PHP, DHTML, AJAX• Web 3.0 – 2010 to ??? -- RDF, HTML5