QwikiA

Q-wiki-A toc This is a page where members of the wiki can ask questions, and others can try to answer them. Of course, to ask questions or answer them you have to click on the edit tab. Good practice for us! If you can devise a crisp title for your question, and apply Heading-2 markup to it, those titles will accumulate automatically in the Table of Contents for this page. We have also started to number the questions, and the answers within them, so they are easier to refer to.

1. Archiving a wiki

 * Q: Does anybody have any experience or leads about what to do about archiving a wiki? Can include technical issues, also philosophical ones about what to keep and what to discard.**


 * A**1 : Archiving will depend on the wiki, but for this one (wikispaces) there's an export to html option if you have "manage wiki" admin permissions (//David Wilcox//)


 * A2:** (John Lindsay, appearing here as amphitaxis, which is another story.) We can’t however have any confidence of wikispaces surviving the next corporate takeover, and then we won’t know what will be on offer. As we have professional obligations on how we manage our resources, there is a real risk that the effort we put into this will simply cease tobe, which is a tobe or nottobe matter. Individuals may self-archive, but that loses the community. There is also the matter of referencing and citation for the knowledge organisation universe, for something which has no guarantee of existence, which is why the British Library was invented (not quite, but short cut).


 * A3:** (//Conrad Taylor//) — John’s points, made above, are excellent. A more secure solution for a KIDMM wiki would be something we had a trusted hosting solution for, based on Open Source software. However, let’s not weep for the eventual demise of a babe new-born and doing quite well at the moment. Wikispaces provides us (IMHO) with an excellent platform for learning on, a kind of meta-sandbox, and a place where precisely these kinds of question are over time encountered and explored. As for the larger questions that John raises of knowledge organisation, referencing and citation (and this touches on the discomfort which the academic community has about Wikipedia too!) — great points, and I have opened a new Topics Arising page where we can construct some knowledge around those questions.

2. Blogs vs wikis

 * Q: How does one distinguish between a blog and a wiki? Or, a wiki and a blog?**
 * A1:** //Conrad Taylor// writes (17 July 2009): There are many technical similarities between the software systems which support wikis and blogs. Both are based on some form of back-end content management, both can be edited remotely using only a Web browser using either a visual editor or a simplified form of text mark-up.
 * ¶ ** I believe it is useful to distinguish between (a) wikis and blogs as forms of practice, in a social context, around the authoring of written material and (b) wiki systems and blog systems, which are technical systems that have been designed to support those practices. Note that software systems can be used for purposes that deviate from those they were intended to support — thus one could maintain a limited form of blog using wiki software. Let us then first consider the wiki and the blog (in a somewhat idealised way) as forms of social practice, before looking again at the technical aspects that support those practices.


 * Blogs: **the word ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘weblog’, and the original idea was of an individual writer maintaining a log of things found on the World Wide Web, and passing comment upon them, from a personal and sometimes idiosycratic point of view. Implicit in this is the idea of a diary-style entry — though in keeping with the here-and-now feeling of the Web, in reverse chronological order, the most recent entries being at the top. As new material is added, the old material sinks down, and may fall off the immediate visibility of the first pageview, to be found if one visits pageviews for previous months.
 * ¶ ** The typical blog system gives authoring rights to one person — the blogger — signed in and authenticated; but allows entries to be commented upon by others, typically without authentication, with the entries placed in a reserved state for the blog owner to review, accept or reject before they go on display.
 * ¶ ** A blog also typically allows the author to associate an entry with categories, to apply metadata description using self-invented tags, or both. The blog system will present a reader with a list of the categories used by the author, and possibly a ‘tag cloud’, so if you want to see what author //Jimbo// has written about //Pentecostalism//, you can.

**Wikis:** derived from Hawaiian creole //wiki-wiki// (‘quickly’), the idea of a wiki is a Web site for the easy collaborative authoring of an information resource. Thus there is an inherent expectation that many people will will be empowered to contribute to the entries — generally those who have been given authenticated access, but there are some wikis (including Wikipedia) where authentication is not a requirement. The software is often designed to allow the management of several tiers of access and editing rights.
 * ¶ ** Whereas in a blog the expectation is that the blogger will write a post, ‘publish and be damned’, and only qualify his or her opinions in a subsequent post, with a wiki there is an expectation that after an initial contribution has been made, subsequent contributors may go in and edit the text, adding new material at any point in the page, or deleting material. It’s therefore seen as important for a wiki system to store previous versions of the page and allow for ‘reverts’ e.g. to counter wiki vandalism and malicious edits.
 * ¶ ** The other key differentiator is that whereas blog entries are serialised, wiki entries are parallel. In principal a wiki has a ‘flat’ structure, but provision can be made for hierarchical organisation of topics and entries. In Wikipedia for example a page can be assigned to one or more categories; the system is potentially polyhierarchical. In this wiki you are reading, the software does not support the construction of cetegorisation other than through page-tags, but we can maintain a custom navigation bar and produce an understood structure through the way links are made between pages, by breadcrumb trails and other practices.
 * ¶ ** In parallel to the pages of content, a wiki system will often support a shadow system of discussion pages, one discussion page per entry. Here, the editorial expectations are different, and the software enforces those expectations: entries //are// serialised, one cannot go back and edit them, but one can comment on previous entries. The idea is to have a discussion zone where editors can trade opinions about how the editing of content on the wiki page itself should proceed.
 * ¶ ** Compared to a blog, there is also a greater need in a wiki for more sophisticated forms of text presentation, such as a page table of contents, footnotes, or tabular display of data. But not all wiki systems provide this level of sophistication.

**Conclusion** ‘Wikiism’ and ‘bloggishness’ are essentially patterns or genres of interaction with other people through texts and associated media. The identification of a need for such patterns has driven the development of CMS-based software to enable them — with different emphases. The affordances of wiki software don’t make blogging easy, and the affordances of blogging software make managing a wiki nigh on impossible. Yet it is possible to imagine an individual or small project — say, a local community project or tenants’ association as an example — using wiki software for un-wikiish purposes, and to their entire satisfaction.
 * ¶ ** Above and beyond this dichotomy, there are other more generalised and extensible CMS systems (Drupal is an example) which, if one downloads, instals and configures the appropriate modules, or has them developed on a custom basis, can be made to support multiple blogs, a wiki space, an online shop, a community image gallery and other functions. But to go there would be to attempt to answer a question which has not been asked!


 * A2.** //David Wilcox writes:// I think of blogs as made up of easily addable chunks of stuff (text, photos, video) in date order, with associated metadata, readable via RSS. Wikis as easily editable pages that can contain stuff not always so easy to identify, tag and read via RSS. So - I've just added a couple of comments to this page. They'll show up in RSS as recent changes and you can go to the page and find what I have added ... but a bit tedious. If they were comments on a blog they would show as separate chunks, could be tracked by RSS and email. But they wouldn't do so well (on a blog) in contributing to a coherent page.


 * A3**: //John Lindsay// (21 July) adds that he thinks there is also the social networking or social media element which links tags, meta data, communities through Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook and such tools which are increasingly allowing cross identification of i-dent-IT-y and persona? The comment and reply bit incidentally is about as confusing as the pages and posts bit. Then we lose the connection between a paragraph in particular and a comment or reply and the text as a whole, particularly when there is no discriminator between a paragraph and a document as the page is the whole document.

A blog generally In contrast, a wiki generally
 * A3:** //Steve Tolkin on the KIDMM email list// (21 July): I agree with Conrad's long discussion of blogs and wikis, but fear that it was too long for some purposes. Here is my take on the distinction between blogs and wikis.
 * Uses (reverse) chronological order as its main organizing principle.
 * Has an ‘owner’ or moderator that can reject or edit posts from other contributors.
 * Has easily visible differences between posts by the ‘owner’ vs. other contributors.
 * Does not use chronological order as its main organizing principle.
 * Allows authorized contributors to add, delete, and edit content in place.
 * Has no easily visible indications of who wrote what, and when.

JL adds, 11 August, that this might be a knew question, or it might be a consideration of some of the points above, that it is neither a question or an answer; but where should we put notes on the things we are using, their strengths and weaknesses, or comparisons, to raise further discussion of these matters?

3. Using wikis for Q&As

 * Q. Is a wiki suitable for Q&As?**
 * A1:** (Adrian Walmsley) //Conrad Taylor// wrote (to the KIDMM mailing list) on 17 July:

There's a certain meta-irony to this, because the logic of a Q&A format suggests .. that a Q is asked in a format which is not capable of later amendment, and the A stands for all time as an honest at-that- moment attempt at an answer, which might be supplemented by other answers. Whereas by doing this on a wiki, history is in principle capable of redaction. But we are nice people and would not do that sort of thing.

//Adrian Walmsley// writes (17 July 2009): there exists at least one wiki implementation ( [|WackoWiki]) which distinguishes between the right to edit a page and the ability to add a comment to a page. One could envisage using the comment capability to pose and respond to questions, knowing that users (even if they have editing rights to the body of the page) would not be able to go back and change the text of others' comments.
 * ¶ ** WackoWiki has other limitations. Notably, the lack of a Captcha facility means that one cannot open up the commenting facility to unregistered users without the system being flooded with automatically generated spam comments.


 * A2**//. David Wilcox writes//: wikipages (this wiki) has a discussion tab on each page too, and I believe discussions can be consolidated.


 * A3** //Richard Millwood writes 3 August 2009// Another conception for Q&A, that I feel would be closer to the spirit of a wiki, would be for us to collaboratively and consensually construct an archetypal Q&A, rather like a FAQ, where the questions are those we believe are most likely or important and the answers are crafted and refined to best answer them. If agreed to, this conception would allow us to be nice people and do that sort of thing, but may still be a risk, cementing the myth that questions have good answers but not diverse and contested answers. I feel the need to put BUT or OR on front of my answer now...

4. The role of the BCS, &c
A1:** //Conrad Taylor// (17 July 2009): To be a little more precise, at least from my perspective: KIDMM is an activity which enjoys a measure of [|British Computer Society] support, and in which a number of professional members of the BCS are engaged — together with people who are involved in ISKO-UK, the RSA, CILIP, NetIKX and other groupings concerned with information and knowledge management. It is also true that many of us are engaged professionally in education, particularly tertiary sector, lifelong learning, and professional development. **¶** For BCS members, //one// dimension of interest in studying wikis and their potential for managing organisational knowledge is that the BCS itself could benefit from instituting more effective mechanisms for eliciting, sharing and celebrating the knowledge of its members. My personal hope is that social software might revolutionise the way the BCS approaches its Learned Society role (and what I call its ‘learning-together society’ role).
 * Q. KIDMM is in some sense an activity of the BCS, or at least professional members of the BCS, and some of us are engaged professionally in education. Do we think this obliges us to think of these matters, and these tools, in a particular way?


 * A2:** JL (17 July). Not sure we can call this an (or the) answer any more but I think there is also the matter of history, and being open about our stories. A strange book called [|the wikipedia revolution] has some strange histories, even though the author might also be open about them. I asked one of our professors this morning when he first used the Internet (he teaches a mudule called Internet protocols), and he said, 1985 or so. I said that in Britain the Internet was illegal until 1994, and that I was glad that he had been as adept at breaking the law (another their morals and ours matter) as I had been. He seemed a bit perplexed at that, and agreed eventually the first Internet tool he could remember was Mosaic. So now we have the genre matter too. In order to make an open history we need some meta tools which aren't in the glossary yet, and which the existing tools don't yet seem able to manage. Back to the Choice of Hercules and Blunt Dialectic, which is longer than a wiki para.


 * A3:** JL: (20 July, answering his own question, which is why they are asked). The next professional matter is that we (that is, members of the BCS) have an obligation through the Royal Charter to use "comput*" for the public good. This doesn't apply to Fellows of the RSA, but something similar applies to MCLPs. I confronted this when forcing the discussion in the BCS on pornography on the Internet and again when chairing the Foresight work on electronic commerce and governance, and again on infocy, metadata and the role of technology in developing countries, which gets back to the post on our histories. This matter of public good is a whole Q&A universe of its own, which raises Polysemantics.


 * A4**: JL (23 July) continuing to post matter to his own Q; there is then the matter of public good and private good, which might be a bad, rights, obligations, which gets us to the matter of knowledge, personal or, but perhaps and (which is an andoid) social. Which gets us to the mater of what has been called knowledge management, where much was made of the concepts explicit and tacit, with citation often of Polanyi, but without elaborating that what he was considering was the combination of that which is personal and that which is social. Which is where the wikiblog matter comes in again, for we have now a transformation of social, public and personal, private spaces (intellectually that is.) Then we have the obligation consequent upon professional membership, for the concept thread – public – good – right – property = knowledge then has to map onto the activities of the members of the Society. I have started building a //mystory//, which is not an //ourstory//, on Wordpress as infopolecon but now I notice another interesting feature of using this machine, which I will leave for another occasion. Wordpress – infopolecon – bcs bye. Incidently, I've also noticed something about the bottom of this page, but that is a different matter.


 * A5: International** JL (24 July) at least I have a title for this bit of the matter. The BCS is the professional institution in Britain recognised by IFIP, which is a body in consultation with UNESCO. The British Government has a treaty obligation to UNESCO and there is in Britain a National Commission on which for a short while someone from the BCS was active. [//Conrad says: it was the late John Iverson, a former President of the BCS, who chaired a workgroup on the Information Society.//] What was the Library Association had a similar association through IFLA and I presume its successor does too. UNESCO is the UN agency for science, for matters cultural, and educational, so touches many buttons of wikispaces and KIDMM. There is a long history, which I have been charting since 1985 at least and begun to build on http://infopolecon.wordpress.com/about/bcs/10-wsis/ (though there are a lot of other matters in this little click. The biggest was probably the role of the technology in third world development, and more broadly on the digital divide as it was sometimes called. Through the BSI and ISO there is also the matter of standards, of which the development of TCP/IP itself is a significant matter, along with www and certainly now wikispace, open source, open access, and another run of threads which could have different pages, or simply links.


 * A6: Education** JL (27 July) Another title, for a theme. Professional societies with charters all have some sort of obligation to education. In the case of the BCS this means validating courses. How are wikispaces to impact on courses and who will decide? There is a metamatter, for wikispaces will change the very thing of knowledge, education, differently, according to subject. Further metamatter, if I give my own cases, is this appropriate for KIDMM wikispaces? Which is another metamatter, which is whether there is any KIDMM beyond individual experience? That raises a methods matter, how to we experiment, or experience this? The themes within which this works out include [examination, coursework, assessment]; group work; real clients; module moderation; module validation; external examination; (and I'm trying to avoid getting into too much detail of particulars). What then happens when members of the same professional body develop such differing opinions of the matter of wikispaces and KIDMM that those in power begin to exert it irrationally and unreasonably, except they might not be doing that?


 * A7: thing: this, that; here, there; now, then** (JL 28 July) Now we return to the knowledge information stuff, and the science method. There is an ideology about science, research, and the pursuit of KIDMM which deals with evidence and proof. When it comes to the arts and humanities though, the matter is different, perhaps. With wikispaces we have knew methods for tracking facts, and relating them to subjects, with argument and reason (this comes from Shaftesbury, I'll track but google will be interesting with the string). The professional societies are both part of the process and part of the matter. Perhaps all that is now history? Or nostalgia. And I think I have thought of all I have to think on the matter of the professional societies.

5. What’s Knew
**¶** How does the existence of this wiki affect the social practice of KIDMM? For one thing, it means that there are now two places where discussions take place, the main KIDMM email discussion list and some parts of this wiki (this Q&A page being one such part). There are also two overlapping communities (not all people signed up to this wiki are on the email list, and only a quarter of those on the email list are signed up to this wiki though they may be reading it anyway). It’s also noteworthy that there are people willing to participate in discussion within the wiki who do not post to the email list. But these are early days, the wiki isn’t even a fortnight old as I write this.
 * Q. By what’s knew, I don’t simply mean what Conrad argues in blogs and wikis, but there must be something new, otherwise no discussion. I also mean, what are they actually doing to the social practice (to use-case the concept above) of KIDMM?**
 * A1:** (//Conrad Taylor, 20 July 2009//) — If ‘what’s knew?’ unpacks to ‘what is new knowledge?’, I’d say that within the social context of a community of people sharing knowledge online, almost by definition anything that is new knowledge to some people will have been established knowledge to someone else, otherwise they would not have been able to share it. Therefore the emphasis is not so much on the newness of the knowledge //per se//, but on the ability of the platform to help us gather what we know, share it with others, and learn from others.


 * A2:** (//John Lindsay, JL, 21 July 2009//) reminds that there is also the Facebook group, which didn’t seem to attract the same sort of attention? But JL really wants to deal with his ‘what’s knew’; for there seems to him, as a matter of course, that there is an important distinction between what might be called a //scientific knowledge// and an //artistic knowledge//. He remembers there was once a universe of discourse called ‘technical documentation’, another called ‘scientific documentation’, and indeed a field, if not a genre, called ‘smt’, which is indeed an entire industry with great cash cows. And that these drove what in its early days was called information systems. There emerged what was called a ‘subject approach to information’, (Foskett, A.C. now in five editions with introductions, explaining very well how information retrieval – as he called it – was developing‚. He admitted throughout that his approach dealt almost entirely with science, with only a genuflect to the social sciences, and nothing at all on the arts and humanities. Now we have a concept //search science//, and we have within KIDMM some of the IRSG search science specialists, but the matter is that history as a matter and a method, the humanities, the arts, have a completely different KIDMM arena from the varieties of sciences — of course though, they are themselves entirely ideologically loaded. That is the matter of Polythemus.

JL adds, 11 August, that he has now tried using this tool, wikispaces, to construct the beginnings of a knowbot on Pastoral, in combination with using twitter and apart from finding it enormously time consuming and unBeauty, in comparison with Zoho several years ago where it was really easy, so far he hasn't found knowledge which needs to be or is destroyed as a result of the process. In less than a month though, that might be a very short time.

JL adds, 17 August, that he isn't certain whether the two following are new questions, or continuations of what's knew, for he has noticed the disappearance of GIS from a lot of this matter and wonders on wikispaces KIDMM GIS. The second thing he noticed is the absence of draw. He remembers lots of draw in the past and wishes there was a really easy draw tool here.

He adds later that he had forgotten that he wanted to add what is a knew matter for this wiki, though not for BCS, but will leave it to the {need a name, administrator, editor, to decide whether to make this a much more major concept topic, which he thinks it should be} and this deals with freelances, consultants, contractors, contracts, jobs, and the bargaining power of buyer and supplier, to use a jargon. He has noticed an increasing tendency for clients to expect agencies to expect that their clients {notice a matter here} to come equipped with powerful laptops and expensive software. As well as alwayson network. We call this externalising costs. We don't want to develop the argument and matter here, until there is agreement that it needs a lot more. This could be an openRSA thing too?

JL adds 20 Sept that the whole matter of theory has raised its head and needs a knew dealing.

6. The Learning Question

 * Q.** **//Richard Millwood asks 4 August 2009// — do we gain more by articulating questions and answers here or by reading them here?

JL response,** for this cannot be an answer, is that it depends on what you want to mean by gain, and what sort of stories you have already? I was reminded of the BCS attempt at taxonomy, and its use of the term wiki, in 2005. The taxonomy archive on jiscmail might be informative.

JL adds later, 08.09.09, that he found a matter in the 16th century which seems useful, about the concept satisfaction, or satius as it was then, and whether the will to do good was more or less satisfying than the knowledge to truth. This seems to him, which is of course, me, that the role of learning is about squaring this circle. Often So.crates pop in as stores for these matters, but he seemed to this author (ed, stop this rubbish) to abandon action?

When we use this knew technology, the balance of know, good, truth, action, seems to change? So therefore does learning and the asking and answering of questions?