Genre+in+wikis

A small breakout group talked about 'document genre' in wikis. toc =What sort of thing would you make with a wiki?= Wikis are used to make documents with different purposes. The best-known wiki-made document is Wikipedia, but wikis are also used to make things like software documentation, complete 'marketing-oriented' public websites, drafts of reports from working groups etc etc. What they generally have in common is that they intend to be practical, usable documents which convey information to an audience. They are functional coherent objects which synthesise and present information: the discussion which led to the information may be apparent in the easily-accessed history of the document but the document itself is supposed to be a resource, not a discussion. =What’s a genre?= To editors or document designers, a genre is a class or type of document which carries certain expectations about how it will be structured, maybe the kind of language it uses (discursive or clipped, for example), maybe what it looks like. Other groups might use words such as pattern or content-type or schema. We are familiar with genres – newspapers, dictionaries, novels, manuals – and tell what they are at a glance. When we read we expect a genre document to let us use it efficiently in ways that we have learned by using other documents in the same genre. =What’s the relationship between a wiki and a genre?= Mostly, none: a wiki is a way of making documents, a genre is a class of similar documents. Wikis don’t normally instantiate genre assumptions on the things that are created with them: they’ll allow you to format, order, and write with anything that's available in their default publishing medium, which is mostly HTML, though it doesn't have to be. They do however make some impositions or limitations, though (you cannot //**not**// design, as someone famous probably said). The formatting editor in wikispaces, for example, allows you to format a block element through a drop-down selector which includes a small subset of HTML elements. It doesn't include the set of ‘definition’ elements so it’s clear that wikispaces has decided it doesn’t want you to create glossaries, for example. Wikipedia is increasingly-tightly oriented towards encyclopedia entries and contains mandatory and optional structures to make it simpler for the user to create documents in that genre. Generally, however, your average out-of-the-box wiki forces only implicit genre assumptions on its users. =Would specific ‘genre choices’ in a wiki be useful?= It works for Wikipedia. In the rest of the wiki world, we thought, the ability to choose between types of document when starting a wiki, might help users feel confident about creating or contributing to a new resource. And it might make the products of the wiki process more useful to their users. Specific genres which might be instantiated in wikis might include ...and no doubt others. =How would a genred wiki be instantiated technically and as user-interface?= We didn’t talk about that, but this page could reasonably include some ideas.
 * glossary
 * encyclopedia
 * case study
 * procedure/instructions
 * reference information
 * book
 * risk assessment

Documents - paper or electronic -