garden/ward-cunningham.md

Ward Cunningham

• A [person].
• [twitter] https://twitter.com/wardcunningham
• The OG.
• The inventor of the [wiki].
• See also: [c2].

[social-knowledge-graphs-discussion]

• [Wiki]
  • Had experience with Smalltalk, amassed over several months of undirected exploration
  • People asked for the gist of Smalltalk to learn it over two days. How to condense months of learning in a format that makes that possible?
  • The initial pattern repository came from that (influenced by christopher alexander).
• "Made this thing over a weekend because people were sending me things by email that didn't render right" -- called it wiki because it meant "fast".
  • "If I make this stupid simple" -- people won't think I tried hard, but they will have the tools to "fix it".
• Tended to the wiki a few hours a day -- in the time between "proper work". But that tending paid off.
  • digital garden
• For long, people could have thrashed but didn't. Then someone did, and people just tended to it.
• The environment that resulted was very creative. Lots of vocabulary was coined right there.
• When Wikipedia came along, it did the right things:
  • They made it in every language
  • They were bold (paraphrase)
• Spinning off wikis out of wikis
  • Wiki on wiki (meta)
  • Religion wiki
• Taking pages and refactoring, cross-linking -- that's the core of federated wiki.
• In a federated wiki, queries propagate -- pages include a history on which wikis have hosted the wiki previously. If a page vanishes, it can be found in a previous version.
• "When you're talking about yourself, talk of yourself as we"
• Google-like analytics were interesting
  • Tried not to pay attention.
  • Bone (sp?) dialog: you talk to the center of the room, not to any particular person. It's good for sharing, giving.
• Some people wanted to put graphs in wiki
• Federated wiki has a few thousand sites on it, 25-30 get daily updates and host vibrant communities and might be interested in your project.
  • Links are the title of the page
  • But if you retrieve a page from some other wiki, it fans out/ripples
  • The sites you pull from become part of your neighborhood
  • When you search, you can choose to "pull" pages into your sites
    • curational event
  • People might turn out to maintain several sites, specialized on topics
• If you go to your unicycle page, it will mention there are N pages about unicycle in your neighborhood
• http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/wiki-as-knowledge-graph.html