Keynote at Hypertext conference

I'm at the Hypertext conference now where I have a paper called "A Social Hypertext Model for Building Communities in Blogs" which we're presenting tomorrow. Anyways, it's interesting in this room for the keynote, there's all these geeks and geekettes with their laptops and there's wires all over the place for ethernet cables and power cables (yes, you know that you're in a conference when...) . And there's all these mobile devices that people have, cell phone, camera, PDA (hey wait a minute, that's me!).

Right now, there is a joint keynote speaker, Ward Cunningham who is going to talk about Design Principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much? Wikis were created in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, so he is considered the pioneer of wikis, and is the author of design patterns. Here are the notes from his talk.

He is defining a wiki, and he's taking it from MSN Encarta which shows 11 words. Britannica takes wiki as 75 out of 496 words. From Wikipedia, a wiki is defined with 3271 words. Wiki was taken from wikiwiki which is a Hawaiian word from Hawaiian bus. What is a difference between a wiki and a blog? According to him, a wiki is a work made by a community. The blogosphere is a community made by its works. There is a reversal of roles. The blogosphere is a collection of works. Wikizens can come and go without changing a wiki's identity. This is important because that is what my research is based on, finding community in blogs, it's the collection of blogs that form a community. I'll explain more about that in my talk tomorrow. Ward keeps having to tell people what is the difference between a blog and a wiki. He is showing the first type of wiki which was archived by Web archive. Ward created this type of wiki to show a new style of computer programming and of writing.

Ward is saying that "Agile development corrects dysfunctional behavior resulting from decades of misunderstood risk". The wiki is being compared with agile software development and open software. How can so little do so much, in terms of a wiki? There was a shortest wiki contest and some are written in Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP and Java, the shortest one is 4 lines, which is 222 characters of Perl. He is going through a sample code of a wiki which was written by Casey West:

#!usr/bin/perl
use CGI':all';

path_info=~/\w+/;
$_='grep -l $& *' .h1($&).escapeHTML$t=param(t)ll'dd<$&';

open F,">$&";
print F$t;

s/htt\S+l([A-Z]\w+){2,}/a{href,$&),$&/eg;
print header,pre"$_<form>",submit,textarea t,$t,9,70


It's interesting how such small code, can produce so much in terms of the result.

Wiki Design Principles

I just noticed he spelled principles wrong as prinicples.

1. Open principle - if a page is incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit. This is based on an element of trust on the Net.

2. Incremental principle - it must be both possible and useful to cite unwritten pages. This is based on hypercard which was created before hypertext.

3. Organic principle - the structure of the site is expected to grow and evolve with the community that uses it. Community is from the people that use the wiki.

4. Mundane principle - a small number of conventions provide all necessary formatting. No person could possibly encode things that are alaways percected and

5. Universal principle

6. Overt principle
- the formatted and printed output will sugest the input requiredto reproduce it.

7. Unified Principle
- page names will be drawn from a flat spcae so that no additional context is required to interpret them

8. Precise Principle
- pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.

9. Tolerant Principle
- All input will produce output even when the ooutput is not likely to be disired

10. Observable Principle
- activity wihin the site can be watched and reviewed by any one else to the conference. Ward was thinking about a person who created

11. Convergent Principle
- ambiguity and duplication can be removed by finding and citing similar or related content.

Ward is now trying to show an example of convergent principle. I really like his diagram of what a wiki is and how methodology and community and technology come together in a wiki.

A final question was asked to Ward about what is the future of wikis and if the 12 principles can be applied, and he said world peace. Everyone applauded, and he gave reference to Doug Englebart and his creation of hypertext.

Technorati tags: hypertext2006