The Wiki Plateau

Wiki Plateau -- ThinkingOutLoud DonaldNoyes 20061213 20100524

Inventor of Wiki

An impressionist summary of Ward's keynote address:

Blogs vs Wiki

"the blogosphere is a community that might produce a work. Whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community. It's all just people communicating."

(Blogs may look like regular HTML pages, but the key difference is that they're organized chronologically. New posts appear at the top, so with a single browser reload you can say "Just show me what's new.")

"One's words are a gift to the community. For the wiki nature to take whole, you have to let go of your words. You have to be okay with that. This goes into the name, called refactoring. To collaborate on a work, one must trust. The reason the cooperation happens is we are people and it is deep in our nature to do things together. Important to make a distinction. Cooperation has a transactional nature, we agree it is a mutual good. Collaboration is deeper, we don't know what the transaction is, or if there is one, but if I give of myself to this collaboration, some good will come out of it. You have to trust somebody to collaborate. With wiki, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to trust them. In 1995, it was a safer environment, don't know if I could have launched wiki today."

Stewards

"The site hit a plateau, changed programming purposefully, would not be disappointed if it didn't keep growing. Will have value as a site, but if I made it read-only it would ruin the way people really read it. The question is what you want to change in the world before you plateau. Inspired by Clay Shirky's a group is its own worst enemy to develop the Steward process and foster a core community collaboratively."'

The hard facts

If you take a look at the statistics of growth (and the present state of hardly any growth) with the latest statistic being that only about 1 page a day was created over the last month or so, You must come to the conclusion that the linear growth of about 10 pages a day of a few years ago, will probably not occur again. The growth of this wiki has reached a point where the main activities have to do with "gnoming" and "deletion". When new pages are created, if there is any reaction at all, it is usually that of reacting to the form of the page, its grammar, spelling and how paragraphs are spaced, and so on.

Plateaus are sometimes points at which new launching points occur

If the present plateau is not the signal of a permanent state, or the beginning of a a declining state, it might be a point when Wiki begins a new type of collaboration which takes advantage of a new form of hyperlinking which does away with specialty wikis as self-contained, self-referential entities which discourage the creation of what some have vilified as "walled gardens" because they are taken to represent interests which are not directly related to the specialty which the wiki represents itself as promoting. Perhaps not. Could it be that Wikis need now to become places where rather than discouraging diversity, are found to be encouraging and promoting it. Pages which are not about "programming", but may affect "programmers", and that deal with these matters in a context here and with linkages to other related contexts elsewhere are found to be growing. Where aids to navigation, the creation of meaningful classifications, groupings and categories become regular and meaningful tasks among certain of the "gnomes" who seek to make the wiki more useful and more highly "linked". Add to that a series of "authorizations" that relate the expertise which have been traditionally loathed or disdained by some of the community to be handled with professional linkages to places where the particular expertise is practised and expressed with confidence and where it is applied in its own context and by its own experts.

For example, one cannot help but be impressed with the feelings expressed by "programmers" of the role and effect of those who are termed "managers" or other such terms which means that they do not write, nor do they probably understand code and the issues of coding. But without the "management" of the resources and the coordination of activities which make up any large project, the success of completion is probably impossible.

What is needed is the "flow of meaning" which is present in "dialogue" which realizes and distinguishes between what one feels most passionate about and the thing which others have similar and sometimes polar opposite feelings about. What is needed is the presentation of information and in the case of wikis, the presentation of pages which have a focus of clear representation of facts and relationships, clearly stated as such and the clear representation of feeling and opinion, also clearly stated.

A Plateau does not mean a halt, it means a time of consolidation and re-ordering of priorities and goals

A plateau is not a BadThing. It is instead a recognition of the point at which changes are necessary. That is if one is to have a situation where a continuation of growth is to occur. Unless one is to close the door on changes and introductions, making a Read-Only, or Reference-Work, one must change some things which continue to make growth possible.

What changes will make this happen?

The plateau represents the achievement of a LocalMaximum. It will take destruction and rebuilding in order for wiki to find its next Maximum, else the WikiNature moves onward and elsewhere. But as for how to get out of it, consider PerItemVoting and UserRanking. -- MarkJanssen

Attempting some answers. I am not sure that there is a plateau at the moment. I don't think it is as flat as that. There are two trends. One is a slow growth of new pages, and the second is a clearing out of old OrphanPages by a small number of people who are doing the "gnoming". If a few pages are grown each day, that growth is soon negated by clearing out a dozen or so old pages. The gnomes are also kept busy dealing with the people who delete chunks of the front pages, or contribute spam. Those jobs get done quietly and efficiently day by day.

After the recent EditWars this has been a quiet place, with some of the 'old regulars' either declaring withdrawal or else for some reason quieter than normal. The chit chat along the lines of 'if you like that have you seen this?' is less than before.

Speaking personally, I have gone on contributing in areas of interest, currently on the implementation of patterns, mainly in C++. I also cross reference pages as much as I can between patterns and implementation, and keep finding new things I did not know were there. I hope that this leaves the topics in a situation which will be easier to follow for someone with an enquiring mind. Some pages which I think from the topic will contain information turn out mainly to be evidence of old arguments. I don't seem to meet up with many people of the same interest as myself. Occasionally I get disparaging comments as to why I don't use some other language or technique - see ParkingTicket, ConversationalChaff.

As I said, quite a quiet place at the moment. -- JohnFletcher

I take such comments which need the WikiTag of ParkingTicket to mean something along the lines of: "I don't do that, Why aren't you like me?" It may be the expression of someone who has already arrived where they think they are going, or need to be, and are not compelled to speak about, investigate, enquire, or to be found ThinkingOutLoud about things. They do however feel the need to say something declarative. I merely move on, knowing I am not like them, and that I do things due to my incessant curiosity an explorative nature.

Much along the lines expressed by Douglas C. Engelbart:

"... I'd like to hear people begin talking about the new "Opportunities" to change their ways and skills so that they can more "Effectively Harness" the new tools, in pursuit of their own "Increased Effectiveness". I very much look forward to harnessing smarter and smarter computer processes within my working domain, but I would like to hear less about making computers very smart so that (apparently) the user won't have to learn new things."

-- DonaldNoyes

Above: graphical illustration of TheWikiPlateau

Spreadsheet

Wiki Page List (up until just a few days ago - beginning to look like a OnePileFilingSystem at just under 35000 pages); currently 34635 pages (On 20100826)

Another view (GIF), autogenerated from data updated weekly:

This Plateau is misleading, as I was around at the time, and I remember very well what happened. There were those that decided that it was their right/duty to run this Wiki like a Dictatorship/Communistic government. Under those conditions, creating new pages of any sort was a crime, and it was yelled to the mountain tops that there was too many pages on Wiki, and that nearly all pages must be considered for deletion. It was OK to ravage and distort other's works and the meaning of entire works. Enter the DarkAge?s of the massive EditWars, and WikiUser seeking revenge upon fellow WikiUser. The end result was MassExodus? of WikiUsers. It was a time of disgrace and shame. Like all statistics, they don't tell the real story, or even the whole story, but just what the presenter wished to present.

Contributors: DonaldNoyes, JohnFletcher, MartySchrader

CategoryWiki

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