Wiki Ecology

(this page was prompted by various other pages, especially WikiSuccessCanInhibitNewWriters)

Perhaps we could try another slant on how and why Wiki has changed over time. It is clear that the focus of attention moves around, driven partly by RecentChanges. (see ThingsOnWikisMind) It would be interesting to see how a Wiki that didn't maintain some form of RecentChanges evolved. For instance, if pages had a subscription model, so that you got a list of changes of the specific pages you were interested in, but not for the Wiki as a whole, presumably there would be less cross-fertilization between different interests, but also it would be likely be harder for a WikiWave to engulf a vast number of less-related pages.

So perhaps we can think of RecentChanges as a medium that allows the easy transmission of WikiWaves?.

You just became an AnonymousHero for me with that sentence.

As everyone knows, most complicated systems have a variety of feedback loops. Wiki is not an exception. It seems clear that a WikiWave both causes and is amplified by Wiki enthusiasms on the part of Wiki visitors, and at the same time, repels other visitors. Although theoretically it would seem possible for visitors to ignore topics that are uninteresting, aggravating, or repetitive, it seems that in reality people can't resist poking themselves in sensitive parts when there are pokers available.

If there were an unlimited number of new things to say about a particular topic, it seems highly likely that the Wiki would sink under the weight of one or another WikiWave, and become an essentially single-topic environment, as everyone who didn't want to talk about that topic was driven out, and the people who remained had to spend all their time dealing with the ever-expanding corpus of their chosen topic.

Fortunately, if you have a user community that mostly doesn't keep talking when it has nothing new to say, eventually the WikiWave will crest and break, and allow other topics to reclaim some perceptual space. As an example, what I would characterize as the XP wave has crested--that doesn't mean that it isn't still interesting, nor that its subject matter isn't still relevant or valid, nor that the subject is exhausted, but just that the broad outlines of the topic have now been explored, and filling in the details takes less bandwidth and is less contentious (and probably less exciting) than the original sketching out of the concepts.

Oh but I disagree here. The really interesting stuff is just around the corner. But I haven't been sure that the Wiki village can cope with it.

It will be interesting to see if people who were discouraged from visiting or posting during the peak of that wave will come back now, or if they are gone forever. Environments tend to be path-dependent, and sometimes successor species cannot be displaced. (see MissingWikiBeforeXp)

I was one of those people, and I'm back. --DavidHooker

CategoryWiki