Wiki Is Not Your Blog

WardsWiki discusses a lot of different things - books, movies, software, politics, philosophy ... even Wiki itself. In general, however, if it's not something you'd like other people to edit, delete, modify, rephrase, and wail on, this ain't the place for it. In particular,

First-person rants are impossible to ReFactor. If it can't be refactored, don't bring it here.
If you must rant, try to pull a concise signal out of the noise and establish a link context for it.
If you can't say it in a paragraph or two, it's probably not worth saying anyway.
Links to external journal pages simply pollute RecentChanges. If we can't edit it, it's no use to us.
Try to keep in mind that wiki does have an OnTopic OffTopic nature so if you're unsure what that is read the WikiWikiWeb page for a good definition.

End Rant ;)

Could wiki be my blog?

Let's say I created an entirely new wiki site and added these properties:

Users can log in and establish their identity.
Logged in users can mark articles they create (at creation time) as read only to others.
Any articles (read only or not) can have annotations added by anybody. These annotations work the same as other wiki content (links, formatting, etc.)
RecentChanges can be queried via RSS. (There might be a need for versions of this page that exclude read-only content, show all read-only content, show all read-only content from a particular user...)

That provides a bunch of blog-like functionality within the wiki framework. Posts/Comments could easily refer to Articles and vice versa. A possible scenario for the use of this would be:

User0 posts a 'blog' entry.
Other users (including anonymous ones) reply in annotations, referring to wiki articles as appropriate.
Eventually the discussion gets refactored into the wiki itself.

But the community would ultimately decide what goes where.

To answer your question: A wiki could certainly be your blog. Go for it.

However, This Wiki is not your blog. ...

Hopefully, my edit has made my intent more clear.

(This particular wiki would make a terrible blog-space because it doesn't support HTML: images and the like tend to be important to many bloggers -- KachinaCrowe )

Blogs typically use a "top-down" publishing model, meaning that a small number of people create/manage content while the site users read and comment on the content. Wikis, on the other hand, have a "bottom-up" publishing model, where their site users also create and manage all of the content.

Wikis can be used in a blog-ish way (for lack of a better description), but ideally, you would want to find one that allows people to "comment" without allowing them to do other common wiki actions like edit other people's content or manage pages. -- TomPurl

CategoryWiki CategoryWikiIsNot CategoryComparisons