Wiki

What's a Wiki??

Half of the Hawaiian word for quick. Any other questions?

Actually, when it comes to software, Wiki has come to stand for a content management system (CMS) that allows users to easily upload, edit, and interlink pages. Often users are ranked and granted editing privileges based on the value of their writing to other users in the system.

The result can be a vibrant online discussion, proceeding in unpredictable, interactive ways. One example is Everything2 - here's an entry on that site that explains more about Wikis. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?lastnode_id=124&node_id=48891

Versions of Wikis abound in the open-source software community. After an extensive and in the end harrowing comparison, we decided to go with SnipSnap, thanks to its relative elegance, stability, functionality, & a lot of other stuff that computer programmers think about.

But the program is in its infancy - this is all quite experimental - and bugs persist. As a class we'll try to view these bugs as interesting: challenges to unmediated expression that replay, in our day, romanticism's struggle with unpredictable technology.