Original Research

Last night I met up with the usual suspects for the Portland version of Wikiwednesday at the AboutUs world headquarters, where being part of a contemporary start-up means doing without heat. (I hope they fix that problem soon.)

I witnessed two things there worth mentioning:

First was the future of Wiki technology. A few weeks ago, I saw an email from Ted Kubaska asked about "how wikis interact with IM, live podcasts, video, webinars, etc." My sense of his question was that he was wondering if we will ever subject non-text media like, for example, videos to the collaborative power of Wikis. In any case, just the sort of question anyone might ask when he -- or she -- is introduced to a new idea. Then last night, Mr Wiki himself, Ward Cunningham asked the exact same question himself. I felt this was the kind of lesson that everyone who is interested in exploring the limits of technology should keep in mind: even the experts ask the same questions the rest of us ask.

Oh, so you want to know what kind of answers Ted and Ward received? Well, I did throw out the idea that one could resurrect the mid-1990s VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) technology, and use that as a basis to create collaborative videos. Ward himself mentioned how he was fascinated with the phenomena of machinima, where people create their own movies using video capture from such 3-D software like first-person shooter games. Then again, I've heard a lot of technorati remark about how they are fascinated by the machinima genre.

Second was Divid McCabe's impromteau presentation about Liquid Threads, an extention to the MediaWiki engine. He's been funded in this effort by a group called "Commonwealth of Learning" ("So what do they do?" David was asked -- "I really don't know. They pay me to code.")
This new feature offers the following:

• Instead of needing to edit a whole section (which contains the string), one only needs to click on "Reply" to write a replay -- just like many forum software packages.
  
• Built-in automatic archiving of threads that have done cold after 14 days. Threads in the Talk space on Wikipedia currently requires either an editor or a bot to archive them.
  
• A usable history record on every thread.
  
• Lastly -- in my eyes, an important feature -- while one can edit any comment in a thread, if any person's comments are altered by another user, that user's name appears on that comment. This makes falsifying other people's comments a little harder to do. (Of course, this has never happened on Wikipedia -- unless you know something I don't.)
  

Geoff

Technocrati tags: MediaWiki, PortlandTech, Wikipedia, Wiki Technology, Wikiwednesday

Labels: portland tech, wikipedia