Tag Archive for 'Wiki'

I Have the Power

Given the recent debate over the accuracy and merit of the Wikipedia project, I found this Penny Arcade piece to be rather funny and fitting:

For every John Doe, Adam Curry and Skeletor there are hundreds of people who are contributing accurate and (relatively) unbiased information to the project. It is only through collaboration and peer editing that the most accurate information will persist. Although Wikipedia may be more susceptible to the rantings of a lunatic, thanks to collective intelligence and peer review these postings can be corrected and filtered out. This is something that can’t be said for the so-called experts over at Encyclopedia Britannica (who could also be considered ranting lunatics depending on your point of view). As far as I?��Ǩ�Ѣm concerned, Skeletor could be a Wikipedia contributor just as easily as he could be on the Encyclopedia Britannica payroll. I prefer the collective intelligence over the opinions of paid experts, and it turns out that according to a recent study by Nature both are equally reliable sources of information.

Thanks to Andrew for bringing this humorous and illuminating Penny Arcade strip to my attention.

Wiktionary

Earlier this summer I was playing around with Tiddlywiki and after a few hours of experimentation I came up with Wiktionary, a wiki of web technology terms which I just posted to the MEdTech Labs site.

Although I was impressed with the original and lightweight version of TiddlyWiki, I choose to implement Wiktionary using MyWiki, a server-side offshot of TiddlyWiki. Wiktionary stores the definitions as pieces of mircocontent (or tiddlers) just like TiddlyWiki does but writes the data to a file on the server as opposed to a local HTML file. This allows for the wiki to persist over time and supports multiple contributions, all accomplished without the overhead of a database or a single page refresh.

Wiktionary and MyWiki are just two of many adaptations of the ever versatile TiddlyWiki. For more information on adaptations to TiddlyWiki, check out TiddlyWiki Mania.

Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.