Wikis of Locality

As Mark Gaved spoke last week at WikiSym 2006, I couldn’t help but think of the World Board concept the IU Informatics students had to tussle with last year. The idea is that physical places could be used to anchor messages. It seems to me wikis that concentrate on serving a small local community might benefit from some of that integration with the physical world.

Mark talked about the Open Guides web site he administers for the town of Milton Keynes, a UK “new town” of population 207,057 (although, to be fair, I had to go to another site to get that last bit of information). As a wiki with a very particular user group, it isn’t likely to grow very large or attract many visitors. However, it serves a definite purpose. From Mark’s perspective, looking for Milton Keynes on a much larger site like WikiTravel is “a bit like looking for Earth on the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We’re ‘Mostly Harmless.'”

The open guides site also features some structured data, something Mark thinks sets this site apart. Editing a page gives the author the same wiki-like control over content, but there are also a number of specific fields to encapsulate data … Categories, Locale, Phone, Fax, Website, etc. “It’s semantic web for the rest of us,” Mark said.

The criteria for success of a wiki was a recurring topic of discussion at WikiSym. While an open discussion on the Future of Wikis speculated on wikis the size of Wikipedia (or larger), Mark asked if a healthy wiki was one with lots of content or one with slow-and-steady growth? In the case of Milton Keynes, big is not necessarily better, since the larger a wiki is the more prone to annoyances like spam and editing wars. It needs to be just big enough to support its user group, so comparisons to a behemouth like Wikipedia probably isn’t appropriate.

For more information, see WikiSym abstract or download the paper.