As I continue to try and process all I learned at WikiSym 2006, I was struck by one thing Ward Cunningham suggested in his keynote last Wednesday about cross-wiki referencing:
It avoids hierarchy and redundancy, but gives away traffic.
A big obstacle individual authors have in contributing to a wiki is letting go of the proprietary nature of their words. When you edit a wiki, you are giving your words to the community at large. Credit comes in the form of peer awareness and the version history.
Wiki engine developers and administrators seem to have the same kind of issues with regard to traffic. User clicks are proprietary, even if the content is not. Doing anything to send people away from your site and onto another instinctively feels like a poor strategy. Yet, from a network perspective, it might actually help wikis support each other in a more efficient manner. Imagine one page on a network of disparate wikis to explain what a wiki is. How much better would the wiki help pages get if the bulk of the wiki engines referenced the same pages?
