Wikiland News

Socialtext was featured in the Wall Street Journal today in an article by Kara Swisher on wikis at work.

What's really interesting is what's happening in the Kwiki developer community -- new SubEthaEdit and Technorati plugins. Plugins on the open source Kwiki framework also run on Socialtext.

There's also an interesting thread on wiki implementation failures on Many-to-Many, where Adina provides a great comment, which I share in full:

A wiki without social conventions for organization is like a meeting without an agenda.

If you gather a group of people together around a table, they will have an unfocused conversation, unless someone has thought through and communicated the topics and goals for the meeting.

The agenda is not a "feature" of the table (!) Yet people know to create an agenda, because that is a social norm for an effective meeting.

The table does not enforce the agenda -- chairs doen't give shocks to people who speak out of turn. The meeting agenda is carried out, with some flexibility, by the meeting facilitator and participants.

When people are looking for wikis to "be organized" by themselves they are looking to the wrong place. People plan meetings, and people organize wikis.

There are social practices for organizing wikis, just like there are social practices for organizing meetings.

Most business software is like a table with a built-in set of agendas that are generic for a few kinds of meetings, and chairs that shock a speaker if she talks out of turn. The agenda designer is invisible, and long gone.

A wiki is more like a normal meeting room, which you can use for any kind of meeting. But the participants need to do the organizing and facilitating.

Implementation takes experience and understanding.