[sociate] Hie Thee to a wiki!

I've been a quiet fan of wikis for some time now, but it's time to turn the
volume up. Wikis are sprouting everywhere, from the Melbourne WiFi and
Freenetworks.org sites, to the Blueoxen Collaboration Collaboratory. Of
course, there's the Ur-wiki and the wiki of wikis.

Wikis are subtle, not flashy or fancy. Wikis are the ultimate social
software. They don't work because of the software, they work because the
participants figure out how to participate.

From a writer's perspective, wikis are also a novel way to communicate
interconnected thoughts in a pithy, useful way.

Wikis are still evolving, but they are already influencing knowledge
management and education (in wonderful ways). If I had a classroom of fifth
graders, I'd show them the Wikipedia, give them access to their own wiki,
and ask them to use it to build a description of something they cared about
in the world.

So at least get acquained with the Wikipedia and skim their NPOV page, which
describes the process they developed for getting contentious issues into the
wiki. If you want to go deeper, I put an entry point called WhatsaWiki on my
wiki.

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