What is a wiki?

Technically speaking, wikis are web presences that anyone can alter. Open in this way, wikis facilitate linking and make it easy for users to move from browsing to writing, and back again. On this continuum, users can coordinate activities and entrain ideas on subtle levels. In other words, with wikis, we can easily share ideas and therefore learn to write together. I like to think that wikis open up textual/analytical/visual spaces to the rhythms most commonly associated with musical practice.

As a way of answering "what is a wiki?" for yourself, simply find one and play around for a while. For example, try the The Audacity Wiki Home Page. Notice how, right away this wiki makes it known that it is "a completely public resource - anyone can edit any page (except this homepage) by clicking on the "Edit text of this page" link at the bottom. Create links by typing, putting words inside brackets like this." This degree of ease and openness offers a lot of freedom--some of us might imagine an "infinite" freedom. Of course, the thought of so many easy-to-make and yawning windows to the infinite can be daunting, in a way.

It becomes helpful, then, if not necessary, to ask, "what can a wiki do?"

Shifting a definitional query ("what is...?") in this way shifts attention towards the ceaseless movement active wikis can sustain, and readies us to participate: wiki as verb. Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, following Vladimir Vernadsky, insist on troping the noun "life" to it's gerundive and verb forms, emphasizing the ongoing change and dynamics of living systems. "The question "What is Life?" is thus a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, re-creates, and outdoes itself" (Margulis and Sagan 14). The wiki way is the same: "to wiki" is to repair, recreate, outdo, alter, etc...

ShareRiff