(Note: another thing I wrote a while ago)
In July 2007 at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon, Tim O’Reilly (publisher, conference organiser and seer) and Eben Moglen (general counsel to the Free Software Foundation) banged heads on the subject of Web 2.0, and the future of Free Software when nobody cares about software any more. Why would you not care? Because you’re using online spreadsheets for free instead – software as a service. Various business models (say, Microsoft and Excel) currently are based on software as a product.
At the beginning of their exchange Tim pointed to Eben’s disbelief of the ‘Web 2.0 era’. Eben responded
“… Look the web is a data storage system, distributed and powerful because it’s distributed. Full of essentially crappy technology which will be replaced.”
Wikis are definitely essentially crappy technology.
But do I mean that’s a bad thing? In the whole, no. The meaning behind the phrase lends itself to simplicity. If you look at the standards and protocols that run the internet, they’re generally pragmatic simplicity enshrined. Or, the quickest and simplest thing that will ‘just work’. They were built on-the-fly to explore what was possible and in many cases aspects of widespread protocols taken as standard today were mere design experiments or accidents, perhaps even the result of a chat over a pint of beer.
This was all in part by design as most of the protocols are in layers which build upon each other. They can purposefully be small parts of a chain to accomplish things, and in many ways act like swiss-army knives in that they have multiple uses. As an example, consider someone delivering you a package. It doesn’t matter what road the firm drives down to deliver it, or what the model of truck is. Probably the government provides a base road network, the delivery firm chooses a truck and the driver chooses a route. And you, of course, choose the package.
The internet works sort-of similarly to that. Someone owns some cables, someone owns boxes to send magic signals down those cables and you choose the web page being delivered. But it works deeper down too. The magical signals are layered – someone designed a way for two computers to talk to each other with one cable, then someone else designed a way to send messages between any number of computers, but only using the protocol each individual uses to talk to each other. Then someone else uses this new protocol to ask questions of remote computers, in a special new format, a new protocol. Questions like ‘do I have any email?’
Wikis evolved like that. The simplest possible thing you can do is allow someone to save a text document on to a server. Then you let people view that document. Then you do things like say “if there is a line surrounded by equal signs, then it’s probably a title” and the software magically turns things like =My Nice Title= in to My Nice Title. It’s called a markup language.
Magic. But then, what about if I delete your title accidentally or on purpose? Then the system needs to store each edit as it happens, along with who, when and why the edit was made. This way, you can browse back over edits and see the evolution of something like a page in wikipedia.
Wikipedia revision history for the OpenStreetMap article – the who, what, why and when.
If you play with wikis today, you will find them like a lot of the tools that run the internet – essentially crappy. The basic application hasn’t changed in years for text wikis, for example Wikipedia itself. Using MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, hasn’t changed much in many years – the innovation in some ways stopped.
Don’t get me wrong, development goes on. A lot of effort has been put in to scaling, that is to making it go from handling 3 users and a cat to 20 million readers a day. But it’s still the same wikipedia. If you use many other wikis and things like Google Docs today then you can use WYSIWYG
tools to add bold text, titles and so on. No strange markup. But wikipedia hasn’t moved with the times. Whether it needs to is debatable.
If you and I edit the same article at the same time then we may have made conflicting edits. If this happens, the system effectively gives up and shows you the differences. That’s essentially crappy, but it works.
